During the last two weekends of October this year students from the Performing Arts and Social Justice department at USF performed Braided Sorrow, a play written by USF alumni Marisela Trevino and directed by Roberto Gutierrez Varea. It takes place under the context of femicide in Juarez and intertwines the role of maquiladoras in it. 

I grew up in Nogales Sonora//Arizona — a border town with many maquiladoras. Going into the play, I was already very familiar, and painfully aware of Juarez’ femicide horrors. It was very interesting for me to observe other people learning about this for the first time.

In 2006 — with the start of president Felipe Calderon’s “Operation Mexico” — the Mexican population was witness to a dramatic rise in violence; according to Human Rights Watch more than 60,000 people were killed from 2006 to 2012 (Castillo, 2012). Ciudad Juarez was already witness to an unbelievable number of murders of women, 2006 further fueled an already occurring phenomenon.

Femicide in Juarez began around the early 1990s, dates that coincidentally parallel NAFTA’s passing in 1994. Maquiladoras were born out of NAFTA and are labor-intensive manufacturing factories — usually placed in duty-free zones in countries that need foreign investment — in Mexico they are located for the most part in the areas along the U.S.-Mexican border in northern Mexico. Over the years it has become a central part of the local economy for the towns where they are located so much so that the maquiladora — after petroleum — has become Mexico's largest foreign exchange earner.

The Pre-show exhibit did a good job at introducing the subject for the audience. It consisted of a wall with names of disappeared women in Juarez carved into it, tiny signs with statistics about maquiladora labor and femicide paired with the distorted voices of maquiladora workers telling their personal experiences of sexual abuse. The exhibit did a great job of introducing the subject in an impactful way, showing the pervasiveness and intensity of the Juarez situation.

The play centers around 16 year old Alma who moves to Ciudad Juarez in hopes of saving enough money to live in the United States in the future. Alma begins to work at a maquiladora where she encounters sexual harassment as well as the dangers of being a woman going home from work by herself in a city where death looms at every corner for women.

This incredibly well written play discusses the themes of femicide, maquiladoras and the way they intercept in Ciudad Juarez. The play uses the vehicle of La Llorona — a famous figure in Mexican folk stories — to show the magnitude and pervasiveness of Juarez femicide.

La Llorona is a pervasive image in Mexican folk stories, there are many different versions of the legend of La llorona in one she is a woman in white wandering the streets on Tenochtitlan as a foretelling of the coming fall of the Aztec Empire, in another she is a mother wandering the streets looking for her dead children whom she drowned.

Maya Alvarez does a fantastic job in the role of la Llorona — described as an earth spirit, a mourning mother, and a witness to massacres old and new. Maya had previously performed a monologue in the Vagina Monologues in high school titled “Juarez,” which talked about women coming back basically as bone, with their skin burned and nipples bitten off. However she says, “during the play we really got to know more about the horrible conditions. We got to know that a lot of times, women don’t even come back. And bodies are often mis-identified when they are found.” Roberto Varea did an incredible job at directing the performance. The cast prepared for their roles watching documentaries together and talking extensively about the conditions in Juarez. Maya says that those conversations were where her knowledge transformed beyond lessons in a classroom to the reality of Juarez. The performance achieved its goal at making the audience reflect on a subject that is not very often talked about.

Ciudad Juarez: The Economics of Death

To the reader interested in knowing more about the subject I recommend reading Necropolitics, Narcopolitics, and Femicide: Gendered Violence on the Mexico-U.S. Border by Melissa W. Wright (2011). In it she goes against arguments that the violence is not worthy of much attention stating that while “governing elites argue the violence devastating ciudad Juarez is a positive outcome of the government’s war against organized crime” they seem blind to the politics behind the violence and what the impunity associated with it says about the country itself (709). She explains that in Juarez the government often did not conduct professional investigation of the deaths of the women and instead often labeled the victims as “girls who lead double-lives”, students or workers by day and prostitutes at night. The national discourse and the impunity that accompanies the deaths of women in Juarez show that this issue is regarded as unfortunate but inevitable. The government even paid for advertising in popular newspapers advising women in Ciudad Juarez to be safe by going out at appropriate hours and dressing appropriately. Government’s attitude towards the murders reflects that the deaths are seen as a type of “public cleansing”, where working class women are seen as unnecessary to society.

In Opportunity Missed J. Grunwald explains how the maquiladoras were born:

In 1964 the United States discontinued its "bracero" program, whereby Mexicans were permitted to work on U.S. farms on a seasonal basis. With thousands of workers idled, the Mexican government faced massive joblessness along its borders. The solution it chose, after observing U.S. production-sharing arrangements in several East Asian countries, was to encourage U.S. industrialists to locate labor-intensive assembly operations just inside its borders to take advantage of Mexico's comparatively low wages and proximity to the United States.

The Mexican maquiladoras have not progressed as well as its East Asian counterparts where the maquiladoras have been incorporated into the national economy contributing to development and led their economies into industrialization. Unlike Mexico in East Asia U.S. companies hire subcontractors within East Asia for “joint ventures, or as suppliers doing assembly work and production for the home market and for export under the same roof” (Grunwald, Opportunity Missed: Mexico). In Mexico there has been no investment in training workers beyond their already established part in the production chain. Grunwald believes that Mexico should consider that “Only a well-trained work force can absorb new technology, adapt it to local conditions, and improve upon it through innovation. Because technology is ever rising, the work force must be continually upgraded” (Grunwald, Opportunity Missed: Mexico).

Sources

• Grunwald, J. "Opportunity Missed: Mexico And Maquiladoras." Brookings Review 9.1 (1990): 44. Political Science Complete. Web. 30 Oct. 2015.