We have much work left to do, the road ahead is long and hard. There will come a time when my voice becomes silent so that new voices can be heard to carry on the struggle for the rights of women, which, as I have said, is also for the rights of men, because it is the struggle for a more just and democratic society for all.
ESTHER CHÁVEZ CANO, 9 NOVEMBER 2007, IN MOLLY MOLLOY,
“THE WOMAN WHO DARED TO STAND TALL ON THE BORDER”
At what cost do I establish the familiar as the criterion by which a human life is grievable?
JUDITH BUTLER, PRECARIOUS LIFE
What is the cost of establishing familiarity as the criterion for mobilizing political action? This question, which is at the heart of Judith Butler’s query above, is central to discussions within the human rights literature regarding the political advantages and disadvantages of forming social justice movements around the politics of testimonial witnessing, a strategy that hinges upon establishing familiarity between the testifier and her public as a way to create a political community of witnesses to injustice.1
In this essay, I examine this question in relation to a social movement in northern Mexico that, in the mid-1990s, galvanized political action against the killing of women within a climate of state-sanctioned impunity. This movement began in the border city Ciudad Juárez, where activists began documenting the murders and kidnappings of several hundred women and girls; they brought attention to the lack of political will either to stop the murders or investigate the crimes. By the end of the decade, the activists called this violence femicide, and they succeeded in laying the groundwork for an international campaign against femicide not just in Ciudad Juárez but also in other parts of the world.2 In focusing on the violence against the women and girls of Ciudad Juárez, the activists generated a broader critique of corruption in the Mexican judicial and political system that created the conditions of impunity enjoyed by the criminals, and they criticized the export-processing factories (“maquiladoras” or “maquilas”) for the poverty wages and inadequate transportation systems that exploited the vulnerability of the working women whose poverty made them even more vulnerable to the criminals who preyed upon them. And the movement also brought attention to the harassment of activists and of family members of the victims who demanded competent police work and accountable governance on the part of elected officials.
While the movement did not fulfill all of its aims, and while competent investigations of the crimes remain elusive, the anti-femicide campaign politicized violence against women along Mexico’s northern border and showed it to be not just a matter of public safety and gender but also, fundamentally, a matter of democracy and accountable government. An important legal victory occurred on the international stage in 2009 when the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights sanctioned the Mexican government for failing to protect the life and integrity of women in Ciudad Juárez. Domestically, however, such hard-fought victories are on the threshold of being lost as the social movement that brought international attention to the femicides has splintered over internal disputes and has been unable to galvanize against the overwhelming violence that currently afflicts Ciudad Juárez. Since 2007, more than 50,000 people have died violently in the country; about 20 percent of those have perished in Ciudad Juárez, along the northern border, making this city one of the most violent in the world. The violence is commonly referred to as “drug-violence,” but what is causing it, who the criminals and victims are and the factors contributing to its spiraling, are still matters of conjecture in the absence of sound investigations and professional policing. What is known is that the victims come from all corners of life, and among the victims are the ongoing signs of femicide, of women being killed for being women and in a context of impunity.3
In relation to this turn of events, I examine how the femicide movement’s development around a politics of testimonial witnessing contributed to its accomplishments as well as to its weakening in recent years, especially in the context of the unprecedented violence that is overwhelming Ciudad Juárez. I focus on the issue of witnessing as a means for examining the internal strategies of the femicide movement as it responded, at different moments, to the need to establish familiarity as a criterion for mobilizing political connections across geographic scales. As my discussion will illustrate, “familiarity” is a fungible concept, its shape and content shifting along with the production of testifying subjects and their audience, as they create or fail to create a political connection around the ongoing chain of witnessing. For as Jacques Derrida insightfully observed in Force of Law, there are no original witnesses. Witnessing is, rather, a dialectical cycle of address and response around the impossibility of there ever being an original witness. Witnesses bring about witnesses.4 For this reason, as Nora Strejelivich, a writer, activist, and torture survivor from Argentina, has written, the politics of witnessing requires that the testifying witnesses meet “the expectations readers or listeners have regarding what truth means and how it should be voiced.”5 In short, testifying witnesses must offer a testimony that appears, and makes them appear, familiar as a certain kind of political speech that, in turn, politicizes their witnessing public.6
The femicide movement’s attempts to meet this expectation for familiarity exacted some political costs, especially for its networks and efficacy within Mexico as a force for motivating pressure on elected officials. I examine such attempts by focusing on how the movement responded to attacks on the victims and on the activists for being “women in the street,” or what I call “public women.”7 Such attacks have persistently portrayed both the victims and activists as “abnormal” or “perverse” women, and the activists have responded by using a strategy for presenting the victims and activists as “family women,” as women familiarized to their public through their representation as “daughters” and “mothers.” As I explore here, the mothers’ use of testimonial speech, as “testifying mothers,” has been the principal means by which they have established not only these identities but also an intimate connection with their witnessing public that witnesses the pain of mothers for their daughters. In making my argument, I draw from an extensive literature, much of it feminist and from multiple disciplines, that critically examines the representations of motherhood, as a particularly situated social and political identity, in the making of testimonial speech and the testimonial subject.8 This scholarship lays much of the foundation for my exploration into how the intimate experience of witnessing a mother’s visceral pain and grief creates political bonds that connect the intimate to the global, as mothers’ tears motivate public outrage over injustice.
This discussion entails following the movement from its inception in Ciudad Juárez in the 1990s as a collaborative effort among feminists, community activists, and family members of femicide victims. By tracking how the movement established the criterion of familiarity in the first years of its activity, during which it made notable gains in the domestic context, I lay the groundwork for understanding the political costs as the femicide movement had to respond to shifting expectations among its witnessing public for what constituted familiarity as the key criterion for creating a political community across domestic and international social justice networks. And finally I conclude with some speculative remarks regarding how the need to produce familiarity as the bond binding testifying witnesses to their witnessing public is currently limiting the femicide activists’ ability to generate public protest over the escalation of violence and the curtailment of citizens’ rights in relation to the government’s drug war.
FROM DEAD GIRLS TO DEAD DAUGHTERS
When a handful of women occupied the Ciudad Juárez mayor’s office in 1993 to protest the lack of government action against the violence, they declared to the press that they were witnesses to the crimes. “They thought no one was paying attention,” said Esther Chávez Cano, one of the original instigators of the femicide movement. “When the press came, that’s when we told them that we had a list of las muertas (the dead women/girls).” And with that list, and that occupation, the protests over “Las Muertas de Ciudad Juárez” (The dead women/girls of Ciudad Juárez) began.9
The women in this original occupation had been active in various causes, such as in feminist organizing around reproductive rights and in the fight to make the government accountable for the extrajudicial kidnappings and murders that occurred during the “Dirty War” of the 1960s and 1970s. They had initially headed to the mayor’s office with the intention of meeting with him, but when they realized that the mayor had stepped out of his office and had stood them up, they decided to occupy his office. “And we came up with our name on the spot,” said Esther Chávez Cano, who had compiled the list from reports she had culled from the back pages of the city’s newspapers. “We called ourselves ‘El 8 de Marzo de Ciudad Juárez,’” after the feminist organization based in Chihuahua that was leading the fight to make domestic violence a crime in the state.10
Within a year, El 8 de Marzo de Ciudad Juárez, with Chávez as its spokeswoman (vocera), joined with several other organizations in the city to form The Coalition of Non-governmental Organizations for Women (La Coodinadora de ONGs en Pro de la Mujer), which I shall refer to as “the Coalition.” Eventually, the Coalition would consist of some fourteen different women-led organizations, which worked on projects ranging from public health, community development, domestic violence, youth at risk, and other related causes. Family and friends of the victims participated as individuals in the Coalition, until they formed their own organization, Voces sin Eco (Voices without a Sound) in 1998.
Soon after, the Coalition created a list of demands that centered around three principle ideas: One, that the city government and the city’s export-processing firms implement strategies for preventing further deaths and kidnappings; two, that the Chihuahua state conduct competent investigations into the crimes already committed; and three, that governing elites (at all levels), along with civil society, address the cultural context that justified violence against women and that created the conditions for femicide with impunity.11 They justified their demands with the idea that they were witnesses to the government’s impunity. As Esther Chávez told me some ten years later, “Nobody cared about these poor girls because they were poor. That attitude created the impunity, and we let them (governing officials) know that people in this city cared about these girls. They just had to know it was happening.”12 And so to publicize the violence, the Coalition had to bring word of it out of the newspaper back pages and put it front and center so that the city’s residents, too, could witness its occurrence in their neighborhoods and city streets. With such aims in mind, the Coalition organized marches, press conferences, confrontations with public officials, and other events that, in effect, created a witnessing public for its own witnessing of the conjoined crimes of murder and impunity.
In communicating its demands, the Coalition made connections between the violence and the political economy of export-processing that had been the engine of growth along Mexico’s northern border and that had laid the path for the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994. The group called for better policing and lighting along the dark roads that women and girls had to walk as they commuted to their jobs in the city’s export-processing industries (the maquiladoras). It urged employers and urban administrators to provide livable wages and safe transportation to the workers and to improve the living conditions of the city’s working poor, the majority of whom lived in improvised housing with inadequate services.
To generate force behind these demands, the femicide protestors created national and international networks that brought attention to the violence and made Ciudad Juárez infamous not only for the feminization of the international division of labor but also for the murdering of these very working women. The city of obreras (“female workers”) was becoming the city of las muertas (“the dead girls”). As a result, domestic and international political and consumer organizations pressured the political leaders of Mexico as well as the leaders of international corporations doing business in the country to stop the murders and the impunity that protected the criminals. And the government and corporate leaders responded. By 1996, officials in statewide and federal office were increasingly having to answer questions regarding their actions to stop the killing of women in Ciudad Juárez. “They were shocked,” Chávez later told me. “They couldn’t believe that a bunch of women could do what we did.”13
But while the political and corporate elites responded to the public pressure created by the Coalition’s strategies for creating public witnesses both to the crimes and to the impunity, they also fought to stem public support, and they did so by dismissing the victims as worthy of any public concern. They made this argument by associating the victims with “public women” (mujeres públicas) as a way to diminish the idea of the victims’ innocence. In Mexico, the term “public woman” suggests the negative interpretation of a prostitute (la puta) who represents the “fallen woman” whose uncontrolled sexuality represents a contagion and a threat to society.14 Public women, according to this widespread and familiar discourse, create the very trouble that they experience; by contrast, the term hombre público (“public man”) is another way of saying “citizen.”15
The political and corporate elites used this discourse as a way to weaken public sympathy for the victims of the violence and dilute the public pressure on them to prioritize women’s safety. In claiming that the victims were public women who actually caused the violence that ended their lives, they referred to a line of argument that in its extreme actually justifies the violence against women as a way to rid society of trouble. If public women are the source of the violence, then that they are being killed by this violence is a means for ending its root causes. With this strategy they countered the Coalition’s witnessing to impunity by presenting their own witnesses to the victims’ guilt of the crimes that ended their lives. In such a context, they contended, there is no impunity, just the normal events in a city full of public women. This position was given official credence by the then-governor, Francisco Barrio, who in spite of creating the special prosecutor’s office, dismissed the violence as “normal” for the city.16 The Coalition was creating, therefore, witnesses to nothing wrong, just to the everyday occurrences in a city full of public women.
The Coalition fought back with a retooling of its witnessing strategy and declared that it was not only a witness to the impunity of the state but also to the innocence of the victims. “There was a change in what we were doing,” one activist later told me, “We realized that we had to stand up for the victims too. It wasn’t enough to protest against the government.”17 The protestors created this change by declaring the victims to be “innocent daughters,” who had been doubly victimized by those who murdered them and by the state that failed to protect them as they worked in the factories that had fueled Mexico’s industrial growth.18 Esther Chávez explained this shift, “We had to make people realize that they were real people, with families, with people who loved them and missed them. The families already called them hijas, [“daughters”] and so we did too.”19 While many of the activists did not intend for this discursive shift to result in an exclusion of sex workers and domestic violence victims from their protests, some divisions began to emerge within the movement over this issue.20
This approach reveals the centrality of empathy to the politics of witnessing that the Coalition embraced. As the activists began referring to the victims as las hijas rather than as las muertas, the victims gained a familial identity that made them familiar against the government’s accusations that the victims had forsaken their familial identities through their public activities that had turned them into “whores,” or non-familial women. Such a strategy has been common to social movements, particularly during the dictatorships across Latin America, when protestors referred to victims as “children” as a way to diffuse government characterizations of them as “communists” and “terrorists,” among other unsavory labels. For instance, Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo (“Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo”) employed this strategy to great effect as they succeeded in generating a social justice movement that helped bring down a violent military dictatorship. By referring to the victims of state-sanctioned kidnappings, torture, and murder as hijos/as, Las Madres created international empathy for the victims that was linked directly to outrage against a government that would murder innocent children.
Likewise, the Coalition in Ciudad Juárez employed such a logic as they worked to generate public empathy for the daughters who had been murdered as they walked to their factory jobs, did their shopping, and waited for their buses on the city’s streets. And they successfully linked this empathy to a protest against a city and state government that did nothing to protect “las hijas de Ciudad Juárez.” As one participant in the protests put it, “When people began to see the victims as daughters, the government had to do something. What kind of government doesn’t do anything to protect its daughters? An illegitimate one.”21
And by 1998 the public empathy for the victims and their identification as daughters had gained international exposure as the New York Times, CNN, and other international news sources, in addition to Mexico’s major newspapers, criticized the Mexican government for allowing Ciudad Juárez to become a place where factory-working daughters were being stalked with murderous impunity as they commuted to their jobs.22 In that same year, the Chihuahua state government established a special prosecutor’s office to investigate the crimes, and the Mexican National Commission on Human Rights declared, for the first time, that sexism was a political problem that contributed to government-sponsored impunity.
As part of this success, Chávez, with the assistance of other activists, formed the city’s first sexual assault and rape crisis center, Casa Amiga, and public officials and corporate leaders were on the defensive as they kept trying to generate public distrust for the victims. As the director of the Maquiladora Association in Ciudad Juárez (AMAC) stated in a televised interview on the U.S. network ABC’s news program, 20/20, in 1999: “Where were these young ladies where they were last seen? Were they partying? Were they on a dark street?”23 The question, in other words, is what were these women and girls doing out in public?
But as public outrage over the killing of Juárez’s daughters increased, along with pressure on political and corporate leaders to do something about the crimes, this attempt to declare the victims to be responsible as public women for the crimes failed to destabilize the Coalition. Thus, faced with the Coalition’s acumen in connecting its witnessing for innocent daughters to a movement that witnessed impunity, the elites took aim at the activists. By 1999, political and corporate references to the victims as public women began to wane as officials set their sights on the activists.
PROFIT, PROSTITUTION, AND PUBLIC WOMEN
The initial target of the public woman discourse was the leadership of the Coalition, namely Esther Chávez, who had gained fame as the movement’s “spokesperson” (la vocera). Her founding of the rape crisis and sexual assault center, Casa Amiga, had also demonstrated her acumen in raising funds and even political support, as she had received some financing from the city government. But her success also contributed to some of the tensions within the Coalition. Esther, who died in December 2009, was a feminist and believed strongly that feminist analysis and politics was necessary for fighting femicide. But not all of the organizations, although all women-led, were comfortable being known for “feminism,” a moniker that continues to invoke “men-hating” and women who forsake their domestic duties. Esther, who had never married, who had no children, and who had retired from a successful career as an executive accountant in a multinational corporation before politically organizing for women’s reproductive rights and then against femicide, was clearly, as she described herself, “a shameless feminist” (una feminista sin vergüenza). Her critique, particularly of domestic violence, and her founding of Casa Amiga as a place that attended prominently to victims of family abuse exposed fault lines within the Coalition between those who supported Esther as the spokesperson and feminism as a political approach, and those who did not, especially those who did not want to critique the family as a political entity.
Adding to the political problems were the ongoing tensions of class. The Coalition’s cross-class alliances, in which middle class, wealthy, and extremely poor women collaborated in the same organization, were showing signs of strain. While some of the women who participated in the Coalition received salaries as personnel of their organizations, others did not and offered their time voluntarily. For the wealthier women of a couple of organizations, this volunteering posed no economic stresses, but for the unpaid women who came from the city’s working poor, their activism required time and resources that were scarce and created hardships for themselves and their families. This class disparity came out publicly after the forming of the victims’ families organization, Voces sin Eco, whose members came from the working poor. Their struggles to participate in public events, to find the resources for transportation and child care, to take time off from work, and so forth, contrasted with the experiences of other Coalition members who either participated in events as an offshoot of their professional activist activities or who had no economic worries. When Esther, a middle-class professional woman, formed Casa Amiga and gained further notoriety as an activist who would now be a paid director of her own new organization, her financial acumen, not just in founding the organization but in founding her own job, exacerbated these class tensions around the accusation, from a minority within the Coalition, that Esther was profiting from the movement for her own political and economic purposes.24 Such attacks took on the shape of the public woman discourse; Esther was portrayed as someone who was taking advantage of the victims by selling their stories to an international public as a way to further her own economic and political goals. The accusations went further in denouncing Esther for also destroying the reputation of the city by constantly raising the issues of violence and sexual assault. So, like the worst connotation of a prostitute, Esther was defiling not only herself through her public activities, she was also defiling the families and communities of the city.
The attacks against her became so vicious that anyone associated with Esther was liable to also become a target of this public woman discourse. For the other organizations, working with Esther in the Coalition was becoming a liability that could jeopardize public support and funding for their own causes. As one member of the Coalition told me in February 2007, “We couldn’t even support her. We didn’t want to get burned with her.” And under this pressure, the Coalition fell apart by the end of 1999; with that collapse, the social movement against femicide lost its infrastructural center. The family organization Voces sin Eco also dissolved by 2000. Meanwhile, the murders continued.
The horrible discovery of eight bodies of women and girls, all showing signs of prolonged torture, in central Ciudad Juárez in November 2001 reinvigorated the movement as the evidence of femicide was undeniable. The Coalition temporarily reformed as Esther and other organization leaders held a press conference to denounce the murders and to present witness, once again, to the ongoing femicide. Outrage over the violence sparked a gathering of organizations in the state capital of Chihuahua City, where other women-led organizations collaborated in the coordination of a protest march, called Éxodo por la Vida (Exodus for Life), across the 220 miles (360 kilometers) of desert separating Ciudad Juárez from Chihuahua City. But while these organizations were seasoned in the politics of activism across a number of causes, from reproductive rights to democratization to home-ownership rights, they demonstrated that they had learned from the public woman attack on the Coalition, and on Esther especially. When they marched across the desert, they wore the black clothing of a woman in mourning and as they placed crosses in the desert, they used religious symbols to represent the victims. Referred to by the press as Las Mujeres de Negro (“The Women in Black”), the Chihuahua group was greeted by hundreds as they entered Ciudad Juárez and marched, through the city center, to erect a cross at the downtown bridge that led into El Paso, Texas. The symbolism of the march indicated a marked shift from a previous round of organizing, as the Women in Black and the religious symbols indicated the domestic and private nature of the activists on the street. And the two family-identified organizations that formed out of this event illustrated this shift clearly as they took over the leadership roles of the movement. One, Justicia para Nuestras Hijas (“Justice for our Daughters”), was based in Chihuahua City and the other, Nuestras Hijas de Regreso a Casa (“Bring Our Daughters Home”) in Ciudad Juárez. A third family organization, The Women’s Institute of Chihuahua (ICHIMU), later formed, also in Ciudad Juárez, and was directly affiliated with the state government office, even as it was under the direction of one of the former leading activists of the Coalition.
With the formation of the family organizations as the new leading voices of the femicide movement, their spokespeople declared themselves to be activists whose political activities emanated from their experience as family women rather than as public women driven by overtly public concerns. And unlike the activists within the Coalition, the family organization spokespeople presented themselves as either mothers of the victims or as people speaking out on their behalf. This declaration was a frontal rebuke of the public woman accusation that had been so destructive for the Coalition and that had weakened public support for the movement within Mexico. Mother-activists thus became the central figures in the femicide movement after 2001, and they stood in stark contrast to the public women of the previous decade.
The declaration of mother-activism materialized primarily through the practice of testimonial speech that the mothers within the organizations used to demand justice for their daughters along with an end to impunity. While testimonial speech had always been a part of the femicide movement and had certainly been key for turning “las muertas de Ciudad Juárez” into “las hijas de Ciudad Juárez” as mothers testified to the daughterly innocence of the victims,25 the use of testimonial speech as a way to witness on behalf of the activists became a defining feature of the movement in its second decade. The mother-activists used testimonial speech, in other words, not just to testify on behalf of their daughters’ innocence and therefore on behalf of their validity as victims, but also on their own behalf as family women who were not, like public women, driven into the public sphere for their own selfish reasons.
In this context, testimony refers to the meaning of testimonio, the Spanish term for legal testimony that took on a key, and nonlegal, meaning in the late twentieth century as a human-rights strategy in response to the oppressive regimes of Latin America. The practice of testimonio has been especially effective for providing women from the economically impoverished classes a means for articulating their social justice demands within the structures of social movements across the region.26 In this usage, testimonio is a first-person account of an injustice perpetrated or sanctioned by the state, and the testimony is offered not in a public court of law but in the public realm of opinion with the purpose of motivating this public to demand justice from governing elites. The power of testimonio derives from the testifier’s credibility as someone whose personal experience of injury reflects a collective experience of injustice.27 The testifier’s credibility as a witness to the public nature of the private injustice thus lies in her ability to present that injustice in a way that rings familiar to her witnessing public; the testifier witnessed the injustice personally, while the public witnesses the atrocity publicly.28
For this reason, testimonial speech relies heavily on the presentation of the testifier’s credentials as those qualifying her for the role of witness. The witnessing of Rigoberta Menchú provides a good illustration of this imperative. For example, when Menchú described her experiences in her testimonial, I, Rigoberta Menchú, she based the validity of her denouncement of the genocide perpetrated by the Guatemalan army upon her own experience of them; as an indigenous woman, she made the claim that her personal experience of the injustice was also the collective experience for other indigenous peoples in the country and beyond. Later, however, when the veracity of her account was called into question, the issue was not whether the events she had described had occurred—the genocide had been documented by other sources—but whether these events had happened to her personally.29 Her firsthand experience of these events was fundamental to her claim that she could bear witness through her testimony to the genocide of indigenous peoples at the hands of the Guatemalan state, but when her firsthand experience was challenged, her ability to stand as a witness to public injustice was weakened.
The mother-activists within the northern Mexico femicide movement have shown their understanding in terms of minding this imperative for establishing their firsthand experience of personal injury as a way to make public demands, on behalf of others, for justice. Their claims rest on their declarations that they, as mothers, have lost their daughters to the violence. As such, they are the only ones with the legitimacy to testify to the injustice of a child’s murder and a state’s indifference to that murder. And their testimonies often illustrate the heart-wrenching experiences of this injustice as they describe their children, their experience of being their mothers, their realization of their kidnappings and/or murders, of their children’s suffering, and then of the state’s indifference and, often, derision as they sought help in finding the killers and doing something to stop the violence. The emotion within their testimonies is palpable, along with the expressions of anger and sadness, and their force derives from the message that their experience lies in the experience of a mother who has lost a child under the most terrible of circumstances. They are not, in other words, radical feminists who seek to overturn the patriarchal structures of family and religion. They are, rather, mothers who will do anything for their children. They will even go out onto the street, raise their voices, march, and be disruptive, as they look for their children with the hope of bringing them home. They are doing what the most conservative elements of religious and family institutions sanction around the world: they are trying to take care of their children.
Yet, like mother-activists in other places and times, those in the femicide movement use this testimony in order to make extremely radical demands. They are calling for the end of corruption from a corrupt state; they are calling for competent police investigations from incompetent police forces; they are calling for investments to make city streets safer for the working poor in a place where the safety of the working poor is not a priority; and they are demanding respect for young women workers who have endured decades of derision for fueling the country’s industrialization. But, perhaps most radically, like the Mothers in the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina, like the Mothers of the disappeared in El Salvador and in Guatemala, like the mothers who have marched in Chile and in Brazil, these mothers are promising that they will return home when their children return. They make this promise even when they know their children to be dead. For this reason, mother-activists emerge as a most radical kind of activist, a kind of eternal revolutionary whose morally sanctioned protest will never end.30 Yet, these radical demands are not based on their own radical identities, but rather upon the conservative conception of mothers as those who will sacrifice themselves for their children’s welfare.31 They live for their children. Consequently, through their testimonies that establish their credibility as witnesses to state corruption and impunity, the mother-activists turn such conservative logic on its head to make extremely radical demands of the political and corporate establishment. But these demands rest squarely on their constant reiteration that they are fundamentally private women whose public presence on the street indicates that something is terribly wrong in their communities. The underlying logic reveals a reiteration of the discourse within the public woman refrain: women on the street mean trouble, but in the case of private women on the street, the trouble is external to them.
Another important quality of testimonial speech that is reproduced through the mother-activist testimony is that of its simplification of complicated political issues via a homogenization of the testimonial message.32 For even as the mothers’ narratives vary according to their details, they share the same basic structure that identifies the political message as pertaining to a mother-activist, as opposed to a different kind of activist and a different kind of politics. All of the mothers reiterate that their personal political motivations derive from their experience as mothers who have lost daughters to femicide. As such, their political activism is an outgrowth of a family relationship that is familiar the world over. Anyone who is familiar with mothers and with their feelings for their children can therefore identify with them. Anyone who is familiar with the experience of being someone’s child can identify with this mother’s politics, derived from her love, grief, outrage, and sadness. Mother-activism therefore emerges as a most familiar kind of activism based on the most familiar kinds of activists: mothers, who are familiar because of their familial presence the world over. The differences of language, class, and regional experience are unimportant in a story of mothers looking for their children, a story that for its simplicity and familiarity seems to transcend politics and the vagaries of geography, history, and culture. Mother-activists, therefore, like their causes and the justice they seek, are both intimate and global.
And on the strength of mother-activism, the family organizations within the femicide movement have succeeded in expanding the international public for the movement. As one activist in Ciudad Juárez said, “The mothers tell the same stories because that’s what the audience wants to hear, even though they have heard it before.”33 Through their testimonial speech and tireless activism, they have internationalized the movement well beyond its reach in the 1990s. By creating a political community beyond the country, the mothers have created constant pressure on the Mexican government to answer its critics and address, especially, the issue of impunity. A major victory as a result of their testimonial witnessing was handed down by the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights in December 2009.34 In a ruling with potential implications across the Americas, the Court determined that the Mexican government violated the American Convention on Human Rights and the 1994 Inter-American Convention on the Prevention, Punishment, and Eradication of Violence against Women by failing to prevent the murders and to investigate the crimes.
The Court declared that Mexico must do the following:
In addition to conducting a serious murder investigation and investigating law enforcement officials responsible for obstructing the cotton field case, which included the fabrication of scapegoats under torture, within one year the Mexican government must hold a public ceremony in Ciudad Juárez to apologize for the crimes; build a monument to the three murdered women in the border city; publish the sentence in the official government record and in newspapers; expand gender sensitivity and human rights training for police; step up and coordinate efforts to find missing women; permanently publicize the cases of disappeared women on the Internet; and investigate reported death threats and harassment against members of the families.35
This victory in the international court is noteworthy for many reasons; it is the first case of femicide to be ruled on by the court; it is binding on the Mexican government, which cannot appeal; and it proves to the political and corporate leadership that the mother-activists are not only credible but also dedicated witnesses on behalf of injustice.
However, this success in creating a political response outside of the country has not proven as successful in repairing the damage caused by the public woman discourse within it. Indeed, while the mother-activists’ declaration of motherhood has served as the principal experience motivating their political organizations, they have not been immune to the accusation that public women have infiltrated their organizations and have contaminated their motherhood. For since the public woman discourse focuses so powerfully on the concept of contagion, the presence of “non-mother” activists within the organizations represents a constant liability via their potential ability to “contaminate” the mother-activists and turn them into public women. Each organization has been publicly excoriated for harboring public women who have turned good private mothers into the kinds of women who seek personal fortune and fame at the expense of their and other Mexican families.36 And such accusations have frayed the alliances among the family organizations, which, in 2004, publicly parted ways around the accusation that some organizations were not dedicated to the mothers’ real concerns but instead to the political and economic interests of feminists, international organizations, and other groups not characterized by the “family women” of Mexico.37 This public accusation, which eventually has been directed at all of the family groups, first occurred during the coordination of the February 2004 protest in Ciudad Juárez organized in collaboration with Eve Ensler’s V-Day Foundation and Amnesty International, among other local nonprofit organizations on both sides of the border.38 One of the family organizations, Nuestras Hijas de Regreso a Casa, accused the event organizers, which also included leaders from Justicia para Nuestras Hijas, of having “sold out the event” to “American feminists.” This accusation exposed the idea that the event organizers were working on “foreign” concerns or, as it were, concerns “unfamiliar” to the mother-activists. The third family organization had already left town altogether in order to avoid the event. So on the day of the march, press attention focused on the splintering of the coalitions, the spreading out of mothers’ attendance at some events over others, and on the accusations of public womanhood that characterized the public fallout.39
In the aftermath of this controversy, the coalitions that constituted the femicide movement within Mexico fragmented, as its constituent groups focused on their own goals. The family organization in Ciudad Juárez, Nuestras Hijas de Regreso a Casa, for instance, focused its energies on international organizing as a way to generate domestic pressure, such as through the international human rights activism. But, as one of the founders, Irma Campos, of the Las Mujeres de Negro group, told me in Chihuahua City, “The femicide movement in Mexico is very weak right now. We’re all working on our own projects. Some of them are important, very important, but the femicide movement is now more outside the country than inside it.”40 For instance, at the time of our conversation, Irma was working on the passage of the new domestic violence legislation that would transform the legal treatment of intrafamilial abuse and serve as a model for legislation in other states. She had been, as a Mujer de Negro, singled out by the governor’s office in 2003 as being a public woman who was “profiting” from selling stories of the crimes to an international audience and who was adding to the “social disintegration” of Mexican society—this within a city where Irma and her husband are well-known political figures.41
CONCLUDING REFLECTIONS
A tension illustrated in the shifting strategies of the femicide movement in northern Mexico is that, with regard to mother-activism, it has proven easier to generate public empathy for the movement internationally than it has been to do so domestically. In other words, empathy has been more forthcoming from strangers than from those more personally familiar with the activists, the events surrounding the crimes, and the issues at play in the political economy of northern Mexico. This situation raises important questions for activists and scholars who work to connect the intimate experience of injustice with globalized campaigns in the name of justice. The efforts to create such circuitry, as seen in femicide activism, expose the challenges of generating activism around familiarity when such efforts prioritize the expectations of a global activist audience over those of a domestic one. If anything, this case shows how producing the circuitry through which intimate stories of pain and injustice can travel globally come with costs as well as with resources.
In order to understand the meaning of such dynamics for the femicide movement we must return to the initial question regarding the costs of establishing familiarity as a criterion for political action. When we examine this question within the context of femicide activism in northern Mexico, we can see that the need to establish familiarity as a pre-condition to creating a political movement that links activists with an activist public has been prominent throughout the country’s history. The Coalition’s struggle to confront the accusation that the victims had caused their own deaths by behaving like whores was a struggle to familiarize the victims by making them recognizable as “daughters” to the public. While whores are “familiar” within the discourse of the public woman that equates women in the sex industry with social trouble and contagion, such women are not the kind who are familiar as family women, or the kind of women that good families want to know. So by turning the victims into daughters, via the discourse of them as innocent children, the activists created a political movement around the public empathy for the victims as the kind of people that the public not only could know but also could love.
The strategic reworkings of the leading activist organizations and their practice of testimonial witnessing also reflect such dynamics, as they constantly had to assert the credibility of the activists as “good family women” within the iconic presentation of “motherhood.” The attack on the Coalition and the domestic dissolution of the femicide alliances has not meant the end to activist politics against violent misogyny, but it has meant that domestic pressure on elected officials and corporate leaders is weaker than it was in the 1990s.42 By contrast, the success of mother-activism in using testimonial witnessing as a strategy for internationalizing the movement and creating a political public that responds to the message of mothers who are fighting for their daughters has created real pressure on the federal government. While the meaning of the Inter-American Commission decision for Mexicans in relation to the government has yet to be seen, the potential precedence is itself noteworthy, as femicide is now, thanks to the activists from the Coalition to the mother-organizations, a political issue for which governments across the Americas can be held accountable. However, the targeting of mothers for being associated with public women and the ongoing association of feminists with socially dangerous women continues to plague the movement and hamper its ability to create a political community within the country. The public woman discourse, in short, has been an incredibly powerful tool for sowing public suspicion and for casting women who participate in democratic politics as the kind of women that good families would not want to know or publicly support.
The stakes in such politics could not be higher than they are now as northern Mexico, and Ciudad Juárez particularly, is in the throes of the worst violence in its modern history. While marches and protests have occurred, particularly with the 2011 national caravan organized with the poet Javier Sicilia, a forceful social justice movement has yet to develop in northern Mexico. The murdering of activists and academics, along with thousands from the working poor, has reached proportions hardly imaginable a few years ago, and the lack of sustained protest over the inept policing, the inability of the government to stop the violence, and the ongoing impunity of the criminals is equally stunning. Perhaps an early indicator of this terrible situation occurred with the discovery in 2003 of twelve men’s bodies, all showing signs of torture, buried in the backyard of a middle-class home, just a few kilometers from where the eight female bodies had been found in 2001. This discovery was not accompanied by any public protest or marches. Nor was there a public outcry over the impunity. Instead, the victims were all declared to be narcos (drug gang members), the house a narcocasa, the mass grave a narco-fosa, and the bodies evidence that the victims had invited the trouble that had ended their lives. Today, there is still much to be done in order to familiarize the victims of drug violence to a public that sympathizes with them and that acts on their behalf politically. No one, in other words, has succeeded in turning narcos into innocent hijos.43 And it appears that Esther Chávez spoke with tragic prescience when she declared early in her activist days that the violence and impunity that had created the conditions of femicide would one day “turn this city into a horror.”
As recent theorists, many of them feminists, have urged, such events call for a serious recalculation of the need for familiarity as a means to generate political empathy. The question, as posed by Judith Butler, is one that is central to human rights activists and theorists as they ask the potential public for political causes to suspend their need for identification with the victims and/or their witnessing activists in order to respond politically to their needs for political pressure, money, or other kinds of support. As the above events illustrate, such a recalculation is urgent for the cultivation of broad-based alliances that have the resources for expanding their political bases across geographic scales. And it is an urgency that requires willingness on the part of witnessing publics to move beyond the politics of recognition and not demand “familiarity” as a precondition for political action. Witnessing publics, in other words, must recognize their proactive roles in establishing the terms through which politics take shape and justice is demanded through the intimate encounters of global activism.
Such a move requires a commitment to what Susan Buck-Morss calls a “radically open communication” for expanding political possibilities through an expansion of the way we tell and listen to politically testimonies. Such an expansion is vital for creating a politics in which public women stand aside private ones as they fight together against violence and impunity and as they try to make their governments more accountable to their citizens.44 Making the expansion and resilience of such alliances the explicit goal of scholarly reflection is a necessary step for fortifying the bonds of political activists and their political publics. And if the lessons of Mexico’s femicide activism are to be taken to heart, a progressive politics of global justice must reflect critically on the circulation of intimacy and the costs of familiarity within the work and networks of social activism.
NOTES
In memory of Esther Chávez Cano, courageous activist, shameless feminist, dear friend.
1. Sara Ahmed, “Affective Economies”; Gillian Whitlock, Soft Weapons; Geraldine Pratt, “Circulating Sadness.”
2. Julia Monárrez Fragoso, “Feminicido sexual serial en Ciudad Juáres”; Amnesty Internacional, Muertes intolerables.
3. A 2010 report by the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) presents data that fewer than 25 percent of crimes in Mexico are reported and that fewer than 2 percent result in sentences. See Meyer, “Abused and Afraid in Ciudad Juárez.”
4. Anne Cubilié, Women Witnessing Terror; Kelly Oliver, Beyond Witnessing; Melissa W. Wright, “Justice and the Geographies of Moral Protest.”
5. Nora Strejilevich, “Testimony.”
6. See Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith, Human Rights and Narrated Lives; Cubilié, Women Witnessing Terror; Oliver, Beyond Witnessing.
7. Joan B. Landes, ed., Feminism.
8. See also Tamara Neuman, “Maternal ‘Anti-Politics’ in the Formation of Hebron’s Jewish Enclave”; Geraldine Pratt, “Circulating Sadness”; Cynthia Bejarano, “Las Super Madres de Latino America”; Diana Taylor, Disappearing Acts; Sonia Alvarez et al., Cultures of Politics/Politics of Cultures.
9. Esther Chávez Cano, interview with author, Ciudad Juárez, February 2007.
11. Marta Estela Pérez García, “La coordinadora en pro de los derechos de la mujer.”
12. Esther Chávez Cano, interview with author, Ciudad Juárez, November 2006.
13. Esther Chávez Cano, interview with author, Ciudad Juárez, May 2003.
14. Debra A. Castillo et al., “Border Lives.”
15. I would like to thank Dr. Socorro Tabuenca Córdoba for pointing out this linguistic difference.
16. Linda Diebel, “Macabre Murders Bewilder Mexicans”; see also the online article by Gabriela Minjares and Sandra Rodríguez, “The Facts behind the Myth.”
17. Anonymous, interview with author, Ciudad Juárez, May 2003.
18. Wright, “Justice and the Geographies of Moral Protest.”
20. I have discussed this issue at length elsewhere: Melissa W. Wright, “Urban Geography Plenary Lecture.”
21. Anonymous, interview with author, Ciudad Juárez, 2004.
22. See, for instance, Sam Dillon, “Rape and Murder Stalk Women in Northern Mexico.”
23. Robert Urrea, in an interview by John Quiñones, “Silent Screams.”
24. For a synthesis of some of these accusations from the Ciudad Juárez dailies El Diario de Ciudad Juárez and El Norte de Ciudad Juárez, see the following article on the Frontera-NorteSur Web site: “Possible Trouble at Crisis Center Shows Trouble in Ciudad Juárez Press.”
25. See Debbie Nathan, “The Missing Elements.”
26. Kathleen Logan, “Personal Testimony.”
27. Nora Strejilevich, “Testimony”; George Yúdice, “Testimonio and Postmodernism.”
28. As one Argentinian activist, author, and torture survivor has written, testimony communicates the “intimate, subjective, deep dimension of horror” (Nora Strejilevich, “Testimony,” 701) that the testifier has experienced personally and that reflects the experience of many.
29. See Stephen Schwartz, “A Noble Prize for Lying.”
30. Sonia Alvarez et al., Cultures of Politics/Politics of Cultures.
31. See Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith, Human Rights.
32. See Nora Strejilevich, “Testimony.”
33. Anonymous, interview with author, Ciudad Juárez, January 2007.
34. Frontera NorteSur, “International Court Holds Mexico Accountable for Femicides.”
36. L. Sosa, “Recriminan a ONGs madres de asesinadas”; R. Chaparro “Se reúnen autoridades con madres de víctimas”; C. Guerrero and G. Minjares, “Hacen mito y lucro de los femincidios.”
37. Melissa W. Wright, Disposable Women and Other Myths of Global Capitalism.
38. Clara Rojas, “The V Day March in Mexico.”
39. Melissa W. Wright, “Public Women, Profit, and Femicide in Northern Mexico”; David Piñon Balderrama, “Lucran ONGs con muertas.”
40. Irma Campos, interview with the author, Chihuahua City, February 2007.
41. Benjamin Martínez Coronado, “Desintegración sociofamiliar, Germen de Crímenes.”
42. Wright, “Justice and the Geographies of Moral Protest.”
43. At the time of this writing, some activists are taking on this challenge in the aftermath of a massacre of children at a birthday party on January 31 and in response to the President’s declaration that the violence reflected violence “between rival gangs.” See Gabriela Minjáres, “Reprimen manifestación de estudiantes.”
44. Susan Buck-Morss, Thinking Past Terror.
Ahmed, Sara. “Affective Economies.” Social Text 79 (2004): 117–39.
Alvarez, Sonia, Evelyn Dagnino, and Arturo Escobar. Cultures of Politics/Politics of Cultures: Re-visioning Latin American Social Movements. Boulder: Westview Press, 1998.
Amnesty Internacional. Muertes intolerables—México: 10 años de desapariciones y asesinatos de mujeres en Ciudad Juárez y Chihuahua. London: Amnesty International, 2003.
Balderrama, David Piñon. “Lucran ONGs con muertas.” El Heraldo de Chihuahua, 23 February 2003.
Bejarano, Cynthia. “Las Super Madres de Latino America: Transforming Motherhood by Challenging Violence in Mexico, Argentina, and El Salvador.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 23, no. 1 (2002): 126–50.
Buck-Morss, Susan. Thinking Past Terror: Islamism and Critical Theory on the Left. New York: Norton, 2003.
Castillo, Debra A., Maria Gudelia Rangel Gomez, and Bonnie Delgado. “Border Lives: Prostitute Women in Tijuana.” Signs 24, no.2 (1999): 387–433.
Chaparro, R. “Se reúnen autoridades con madres de víctimas: Lucran ONGs con feminicidios, acusan.” El Diario de Ciudad Juárez, 22 January 2005.
Coronado, Benjamin Martínez. “Desintegración sociofamiliar, Germen de Crímenes: Patricio.” El Heraldo de Chihuahua, 20 February 2003.
Cubilié, Anne. Women Witnessing Terror: Testimony and the Cultural Politics of Human Rights. New York: Fordham University Press, 2005.
Diebel, Linda. “Macabre Murders Bewilder Mexicans: More than 100 Women Slain near Border Since 1993.” Toronto Star, 7 December 1997, A1
Dillon, Sam. “Rape and Murder Stalk Women in Northern Mexico.” New York Times, 18 April 1998.
Fragoso, Julia Monárrez. “Feminicido sexual serial en Ciudad Juáres: 1993–2001.” Debate Feminista 25 (2002): 279–303.
Guerrero, C., and G. Minjares. “Hacen mito y lucro de los femincidios.” El Diario de Ciudad Juárez, 22 July 2004.
Landes, Joan B., ed. Feminism: The Public and the Private. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Logan, Kathleen. “Personal Testimony: Latin-American Women Telling Their Lives.” Latin American Research Review 32, no. 1 (1997): 199–211.
Minjáres, Gabriela. “Reprimen manifestación de estudiantes.” El Diario de Ciudad Juárez, 12 February 2010.
Nathan, Debbie. “The Missing Elements.” Texas Observer, 30 August 2002.
Neuman, Tamara. “Maternal ‘Anti-Politics’ in the Formation of Hebron’s Jewish Enclave.” Journal of Palestine Studies 33, no. 2 (2004): 51–70.
Oliver, Kelly. Beyond Witnessing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001.
Pérez García, Marta Estela. “La coordinadora en pro de los derechos de la mujer: Política y procesos de cambio en el municipio de Juárez (1994–1998).” Master’s thesis, La Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez, 1999.
Pratt, Geraldine. “Circulating Sadness: Witnessing Filipina Mothers’ Stories of Family Separation.” Gender, Place and Culture 16, no. 1 (2009): 3–22.
Rojas, Clara. “The V Day March in Mexico: Appropriate and (Mis)Use of Local Women’s Activism.” National Women’s Studies Association Journal 17 (2005): 217–28.
Schaffer, Kay, and Sidonie Smith. Human Rights and Narrated Lives. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004.
Schwartz, Stephen. “A Noble Prize for Lying.” Globe and Mail, 30 December 1998.
Sosa, L. “Recriminan a ONGs madres de asesinadas.” El Diario de Ciudad Juárez, 6 July 2007.
Strejilevich, Nora. “Testimony: Beyond the Language of Truth.” Human Rights Quarterly 23, no. 3 (2006): 701–13.
Taylor, Diana. Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s “Dirty War.” Durham: Duke University Press, 1997.
Urrea, Robert, in an interview by John Quiñones. “Silent Screams: Who Is Killing the Young Women of Juárez?” 20/20, ABC, 20 January 1999.
Whitlock, Gillian. Soft Weapons: Autobiography in Transit. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2007.
Wright, Melissa W. Disposable Women and Other Myths of Global Capitalism. New York: Routledge, 2006.
——. “Justice and the Geographies of Moral Protest: Reflections from Mexico.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27 (2009): 216–33.
——. “Public Women, Profit, and Femicide in Northern Mexico.” South Atlantic Quarterly 105, no.4 (2006): 681–98.
——. “Urban Geography Plenary Lecture: Femicide, Mother-Activism, and the Geography of Protest in Northern Mexico.” Urban Geography 28, no. 5 (2007): 401–25.
Yúdice, George. “Testimonio and Postmodernism.” Latin American Perspectives 18, no. 3 (1991): 15–31.