Imagining Transnational Chicano/a Activism against Gender-Based Violence at the U.S.-Mexican Border

Abstract

Since 1993, hundreds of women have been killed or have disappeared from Mexico’s largest northern border city, Ciudad Juárez.¹ When bodies are found, they often show signs of prolonged and savage torture, (gang) rape, and mutilation. Many of the victims are young, recent arrivals from other parts of Mexico, and poor. About 20 percent worked in Ciudad Juárez’s maquiladoras or assembly factories, where young women from low-income families are most likely to find employment.² Others are students, dancers, homemakers, store employees, and prostitutes. The few, seemingly haphazard convictions that have been handed down since 1999 have not stopped the violence. Instead, the murders have spread to Chihuahua City, the capital of the state. Bodies are also now found in more dispersed sites, and greater efforts are made to conceal them.