This chapter begins in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico—in the borderlands of the US and Mexico, where Gloria Anzaldúa’s metaphorical “herida abierta” (25) is made flesh on the bodies of female subjects who have been raped, mutilated, and/or dismembered before death. The femicides of Ciudad Juárez are not a “black legend”;50 femicidal violence has, indeed, claimed the lives of hundreds of women and girls since 1993, and this gender violence continues to the time of this writing in 2019. Countless responses to femicide in Juárez have emerged in the past two decades, ranging from academic investigations, to media coverage, to grassroots forms of activism. Undoubtedly, these responses have revealed the feeling that justice seems to be deeply buried in the desert alongside the bodies of dead women. To engage in an inquiry of mourning in relation to femicide, I turn my attention to Chicana Marisela Treviño Orta’s play, Braided
Sorrow (2009), which importantly provides a window into how a mother mourns the death of her daughter and, subsequently, all of the daughters of Juárez. In this play, mourning can be
interpreted as a resistant act aimed at the pursuit of justice for the victims and their families as well as the end to femicide.
50 I borrow this from María DeGuzmán’s Spain’s Long Shadow: The Black Legend, Off-Whiteness, and Anglo-
American Empire (2005), which examines how many Anglo-American cultural producers deployed the Black Legend against Spain to paint the Spanish as barbaric and cruel, as opposed to Anglos, whose Anglo-American empire was made to seem like a morally righteous empire. The Anglos were deemed as the right kind of “white” (along ethical and racial lines), while the Spanish were cast as the wrong kind of “white.” While femicides along the US-Mexico may be regarded as a Black Legend that shifts blame entirely on Mexico, Anglo-American corporations, too, are complicit in these femicides, as this chapter will demonstrate.
Braided Sorrow, which won the prestigious University of California Irvine
Chicano/Latino Literary Prize in 2006, is Orta’s first dramatic work. The play follows sixteen- year-old Alma Cardenas, who has moved with her brother, Carlos, and sister-in-law, Yadria, to Ciudad Juárez in hopes of obtaining employment in Mexico’s maquiladora51 capital to send her parents money in San Luis Potosí (Mexico). Alma’s migration to the border city is not
uncommon, as maquiladoras were “dependent on continual flows of migrant women from the center and south of Mexico” (Volk and Schlotterbeck 63). Moreover, young Mexican women became the primary labor force because maquiladora managers understood the ideal worker as “docile, undemanding, nimble-fingered, nonunion and not militant” (Sklair 172); these
characteristics became problematically synonymous with female workers and, by 2004, women made up just over half of assembly plants’ workforce (INEGI 6). In these ways, Orta paints Ciudad Juárez as the site of a racialized and gendered political economy. Alma and her family quickly learn that Juárez is also the site where women are disappeared, sexually violated, brutally murdered, and then disposed of in the desert.
51 Maquiladora refers to a foreign-owned assembly plant in Mexico that manufactures imported goods for export at a low cost. After the end of the Bracero Program in 1964, the Mexican government established the Border
Industralization Program to create jobs along the border and thereby slow down migration to the US; the program allows duty-free importation of raw materials and equipment so long as they are exported back to the US (Leonard). Maquiladoras are highly relevant to femicide in Ciudad Juárez, as the city’s maquiladora sector has been connected to the kidnappings and murders of young female maquila workers.
In the midst of the deadly borderlands, Braided Sorrow summons La Llorona52 as a mother and protector who vigilantly watches over young women like Alma.53 La Llorona first appears at a bus terminal upon Alma’s arrival in Juárez, temporarily guarding Alma in her brother’s short absence as he cares for his wife, who, unbeknownst to them, is pregnant. As the play unravels the daily challenges of the Cardenas family and the socio-economic conditions of living in the borderlands (including Alma’s troubling experiences working at a maquiladora), so does La Llorona continue to materialize when women most need her protection from threatening forces. Yet, even La Llorona’s omniscience is not enough to save many of the women of Juárez. She admits that she “can’t save them all” and subsequently directs Alma to “dig up [her] river of blood”; she calls on the adolescent to “let the earth bleed its sorrow” and “[t]ell them that the river will bleed into the desert as long as [her] daughters are hunted” (Orta 57-58). La Llorona’s command is a tall, even dangerous order, because Alma must dig up this river in Anapra, which is in the outskirts of town and a perilous journey for any young woman to undergo. Obediently serving as La Llorona’s messenger, Alma travels to Anapra where she ultimately meets her demise. Vulnerable and frightened, Alma tries to scream but freezes; as a result, La Llorona does
52Although there exists a catalog of lloronas—that is to say, there exists a wide variety of productions of the figure— the traditional version that haunts our cultural imagination goes some like this: a woman commits infanticide and then spends the rest of eternity searching for and mourning over her murdered children near bodies of water. Dissemination of this traditional version maintains a few essential elements: a woman, water, wandering, and crying for lost children. Some versions even maintain that the weeping woman wears a white dress. Reasons for why La Llorona murders her children vary, but popular recounting affirms that it is in direct response to her husband’s infidelity. While this act ought to be read as the reaction, admittedly unmeasured, to sexual and familial betrayal, the conventional version of the weeping woman legend fails to concede patriarchal betrayal; instead, according to a patriarchal logic, La Llorona is cast as the menacing villain who committed infanticide and who must be ultimately condemned.
53 The appropriation of La Llorona in relation to factories in Mexico is not entirely unique. Alicia Schmidt Camacho notes that the legend cropped up in the late 1980s in the Matamoros-Brownsville area because a young woman factory worker became pregnant after having an affair with her Anglo plant manager. Because her children were stillborn and had signs of significant birth defects, the woman kills herself. As the legend would have it, her spirit walks the Rio Bravo, looking for children (Camacho 27). Camacho offers different arguments for reading La Llorona in this version, including the idea that she is an “allegory for the national anxieties about the partnership between U.S. companies and the Mexican government” (29) precisely because it advanced a “subversive circulation of cautionary tales about the sexual and economic exploitation of women in the maquiladoras” (28).
not appear in time to save her. Alma “wasn’t supposed to join them” (Orta 74) because her work at the maquiladora was only temporary. But, Orta’s distressing line, “Women are devoured here” (74), echoes from the play’s beginning to end, and Alma Cardenas is, unfortunately, not exempt.
My examination of Braided Sorrow focuses on the intersection of femicide, mourning, and maternal resistance. Orta does not uncomplicatedly conjure La Llorona in Ciudad Juárez, who remains an intriguing and complex persona in oral and literary traditions. In the context of the play, she is most immediately read as an ethereal figure who defends and liberates women from femicide; she is the savior that Juárez desperately needs. However, La Llorona figures in various ways throughout the play: an extended metaphor that relays the Mexican history of conquest and destruction, a guardian angel, a goddess, and victim of commodification in the context of neoliberalism, among other interpretations. I argue that La Llorona is a surrogate mother whose haunting presence grieves deaths caused by femicide and whose maternal resistance manifests in the form of public mourning, which defends the grievability of the women of Juárez and simultaneously critiques how Mexican state authorities have excluded these women from the political to justify the state’s criminal impunity. La Llorona’s public display of grief and mourning is ultimately an intentional, communal and subversive act that deconstructs grief as a strictly private experience that empties it of social power.
Mourning over the murders and the ongoing hunt of her daughters, La Llorona’s emblematic public expression of grief performs a kind of haunting because listening to her (or even being around her) causes discomfort and anxiety; this anxiety is incidentally familiar with the legend of La Llorona when it is interpreted as a cautionary tale with sexual and patriarchal overtones. La Llorona’s public mourning requires an uncomfortable acknowledgement of deep- seated pain, and it simultaneously generates the social power to demand justice because her
expression of pain—“pain which knows no limits,” according to José Limón (414)—calls for more than indignation and sympathy. These kinds of emotional responses may serve as foundations for social and political change, but La Llorona’s haunting presence prompts and champions action from local and state authorities who have allowed femicide to continue in Juárez because of their disturbing apathy and employment of a narrative that blames the victim for her demise. While La Llorona may ostensibly emerge as a maternal defender in Braided Sorrow, she, too, is fighting larger social, political, and economical forces that have shaped the tragic circumstances in Ciudad Juárez. She cannot save Alma, and she alone will not save all of her daughters; accordingly, her haunting presence is important for its maternal resistance and public mourning.
Before analyzing La Llorona’s public expressions of grief, I begin by briefly mapping the dominant discourses that have advanced the investigation of femicide in Ciudad Juárez. These discourses, which are grounded in various academic disciplines, engage sociocultural, economic, and/or political arguments that each bring attention to femicide’s relationship with ideologies and larger structures of power. Femicide is not an isolated phenomenon that can be easily explained, but rather a multifaceted issue whose scope requires a synthesis of interdisciplinary discourses. Contributing to these discourses are cultural productions by both Mexican- and US-based artists, some of which have made critical interventions for understanding femicide as a structural issue. Unlike scholarly inquiries, however, cultural productions inevitably grapple with the difficulty of representing violence without sensationalizing it or otherwise participating in a voyeuristic, racist, and/or colonialist gaze. To this end, I explain how Braided Sorrow strategically negotiates the problem of representation by moving away from the desecration of female bodies to focus on mourning in response to death and violence. While the play has been criticized, ostensibly, for
the saccharine portrait of its protagonist and for the inability to aggressively paint a portrait about violent crimes against women in the borderlands, I make the case that Orta’s more poetic
treatment of femicide on the theatrical stage rejects the fixation on dead corpses in the desert; instead, it concedes personhood to Juárense women as much as it displays the social injury that femicide causes.
Next, I explore La Llorona as a figure in Mexican folklore and Chicana/o literature, attending to the ways she has been historically and culturally reimagined. I especially consider how Chicana writers have cast La Llorona as a figure of resistance and how Orta similarly follows suit but does not abandon her characterization as a mother who mourns the death of her children. Accordingly, I discuss the play’s aesthetics of mourning and the ways it is particularly framed using the mother-child relationship. It is here that I briefly turn to Sigmund Freud’s understanding of grief and mourning to contest the notion that successful grief work requires the mourner to sever bonds with the deceased. On the contrary, parental grief challenges this idea and, instead, suggests that negotiating the loss of a child leads to the recognition of an inability to be whole again. My attention to La Llorona’s emotional pain, and even the physiological
manifestations of grief, leads me to question to what degree the lives of Juárense women are considered grievable in the public sphere. Employing Judith Butler’s notion of grievability, I contend that femicide is a repeated performance of violence, made possible by criminal impunity, that reduces women to what Giorgio Agamben has theorized as “bare life.” In short, the issue of grievability and “bare life” existence go hand-in-hand.
In the last sections of this chapter, I elaborate on the abandonment of Juárense women by Mexican state officials and other entities of power (i.e. maquila corporations). I draw attention to how Braided Sorrow weaves the problem of criminal impunity and blaming-the-victim
narratives into La Llorona’s problematic experiences with the police when she reports that her daughter has gone missing and when she learns about her daughter’s murder. In particular, I address how her public mourning enables the critique of the state’s failures, which have made the lives of Juárense women ungrievable. Because La Llorona’s carries her grief wherever she goes, refusing containment, her public mourning directly undermines the idea that the murders of these women do not matter. Even the use of black crosses in the play, painted on telephone poles to serve as visual markers of loss, contribute to a politics of public mourning. As an act of resistance, public mourning ultimately raises serious questions about state responsibility and structural neglect. To conclude, I briefly describe how public mourning acts have been realized by real victim’s mothers and activists on the ground; these acts have importantly galvanized and politicized communities in response to femicide in Ciudad Juárez.
Ciudad Juárez and the Contexts for Femicide
Femicide at the border has caused the world to view Ciudad Juárez not only as a “city of vice” due to considerable drug crime, prostitution, and other illicit activities that capitalize on the border’s fluidity and porousness, but also as a “symbolic place of women-killing” (Staudt xi). Grounded in a commitment to understanding and eradicating violence against women,
journalists, academics, activists, national and worldwide organizations, and cultural producers of all kinds have contributed to the study of femicide by producing knowledge using various methods of inquiry, theoretical frameworks, and approaches. Many theories about why the murders have happened (and continue to happen) have subsequently emerged, but there are a couple of dominant theories that have been corroborated by several interlocutors. However, I want to acknowledge that a comprehensive understanding of femicide requires a synthesis of
several interdisciplinary discourses to avoid minimization or, worse, erasure of structural problems at local, state, and global levels.
Before providing a review of these salient discourses, I first want to make clear that my use of femicide, as opposed to gender violence, is a direct expression of violence against women that collectively stems from political, economic, and social realms and that can also,
indisputably, be attributed to male power. The United Nations General Assembly defines
violence against women as “any act of gender-based violence that results in, or is likely to result in, physical, sexual or psychological harm or suffering to women” (1993) and acknowledges that such violence has roots in gender inequality. While girls and women constitute the majority of persons affected by gender violence due to an unequal distribution of power, this is not to say that men are exempt from gender violence. Due to heteronormative norms and roles associated with gender, men, too, can become targets of violence, should they transgress these norms and roles. Further, not all gender violence results in murder, though the possibility of murder
certainly increases under an escalation of violence; thus, femicide is best understood as a specific kind of gender violence.54
Perhaps the most inadequate approach to understanding the scope of femicide in Ciudad Juárez is the idea that there are several perpetrators whose psychotic state or otherwise deranged disposition leads them to serial killing. Though several suspects were arrested,55 the femicides
54 Scholars may use the terms femicide and feminicide, sometimes interchangeably, to refer to the “the murder of women and girls because they are female,” a generic definition developed by feminist sociologist Diana Russell (15). Feminist anthropologist Marcela Lagarde translated femicide into Spanish as feminicide, with Russell’s permission, but added to the original word’s meaning the impunity with which crimes against women were treated by misogynist state power officials. Thus, feminicide seems to implicate the state’s role in taking responsibility for these murders. I use femicide because it refers to gender-based violence that either implicates the state or individual perpetrators, or both. For an extended discussion of femicide vs feminicide, see Fregoso and Bejarano introduction to Terrorizing Women: Feminicide in the Americas (2010), especially pp. 4-5.
55 Egyptian Abdul Latif Sharif became a chief suspect and a scapegoat, due to his history of sexual violence. Sharif was arrested in 1995 and eventually sentenced to 60 years in prison after being found guilty of one of the two
continued.56 Another theory connects the disappearance and killing of women with existing
organized crime or isolated criminal activities (Gonzalez Rodriguez). In fact, Mexican police participation in the murders through organized crime has been cited (Gonzales Rodriguez; Dominguez-Ruvalcaba and Ravelo; Rodriguez). More developed approaches and analyses are socioeconomical in nature, as they thoroughly contextualize the murders in the borderlands, taking into account the rise of maquiladoras with neoliberal developments like The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1992 as well as the intersectional identities of the female victims (gender, class, race); these two threads are not mutually exclusively. Weismann, for instance, argues that we must explore theories “related to political economy and the
socioeconomic injustices that global economic liberalization produces” to underscore “the relationship between socioeconomic systems that contribute to and depend on the subordination of poor communities and gender oppression” (225). Cultural approaches to understanding the femicides foreground traditional gender roles and norms that reflect long-standing patriarchal values and gender power dynamics in Mexico, while they also point to a misogynist culture to which these Mexican cultural imperatives give rise. Of particular interest is the threat that women pose to the social order that maintains male power when they take jobs, leaving their