BY LETISIA MÁRQUEZ
UCLA Today
Since the signing of the North American Free
Trade Agreement, young women from poor villages in the interior
of Mexico have flocked to Ciudad Juárez, the city that
borders El Paso, Texas, to look for jobs in American-owned maquiladoras
or factories.
Instead,
what hundreds of them have found is a gruesome and early death,
said Alicia Gaspar de Alba, associate director of the Chicano
Studies Research Center. Since 1993, more than 300 young women
and girls have been killed in Ciudad Juárez, across the
border from Gaspar de Alba’s hometown of El Paso.
This 10-year crime wave of deadly violence
will be the focus of an international conference, “The
Maquiladora Murders, Or, Who is Killing the Women of Juárez?”
slated for Oct. 31-Nov. 2 at UCLA. It will coincide with Days
of the Dead, a Mexican holiday that honors the dead.
The conference, the first of its kind to take
place at a major research university in the nation, is being
organized by Associate Professor Gaspar de Alba, hosted by the
center and co-sponsored by Amnesty International and UCLA student
organizations. Eve Ensler, author of “The Vagina Monologues,”
will deliver the keynote speech.
“The purpose of the conference is to
encourage more scholarly inquiry into the crimes and also to
examine the social, political, economic and cultural infrastructure
of the crimes,” said Gaspar de Alba, who has been researching
the crimes since 1998. Participating will be scholars, journalists,
artists, activists and po-licy specialists from the United States
and Mexico, as well as families of the victims and the campus
community.
“You have to understand that these crimes
are more than murders,” said Gaspar de Alba, who wrote
a mystery novel, “The Factory: A Novel on the Maquiladora
Murders.” “They are ritual acts of pure and unadulterated
hatred and desprecio (scorn) toward the indigenous female body.
Who can hate these powerless women so much?”
The arrests made so far in some of the deaths
have usually turned out to be controversial or erroneous, Gaspar
de Alba said. For instance, police allegedly tortured some of
the suspects into confessing they were guilty while other suspects
have been released, she said.
Still, the murders of young women in Juárez
have not stopped. In February 2003, four new bodies were discovered,
including one of a 5-year-old girl with multiple stab wounds
and her eyes removed. Many of the victims remain unidentified.
“Beyond exploring the many theories that
exist around the question ‘Who is killing the women of
Juárez?,’ the conference will look at the complicity
of silence that has protected the killers on both sides of the
border,” Gaspar de Alba said.
Participants will examine the sexism that surrounds
the murders. According to Gaspar de Alba, some people, including
the authorities, believe: “She asked for it by the way
she dressed.”
Organizers also hope to draw attention to the
American companies who employ many women. Many of the victims
were killed on their way home from work at night. “The
maquiladora industry needs to be made accountable for not protecting
its personnel,” Gaspar de Alba said.
For more details, e-mail: maquiladora_murders@yahoo.com.
