Alejandro Lugo

Fragmented Lives, Fragmented Parts & Violence and Activism at the Border

Although overshadowed these days in mainstream media by drug cartel violence, Cuidad Juarez has come to capture the minds of many people concerned about social justice, and for good reason. In no other city in Latin America do controversies such as globalization, economic collapse, institutionalized violence against women, history, immigration, resistance, North American exceptionalism and the much lauded Eduardo Galleano-esque mythology so crisply cut paths. Juarez is as much a place of triumph as it is the crushing sadness that has come to symbolize its cycle of death the last 20 years. And two University of Texas Press books, Fragmented Lives, Fragmented Parts: Culture, Capitalism and Conquest at the U.S.-Mexico Border by Alejandro Lugo and Violence and Activism at the Border: Gender, Fear and Everyday Life in Ciudad Juarez by Kathleen Staudt, seek to make sense of the world of Juarez, a city at war with itself as well as those outside.

Lives and Activism take different tacks to reach some similar conclusions about the persistent woes facing the people of Juarez. For both authors, gender is an importunate motif underscoring many relationships in this society and without. Staudt heads up a far more adventurous path. Rather than falling into clichés that would otherwise relegate it to blogosphere protoanalysis, Staudt talks about femicide in Juarez as a tragedy in which governmental failure and civilian complicity on many levels have linked with profit to a conspiracy of silence unlike anything else in Mexico. Such fears have been expressed before, but rarely so passionately as they are in Activism.

The real value in books like Lugo’s is in their efforts to tell Mexico’s story in a way that is unafraid to tangle with patriotism, indigenism and the nation’s conflicted cultural pride. That pride slammed headfirst a few years ago into elites’ deals to import U.S. jobs and exploit Mexican underclasses in the service of North American corporations’ maquiladores. Those maquilas were largely transferred to cheaper labor pools in South Asia in the new century, and the result on the Mexican psyche was significant. Sheila Marie Contreras’ Blood Lines: Myth, Indigenism and Chicana/o Literature is a great compliment to some of Lugo’s writings on these issues. However, Lugo should receive high praise for his willingness to talk about Mexico and its contradictions between national integrity and free-market opportunism. Acknowledging how compromised the country is can be a hard conversation for some quarters to take. Still, Lives scrutinizes these matters without trepidation. Staudt seeks to discuss these facets as well.

Both Lugo and Staudt dissect labyrinthine gender roles in Mexico, particularly abstractions related to the feminine. Notions of female subservience captured in images like La Malinche, valid though quaint, are not clearly contextualized in either work, brave attempts notwithstanding. There is no denying there may be particularly sexist qualities in Mexican or Latin American culture. But while economic globalization is seen as a major source of Ciudad Juarez’s miseries, global systems of patriarchy are largely spared the same rebuke.

As another University of Texas Press release, Drugs, Thugs, and Divas: Telenovelas and Narco-Dramas in Latin America by O. Hugo Benavides, acknowledges, popular culture plays on racialized notions of Mexican/Latin American men (and, by extension, Black men and men of color generally) as distinctly macho, brash and disrespectful of women in ways white men are not. This sort of positioning often occurs absent of history. While Frantz Fanon astutely pointed out postcolonial societies without a strong understanding of race and class are doomed to repeat the mistakes of their colonial overseers, putting the proper context to thoughts that postcolonial societies are somehow more primitive in their approach to issues like gender misses the point of understanding dependency theory and cultural imperialism. Whiteness pervades Mexican culture as much as in any other postcolonial country, and its impact on race, class and gender is more forcefully thrashed out elsewhere.

Many books have stridden the streets of Juarez, aiming to find a grain of hope among the killing fields there. Lugo and Staudt offer up alternative visions in many ways, from the grassroots efforts profiled in Activism to new thinking proffered by Lugo, and both manage to bring something fresh to what is one of Mexico’s longest open veins.

Reviewed by Ernesto Aguilar… (lisätietoja)