Articles about the feminicide on the border between El Paso, Texas and Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, often feature descriptions of the victims. Authors portray the young women based on a series of predictable attributes. They are young (in their teens or early twenties), thin, naive and poor.Footnote 1 Sometimes the young women were last seen on the way to look for work, sometimes on the way home from school. Many leave behind young children. Often the girls’ mothers become involved in activist efforts for justice. The portraits of the victims strive to bring a human face to the number of young women dead or missing in the past 20 years. While Volk and Schlotterbeck (2007) have argued that the depictions of the young women have “become both the site where victims are mourned and the means by which justice can be restored” (54), they also suggest that they may “narratively revictimize Juárez’s women by representing them within a framework of male dominance and female submissiveness” (58). I further assert that depictions of the young women of Juárez that portray them as innocents do so in a way that privileges middle-class subjectivity and its understanding of girlhood, describing the girls’ deprivation of security in terms of a construction of girlhood that obscures their agency to act within the economic and social institutions that structure life for the poor in Juárez. Through the critical analysis of two novels, Desert Blood by Alicia Gaspar de Alba (2005) and If I Die in Juárez by Stella Pope Duarte (2008), and the poem “Women of Juárez” by Amalia Ortiz (2006), I re-examine the border between girlhood and womanhood that much of the discourse about the Juárez murders straddles without adequately interrogating.

By failing to critically scrutinize this border between girlhood and womanhood, authors often assume a middle-class, United States ideal of girlhood as a protected, innocent time of life that lasts from birth until one’s late teens, at the earliest. This assumption leaves a significant factor of the victims’ profile and their lives under-examined. By relying on this ideal of girlhood, it becomes easy to overlook a critical piece of the systematic construction of vulnerable young women in Juárez, namely that their youth and their assumed innocence makes them more vulnerable to those who seek to manipulate or abuse them.Footnote 2 On the other hand, by constructing the girls as innocents, those who represent the victims also largely ignore the voices of the girls of Juárez themselves, leaving the job of telling their stories to adults, the media and the government. This oversight, as my analysis will demonstrate, has significant consequences for how we understand this violence.

Violence, Girlhood and Class on the Border: An Overview

Since 1993, hundreds of girls and women have been found dead or have gone missing in the border region between Juárez and El Paso, but an exact number is hard to come by.Footnote 3 Ciudad Juárez is the fifth largest city in Mexico, an area that has grown increasingly since the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), as it has become the center of assembly for many consumer products in North America, including televisions, laptops and garments. It is also a location that features multiple universities and “shantytowns” (colonias) as well as “obscene income gaps between rich and poor” (Staudt, 2008, 2). Today, Juárez is known as home to one of the world’s largest drug cartels and the mass murder of young women.Footnote 4

Juárez’s relationship with El Paso underlines the way that the city is also emblematic of the border and the relationship between the United States and Mexico. For example, eight in ten El Pasoans are of Mexican descent while seven of ten speak Spanish and many others are bilingual or Spanglish speakers (5). Domestic violence also affects communities on both sides of the border. One quarter of women in both the United States and Mexico report physical violence at the hands of their partners, but six times more women are murdered on the Juárez side of the border. As Kathleen Staudt (2008) writes, “Paradoxically, two cities sit side by side, one among the safest and one among the most dangerous in their respective countries” (5). Given the similarities in ethnic background, language and prevalence of domestic violence on both sides of the border, the astronomical rate of femicide in Juárez is even more striking.

Repeatedly, scholars and activists point to the economy as instrumental in creating the culture of violence, especially gendered violence, in Juárez. This borderland is home to more than two million people, making it the largest metropolitan border in the world. Aside from those engaged in manufacturing and drug trafficking, the border population includes many crossers who engage in business or labor on both sides, further complicating the entwinement culturally, economically and politically (8). Much of the climate on the border is created by the economic relationship between the United States and Mexico and the concentration of cheap labor in the metropolitan area of Ciudad Juárez. Some have argued that the shift caused by NAFTA and globalization in the distribution of manufacturing labor has caused complicated class relationships both nationally and internationally so that spaces and people have been transformed by new labor practices. Jessica Livingston (2004) claims that although ethnicity and the perception of Mexicans as cheap labor for US-owned companies were certainly a part of the move to Juárez for production sites, “once the factories are operating, gender plays a significant role in both obscuring and maintaining class relations in the new international division of labor” (60). Young women are thought of as cheap and disposable labor, contributing to a system that makes it possible to kill them without consequence.

The maquiladoras, where some of the girls and women work, are just part of a larger system of poverty in Juárez. The maquiladoras attract migrant workers who live in colonias, neighborhoods of makeshift houses on the outskirts of the city that are vulnerable to drug cartels and pollution. Many live with erratic electricity and without running water or telephones. Because of the peripheral location of the colonias, workers have to walk miles to catch the company bus to take them to work, thus leaving them vulnerable to attack. Despite these living conditions and the climate of violence, as many as 40,000–60,000 young women move to Juárez each year because the jobs in the maquiladoras pay higher wages than those elsewhere in Mexico. In addition, the jobs attract young workers from rural areas, seeking greater economic and personal independence than they could likely find at home (61).

Although much of the scholarship on the gendered violence in Juárez focuses on the role of the maquiladoras and gendered assumptions about the workforce (Salzinger, 2003, 10–15), since the establishment of the maquiladora system, the hiring of workers has balanced out to relatively equal numbers between men and women (Lugo, 2008). Scholars such as María Socorro Tabuenca Córdoba (2010) have further pointed out the way that gender stereotypes prevalent in Mexican culture have contributed to the failure to effectively address gendered violence in Juárez (97).

When women have gone missing or have been found murdered, the response of the government has often relied on the narrative that the victims were at fault. Police suggest that missing girls have simply run off to be with their boyfriends or that they were prostitutes (Livingston, 2004, 63). Some argue that rather than investigating the murderers, the state-appointed prosecutor, Suly Ponce, spent more time investigating the reputations of the victims, stating “we were studying the entire family [of the victims] and we couldn’t reach any conclusions because many of them were good workers, many of them were students – good girls, clean girls” (quoted in Livingston, 2004, 63). These narratives depend on already circulating discourses that conflate the physical labor of women in the factories with the sale of the female body through prostitution (Schmidt Camacho, 2005, 265). They imply that only “good girls” are worth worrying about. In studying campaigns intended to educate women on how to protect themselves, Tabuenca Córdoba (2010) found that the ads heavily depended upon the virgin/whore dichotomy, while also positioning the attacker as a wealthy young man, and failing to address the complicated gender and class dynamics in the violence. She further argues that “the investigations in Ciudad Juárez were already obstructed by two types of discourse that form part of Mexico’s everyday life: that of women as inferior beings or objects; and that of values, as former assistant attorney general Jorge López Molinar affirmed in an interview with the newspaper El Nacional: ‘All the victims were mischief makers or even prostitutes’” (100). As Tabuenca Córdoba (2013) discusses in her essay, “Mirrors, Ghosts, and Violence in Ciudad Juárez,” the response to the crimes in part depends on sexist ideologies that predate the rise of the maquiladoras and middle-class values that attempt to put the violence at a distance by making “others” of the victims (153–162).

Alicia Schmidt Camacho (2005) argues that along with the troubled relationship between labor and gender, the maquiladora system also contributes to the denationalization of female workers in a way that subverts their rights as Mexican citizens in an area that is largely governed by international companies rather than rule of law. Schmidt Camacho connects the shift in Juárez to legislation predating NAFTA, arguing that the deregulation of the economy “entailed the wholesale conversion of the northern border into a platform for cheap labor and out-migration” (256). The effects of the changes are most heavily borne by women whose labor has “served the state as a stabilizing force amidst the economic and political crises of the neo-liberal regime in a way that both prohibits and delimits new forms of female agency in the border region” (256). She thus argues that the economic changes toward globalization and cheap manufacturing labor in Mexico have undermined the human rights of women by deteriorating the role of citizenship: “Ongoing transformations in border governance suggests that just as globalization enfranchises a new class of postnational elites, it also fosters the conversion of marginalized people into ‘disposable non-citizens’ whose value to the international system derives from their lack of access to rights” (258). Therefore, the characteristics that make the women desirable employees for maquiladora managers also render them vulnerable without recourse to the rights of citizens. Schmidt Camacho asserts that the “feminization” of the disposable workers within this new globalized manufacturing economy is most visible in the ongoing feminicide. Juárez itself functions based upon a system in which citizenship has little influence as the population is largely migratory, new to the area, or employed by transnational corporations (261).Footnote 5

The denationalization of workers also troubles notions of human rights that are drawn upon by those who seek to fight the killings, find justice, or change the system that makes the women vulnerable and their killers untouchable. Schmidt Camacho writes, “Current legal frameworks for protecting women’s rights commonly fail to address the material logic promoting the use of gender violence as a technique of political repression and economic exploitation” (282). In other words, while those fighting for justice may rightly argue for legal protections, in doing so they fail to account for the multiplicitous ways that the state and the maquiladoras are responsible for making the workers disenfranchised and disposable.

Narrating Violence

Alongside this struggle for justice, much has been written about activism, class, scholarship, and the voices of the victims or their families in response to the feminicide. For example, Dominguez-Ruvalcaba and Corona (2012) question the turn from scholarship to social activism and argue that “effective intervention is not possible without questioning and even strategically suspending artificial boundaries and limits” of professional practices or legal frameworks (7). In this way, they seek to better understand the role the academy has played in the discourse surrounding the feminicide. Drawing attention to class sensibilities, Monarrez-Fragoso (2010) critiques the way “people in power evaluate subordinate groups and portray them through their particular class perspective, especially when these subordinate groups are afflicted with pain and injustice” (184). She argues specifically that the narratives of the families speaking out about their lost daughters and mothers, expressing grief and demanding justice, are met with resistance or critique from systems of power, such as the government, and this conflict illuminates the class systems that grant some narratives power over others. She asserts: “Activism, political consciousness, and the enjoyment of justice have to do with money, health, education, and privileged social relations; all these components form part of the symbolic capital which victims’ families lack” (195). This analysis raises important questions about whose voices are shaping the discourses about the murders and how mainstream media narratives have often usurped the story from the victims and their families.

In creating narratives about the killings, writers sift through the political and feminist work about the El Paso-Juárez border while also working to put a human face on the crime. Often, they focus on narratives of individual victims, usually teenage girls. The depictions of the victims in literature and journalism also demonstrate an anxiety about the borders of girlhood, over-emphasizing a dichotomy between innocence and experience that obscures the ways in which girls act as agents. Girls’ participation in the workforce, domestic work, and in protests, blurs middle-class notions of childhood and adulthood, or girlhood and womanhood, as girls help provide for their families, take care of other children, and sometimes have children of their own.

Portrayals of the victims largely appeal to their innocence or their powerlessness as a way to counter the narratives of the government that blame the victims. For example, in a 1998 article in Ms., Graciela de la Rosa, coordinator of Federación Mexicana de Asociaciones Privadas (FEMAP), argues:

It’s obvious that many of these girls went willingly with their murderers. This is part of the collision of the migrant who’s just arrived and has no resources to confront the dangers and complexities of this forced ‘modernization’ we have going on here … . Children are blind before the maquiladora. Choosing between the village and the maquiladora, the maquiladora is better because, although you’re not paid well, at least you have food. (Quinones, 1998, 16)

She explicitly calls the victims “girls” and “children,” yet on the same page of the article, the author describes the maquiladora workers arriving on Friday ready to go clubbing after their shift. As in other cases, the portrayal of the victims thus straddles opposing discourses about innocence and subjectivity. On the one hand, the girls are victimized by barbaric violence, and on the other, the young women are made into workers in an economic system that renders them disposable.

Similarly, Balli’s (2001) “Letter from Juárez” article from Texas Monthly, opens with the image of a motherFootnote 6 holding a banner of her “fawn-eyed daughter, Monica Janeth Esparza” (104). Like many of the narratives of the murders in popular media, the grief of the mothers or the backgrounds of the victims are used as a starting point, positioning the reader in the context of singular human struggle amidst massive ongoing violence. Published nearly 20 years after the murders started, the article continues to describe the victims as adolescents, “thin, pretty, naïve,” emphasizing their innocence (112). Monica is not doe-eyed, she is fawn-eyed, emphasizing not only femininity, but youth. Published for a US audience, the article counters the argument of the government that the girls were prostitutes or leading a double life. Instead, it encourages the reader to consider “the countless stories of daughters who’d gone in search of jobs and never returned,” appealing to the reader as a parent or a guardian (114). Ballí continues, “As I watched a handful of teenage girls walking down the street after school, I was acutely aware of the many modeling agencies, massage parlors and pay-by-the-hour hotels that surrounded us. There were likely underground markets for adolescent girls all over Juárez” (114). Most striking is the way nameless girls in Juárez are presented to the reader as in need of protection. Although many of the victims are mothers or women in their early twenties, the article leans on the angle that they are innocent teens, vulnerable to the systems of evil that surround them. By presenting the girls as innocents, Balli (2001) and others construct a narrative that leaves space for excusing or forgetting crimes against girls and women who do not fit this neat mold of middle-class naïve girlhood. Further, the representation positions the reader at a safe distance from the crimes, yet still in a position to offer help, critique or anger as an outsider.Footnote 7

The experiences of girls in Juárez are not shaped just by the maquiladoras, as many young women refuse to go to work in them. Although the maquiladoras and the role of sex and drug trafficking on the border occupy most of the media coverage of the area, girls’ lives are more immediately affected by the responsibilities they face as members of poor families. Because of the large number of hours residents of the colonias spend at work, girls are often tasked with taking care of younger siblings, sick parents or grandparents. In other cases, they are sent to work as wage earners helping to support their families financially. Although girlhood in Mexico and the United States are culturally similar, the duration of girlhood in Juárez is in some ways truncated by the earlier need for them to become responsible and productive members of the family (Cervantes-Soon, 2011). They are therefore asked to grow up sooner, a move that creates a cultural disconnect between the expectations of girls and women and puts pressure on middle-class assumptions about innocence and experience. In her work with girls at a secondary school in Juárez, where most students were challenged by precarious incomes, domestic violence or loss of family, Claudia Cervantes-Soon (2011) found that “Not only do girls feel that their time, space, and movement are controlled and limited by the dangers in the city, but their pursuit for independence is also hampered by their feelings of responsibility to their family and not wanting to leave them behind in such a context” (184).

In contrast to discourses that portray the young women of Juárez as subaltern, or powerless victims of sexist economic systems, Cervantes-Soon’s work focuses on the ways that girls understand and represent their individual identities. She found that although the girls were aware of the violence of the city, and many of them had been victims of gendered or domestic violence, their attitudes toward the future and toward their individual identities remained optimistic: “Contrary to conventional thinking, most of the girls that I met appeared to have positive self-perceptions and feelings about their personality, their abilities, their bodies, and their choices. And those who did not were generally not afraid to talk about it” (201).

Despite these attitudes, however, the girls also had to negotiate the complicated and often dangerous terrain of their city and their class positions within it. Cervantes-Soon writes: “While most of them admitted that if they had the resources and were able to take their families with them they would leave the city, they also knew that this was rather unrealistic and that they had to find ways to not just survive but also pursue their dreams in their current context” (211). Thus, even though the girls are potentially limited by their circumstances, they still perceive themselves as having subjectivity over their lives.

Their understanding of gender was similarly shaped by their context in the barrios of Juárez, as each viewed women as positioned to be fighters. When girls were asked individually about what qualities women needed to possess, Cervantes-Soon found that:

[T]heir responses were strikingly similar. Strength was perhaps the most common descriptor, followed by boldness, willpower, intelligence, confidence, and self-esteem. As they described each one of these attributes they made references to the need to stand firm in the face of adversity, to be able to resist repression, to have the determination to leave an abusive partner, to have the intelligence to resist manipulation, and to value oneself no matter what. (211)

From her work on how young women in Juárez understand and express themselves and their positionality relative to the complicated gender and class politics of Juárez, emerges a clear sense that young women in Juárez occupy a complicated position. Their ambition and optimism align with middle-class norms of girlhood, but their knowledge and experiences of violence upset expectations of girlhood innocence. In US-based depictions of the feminicide, however, the narrative often portrays young women in Juárez in a way that depends too much on a dichotomy between innocence and experience, obscuring the nuanced ways in which girls in Juárez negotiate violence, trauma and responsibility. In doing so, these texts privilege a middle-class construction of girlhood and undermine the rhetorical agencyFootnote 8 of young women.

Turning to Desert Blood by Alicia Gaspar de Alba (2005), If I Die in Juárez by Stella Pope Duarte (2008) and the poem “Women of Juárez” by Amalia Ortiz (2006), I examine depictions of girlhood that complicate notions of identity, power and class on both sides of the border. Through my analysis of these texts, I critique the ways that middle-class and/or US privilege are assumed in a way that narratively stifles the voices of girls in Juárez, paralleling Volk and Schlotterbeck’s argument about revictimization.

Desert Blood

In Alicia Gaspar de Alba’s Desert Blood, a detective novel based on scholarship and activism surrounding the feminicide, the protagonist Ivon Villa, an El Paso native and professor at a university in California, investigates the murders in Juárez in search of her kidnapped sister, Irene, and larger answers about the perpetrators of the violence. Ivon and her family are of Mexican descent, but live in the United States as lower-middle-class citizens. Volk and Schlotterbeck praise the novel for shifting the focus of its detective plot from seeking out the killers themselves to a case of “who was allowing these crimes to happen?” (79). They assert that her work departs from other narratives about the murders as she populates her novel with “strong and resistant women,” creating a “gynocentric community inhabited by borderlands’ women who have ‘unlearn[ed] the puta/virgen dichotomy’” (79). The limitation with this reading, however, is that these strong women are only in Ivon’s family. Secure in their US homes, Ivon and Irene are not representative of the girls of Juárez who the novel kills to make a point. Although Gaspar de Alba may clearly implicate multiple systems of oppression, her failure to account for her own class position and US citizenship, and those of Ivon, as well as to sensitively portray the agency of the girls of Juárez, demonstrates her own bias as well as assumptions about middle-class “American girlhood.”

Ivon’s sister Irene is portrayed as a naïve but intelligent high school senior. She fits the profile for the victims, but she feels confident of her security, partly because of widespread ignorance about the ongoing feminicide and partly because of her social location as a middle-class US citizen. The novel also features an unnamed maquiladora worker who is abducted while wearing a green butterfly barrette she bought herself for her upcoming quinceanera. While the circumstances of Irene’s abduction are implied but not described, the reader is presented with the full, violent scene of the other girl’s abduction and her mutilated corpse. Irene goes to a colonia after partying at the carnival in Juárez. The scene ends with her swimming in the river, making note of her friend talking to a man in a cowboy hat (Gaspar de Alba, 2005, 111). When Irene next appears, she is in captivity, fearing violence that the reader never sees happen to her. In this way, her dignity in the text is relatively protected. The unnamed girl, however, is only seen alive in the text during her abduction by the same man with the cowboy hat (147–153). She innocently believes that he will sell her makeup, which will make her pretty enough to be in one of his movies, a narrative that matches much of the scholarship about the sexualization of young maquiladora workers. Only when it is too late does she realize her mistake and try to escape from the man’s car. Her abductor replies, “Shut up, or I’ll cut your tongue out, you little whore. It’s not time to scream yet” (153). Her narrative is left hanging until she is found dead, her brutally mutilated corpse described in vivid detail. In comparing the two narratives, it is clear that Irene enters Juárez as a consumer. She can go to the carnival, have a good time and return home safely as long as she stays in the well-populated tourist areas. The young worker, however, lives in Juárez and deals with the daily complications of living and working in the dangerous city, including her fear of violence, attention to US currency, and the care she takes to hide that she is only 14 years old (150). Although she is more keenly aware of the dangers of Juárez, she still cannot escape them and there is no one to rescue her. Irene and the maquiladora worker are established as doubles through the parallels in their age, image and stories. Strikingly, however, in contrast to Irene’s naiveté, the young worker is knowledgeable enough about the violence in the city to keep track of her surroundings and hide her age, but still trusting enough to get in the strange man’s car. The line between innocence and experience here is blurry, but rather than considering the implications for the young woman’s life, the novel quickly turns back to Irene and her more clear-cut middle-class girlhood.

The anonymous girl is found in the desert while Ivon searches for Irene. She is finally given her name, Mireya Beltrán, as a volunteer finds her work ID badge, but the novel throws her away as much as her killers do, as Ivon thinks, “It wasn’t Irene. For as much as she hated to admit it, deep down inside, that’s all she cared about right now. It wasn’t her sister” (249). The girl becomes the symbol in an argument made by Father Frank, a local activist, who indicts the infrastructure, the economy and the maquiladoras (253), mirroring the way articles about the murders open with portraits of the missing. Father Frank claims, “that poor child we found this morning, she’s a victim of that infrastructure, do you see? She probably came here hoping to make a good life for herself, hoping to make money to send back home to whatever village she came from, and now she’s here with the buzzards” (253). After Father Frank finds her and makes his statement, the girl disappears from the text. The novel thus privileges the relatively protected girlhood of Irene, subjugating the safety of the unnamed poor teen from Juárez to that of her Texan double.

Although Rachel Adams (2007) argues that “the novel gives voice to the victims” and that “the dead can speak out to remind the living of their suffering,” the voices of the families are often cut off by Ivon’s concern for her own sister or co-opted by others in the press (268). Ivon’s preoccupation is understandable, but it creates an imbalance in the narrative between the voice of the middle-class US family and the voices of those in Juárez, whose awareness of and proximity to the violence far exceeds Ivon’s. Further, although the reader often gets quotations from activist groups and mothers in Juárez, they are filtered through the subjectivity of Ivon or other middle-class citizens (Gaspar de Alba, 2005, 322–324). In structuring her narrative this way, Gaspar de Alba perpetuates media portrayals of the victims as subaltern and fails to trouble the relationship between class and citizenship inscribed on the border. The novel never addresses the fact that Irene survives largely because of her class privilege and US citizenship (and luck). Instead, it resolves with Irene recovering at home while Ivon, capitalizing on her first-hand experience with the feminicide, folds the experience into her dissertation.

While Desert Blood presents class diversity within the Latino community at the border and also depicts a variety of relationships between women, ranging from Ivon’s lesbian partnership to her complicated relationship with her mother, the strengths of the texts are weighed down by the problematic representation of violence. At the novel’s close, the awareness Gaspar de Alba may have been trying to raise through her novel is potentially undermined by the way she shifts her focus from the ongoing violence in Juárez and the vulnerability of young Mexican bodies to the security of the Texan daughter and sister. In Desert Blood, on the US side of the border, girls are safe (a situation I will return to with the poem “Women of Juárez”).

If I Die in Juárez

In her novel If I Die in Juárez, Stella Pope Duarte focuses less on narrating the investigation of the feminicide and instead portrays the social and economic structures that make women in Juárez vulnerable and grant their killers impunity. Through the intertwining stories of Evita (15, a homeless runaway and child prostitute), her cousin Petra (19, a maquiladora worker helping to support her family during her father’s illness) and MayelaFootnote 9 (12, a Tarahumara Indian orphan), she depicts how poverty, homelessness and the necessity of going to work in the maquiladoras strip the girls of their girlhood while also making them vulnerable to their eventual abductors. Pope Duarte’s portrayal implicates the socioeconomic systems that allow for violence against women and the poor, presenting it as a condition of life for everyone in Juárez, not just the victims and their families. While only one of the three central characters is the victim of an attempted murder, all three are forced to deal with rape, or the threat of it, and the consistent anxiety and vulnerability faced by all women in Juárez in the text. Pope Duarte effectively conveys ways that the girls are made victims to systems too large to be within their control, but she does so in a way that portrays them as innocents, corrupted by, or sacrificed to, the gender and class systems they live under. This dynamic provides an opportunity to consider how knowledge of violence and oppression affect the girls’ agency and maturation, but the knowledge is largely figured as a fall from innocence rather than a more nuanced understanding of girlhood. Although her novel features the girls’ interiority in a way that makes room for how they understand their positionality and the violence around them, her depiction of their internalization of the violence has the potential to undercut any statement she intends to make by portraying the girls as helpless and without agency, in need of rescue from outsiders to the community.

The most troubling narrative is Evita’s. Raised in a colonia, at 13 years old, she runs away from home because her alcoholic mother suspects that Evita is trying to seduce her boyfriend, Ricardo. Evita finds shelter in the home of Isidora, an elderly woman who acts as a sort of madam for a series of prostitutes who live with her; she also uses Evita as part of a drug smuggling operation. Initially, Evita works for Isidora, keeping house and cooking. Her mother sends the police to find her and, when bringing her home, the officers call her a prostitute and nearly sexually assault her. Eventually her mother becomes violent again and Evita runs to her godmother’s house and then back to Isidora’s. When she is 14 years old, Evita is found by Ricardo, who takes her to a hotel to watch telanovelas. Even though she senses that his intention is to rape her, she goes with him because she fears angering him. In this way the conflation between her would-be step-father and her rapist highlights both her childhood and her vulnerability to violence. After the rape, Evita acts out violently against herself: “Evita got up, her face cold, hard, feeling the huge black spikes she carried inside her pushing up through her skin … . She took the knife out of its leather sheath and felt the blade. It was very sharp … . It was just a thing until she made it her own. She plunged the knife into her left arm, deep into her wrist, and blood spurted out onto the floor” (81). From there, the portrait grows more disturbing as Evita continues to feel the spikes beneath her skin, which symbolize her internalization of the violence committed against her by others. Throughout her narrative she consistently belittles herself. For example, she thinks, “she was the dot at the end of a sentence, little and stupid” (75). Although her self-destruction could speak to the way the violence and exploitation affect the psyches of the victims, I think it more clearly reads as a statement about the futility of fighting back in a way that makes Evita disposable, even to herself.

Worse is the way the novel connects her potential to her abuse. Early in the story, Ricardo takes Evita out to lunch and discusses business with her. Noting her intelligence, he tells her that she has potential, even though she didn’t finish school: “I swear you could manage your own business and make a fortune … . Then I’d be working for you! … Anybody can be smart, but not many can follow their hearts and realize who they truly are” (7). At the time, Evita is moved by his words and encouraged by them. The narrative falls on traditional middle-class aspirational discourses: hard work can lead to success. But Evita does not have access to the resources she needs to make good on her potential. She does not even have a stable roof over her head. Tragically, then, after she begins sleeping with Ricardo and Isidora teaches her the rules to successful prostitution, Evita thinks “that Ricardo was right when he had told her that someday he would be working for her” (83). The moment perverts any hopes Evita had for her future, further complicated by her lingering childishness. Misunderstanding that she works for him, she believes Ricardo when he says he loves her like a father, and comes to love him sexually until he impregnates and abandons her. The moment clearly portrays the complex border between girlhood and womanhood as Evita becomes a prostitute while still trusting the adults around her like a child. It does so, however, in a way that emphasizes her own self-hatred, leaving little room for critique of the system.

Evita’s cousin, Petra, represents another way that women become victims of systems beyond their control. While Evita’s time as a prostitute is the result of poverty, an unstable family and the lack of a system keeping her in school, Petra’s problems are the direct result of sexist labor practices that enable maquiladora managers to take advantage of young workers without penalty. Petra goes to work to help her family pay for her terminally ill father’s medical care. In the maquiladora, she is quickly promoted because of her education and given attention by the bosses because she is attractive (160–161). Fearing backlash from her co-workers and the advances of managers, she begins to wear an engagement ring, relying on the specter of her boyfriend back home to protect her. Instead, she is again promoted, given a car, and wined and dined by Augustin Guzman, a powerful man in the company who also helps run a drug cartel. Augustin eventually abducts her and, along with his gang, rapes and tortures her.

Like Gaspar de Alba, Pope Duarte conveys the multiple oppressions that make women vulnerable to violence and also does so in a way that constructs the victims as powerless innocents. She takes things a step further by depicting the girls internalizing the violence in such a way that they are doubly victimized. The way that Evita and Petra are portrayed as stuck in the system revictimizes them and also portrays girlhood as inherently fragile and vulnerable, leaving no real space for escape. Further, there is no representation of any girlhood or womanhood that engages with ideas about citizenship or the border. Even life in rural Mexico seems to push girls to Juárez, beyond their control. In this way, the text creates an essentialized view of Mexican girlhood as helpless, fragile and fleeting. While Evita and Mayela experience premature falls from innocence at the hands of their negligent families, Petra’s naiveté and failure to take control over her life lead to her capture. The transition from girlhood to womanhood thus hinges on a transition from ignorance to knowledge marred by violence and powerlessness. Although Pope Duarte expertly depicts how girls in Juárez are unprotected by both parents and a corrupt police force, flying in the face of a middle-class US assumptions about girlhood, she does so in a way that also portrays the girls as incapable of much but fear. They do not think critically about their situations. They do not act, just react.

Finally, although by her novel’s end Eva and Petra have escaped from prostitution and torture, they are able to do so largely through the intervention of outsiders from their community – namely a soldier in the United States Army, Harry Hughes, a Midwestern boy who marries Evita and is instrumental in rescuing Petra. As with Irene in Desert Blood, Eva and Petra are saved by US citizens when the people in their community cannot or will not help them. In this way, rather than empowering the girls in her narrative or troubling the systems of privilege inherent in her depiction of their girlhood, Pope Duarte’s novel reinscribes the dominant media narratives about the girls in Juárez.

“Women of Juárez”

Focusing more coherently on the role class and geography play in the lives of young women on the border, in the spoken word poem “Women of Juárez,” Amalia Ortiz reflects on the similarity between herself and the victims of the murders. She is young, slender, dark and, “pretty, some say” (2006). Although she fits the profile of the victims, she is safe simply because she lives in El Paso, not Juárez. She notes, “I am a dead ringer for an army of the dead” (Ortiz, 2006). Angrily, she indicts El Pasoans for their security and failure to pay attention to what is going on under their noses: “And they on the other side, they all look like me. Yet on my side we sit passively nearby while the other side allows a slow genocide” (Ortiz, 2006). Further, she sharply unpacks the layers of gender, class and bureaucracy that plague the investigation of the crimes in “an entire society where young women are expendable. Young women like me” (Ortiz, 2006). Like many scholars and journalists, she notes the mismanagement of evidence such as DNA that does not match or mismatched clothing. Meanwhile, she and her friends spend weekend nights drinking in Juárez, feeling secure, “As long as we stay on the touristy paths that may exploit, but do protect Americans and our American Dreams. See, we are different. Even my parents don’t seem to see. All those missing women, they all look like me” (Ortiz, 2006).

As she concludes her poem, Ortiz makes clear her argument about the role the border plays in her life. She describes it as an arbitrary line “between their grandparents and mine” that makes her and her family safe from the violence because they are “Less Mexican, less poor, American and worth more” (Ortiz, 2006). Ortiz situates herself as a worker, similar to those in the maquiladoras, but she is safe because of her US citizenship, which grants her a more secure class position. Ortiz brings her middle-class subjectivity to the forefront and the privilege does not sit well with her as she lives “safe but still not out of earshot” of the women of Juárez and of their grieving families. She wonders what her life would be like if she lived just a few miles away, in Juárez instead of El Paso, and asks “if silenced, who would speak for me?” (Ortiz, 2006). In this way she prompts the audience to consider the privilege that shapes the portrayals of the young women as well as the lives lived on either side of the border.

With her repeated insistence, “they all look at me,” Ortiz expresses outrage at the arbitrary nature of her security and other women’s vulnerability to violence. Her poem addresses the impact of class and nationality on privilege, gender and security, troubling the role of the border in security and violence in a way that Desert Blood does not and arguing for more attention to border politics and the construction of girlhood than If I Die in Juárez. Ortiz’s poem actively complicates the relationship of an outsider to Juárez while also demanding to speak up for the victims because their crimes are personal. Still, however, I have to wonder how Ortiz’s doppelganger would perceive their similarity and her role on the other side of the “line in the sand.” Even as her poem moves away from discourses focused on innocence and experience, the rhetorical agency belongs to Ortiz. Given the proximity she dwells on in her poem, it seems that by engaging in a monologue that tells the story for the women of Juárez, Ortiz creates a greater distance between herself and the women who are “like her.” Further, she describes the women of Juárez as silenced, even though many girls and women are quite vocal in the community, fighting back against the violence.

Critical Spaces for Girls’ Voices

Critical pedagogy has served as a space that seems to most readily make room for the voices of girls themselves, allowing for their own ideas about their identities, citizenships and vulnerabilities. For example, Claudia G. Cervantes-Soon (2012) conducted a study “Testimonios of Life and Learning in the Borderlands: Subaltern Juárez Girls Speak” in which she gathered the testimonios of high school girls from Juárez, using their stories as an example for how “young Juárez women use counter-narratives to interrupt the media-driven discourse, raise consciousness, and reclaim their humanity” (373). In this way, they respond to productions such as those examined above that limit their agency by co-opting the narrative of their community and bringing to it the dominant concerns of a middle-class US audience. The girls in Cervantes-Soon’s study attend Preparatoria Esperanza, “the only public high school serving low-income youth from the northwestern zone of [Juárez], one of the most marginalized areas” (378). Thus, these students live in the areas heavily focused on in narratives of the abject poverty and culture of violence in the city. The area and its residents are criminalized by the police and stigmatized by the larger community because of the poverty and discourses about it for the past 20 years (378). The school, however, contradicts these stereotypes, as its highly educated teachers, many from the region and dedicated to “remaining grounded in the community,” champion critical education techniques based on reciprocal relationships with the students and an emphasis on the student as a thinking subject (378). Further, the teachers “deliberately promote the legitimization of students’ voices … through critical dialogue,” making the students’ own stories part of the learning process (378). Therefore, in the midst of an area portrayed by both scholars and artists as populated by subaltern people victimized by layered systems of oppression, the young people are educated in quite the opposite fashion.

The testimonios Cervantes-Soon cites in her study demonstrate not only the girls’ understanding of these systems – they are not oblivious to why things are the way they are – but also their determination to continue to fight for change. For example, 17-year-old Gabriela writes about the police harassing the young people in her barrio because of their involvement in protests:

So I do feel stressed, to think that we have not gotten out of this, out of this violence. And to think that Juárez is not just any place because this is a border. A kilometer north from where I stand there’s a whole other world. We are so close and so far away. I sit on top of the hill and look down and can see that line that divides two very different worlds. Yet you can see the influence of the United States on TV, everywhere. Even in the violence. Juárez is where all kinds of people end up, those escaping the law in the United States, those who are deported, people from southern Mexico, and suddenly you have a combination of Americans, Mexicanos, and Chicanos living here. Some see this border as a place of hope. That’s what my friends from the South tell me; it is their dream to come here. And here we are, trying to get out … . I tell one of my teachers that I like to gather people and help them clarify things because people today are very confused. That’s why we need to keep people informed, not through the mainstream media because that is manipulation, but among ourselves. (382)

In her narrative, the criticism voiced frequently in both scholarly and fictional texts is expressed by a teenage girl from Juárez, the very person whose narrative the former co-opt.Footnote 10 Gabriela’s testimonio makes clear that the cultural productions that present the girls of Juárez as naïve victims are themselves an assertion of power. Though some girls very well may be naïve about the conditions in Juárez, as Gabriela herself expresses about her friends from the south, many are aware not only of the dangers but also of the economic, political and gendered systems that create the culture of violence.

Her testimonio counters narratives such as Desert Blood and If I Die in Juárez, demonstrating how essentializing their portrayals are in their failure to give the subaltern a voice for anything but an inarticulate scream for help. These narratives construct the girls as undereducated or uncritical objects rather than critical subjects, because of their poverty and, maybe, their race or nationality. As Cervantes-Soon (2012) calls the testimonios “a politicized discourse that situated the girls’ experiences in the context of power dimensions and systematic oppression,” she argues for the impact they can have: “In a space where women’s bodies are positioned as docile objects and abused by patriarchy and voracious capitalism, young women’s reclamation of voice and knowledge requires … epistemological tools that take students’ everyday life and suffering seriously” (386–387).

Similarly, for her dissertation, Cervantes-Soon (2011) worked with young women at another high school who took photographs to capture their lives and feelings about themselves, their families and their communities. Nearly all of the students included at least one photo of Juárez. Cervantes-Soon writes, “Sure, they were not blind to the violence and distress in the city, but their depictions went beyond that to perceive other aspects that reveal the humanity that exists in Juárez … [N]one of their photographs portrayed sensationalist images of the city; instead stories of struggle, resistance, and hope prevailed” (213). Cervantes-Soon’s work with adolescent girls, like the work scholars such as Melissa W. Wright (2006) and Patricia Ravelo Blancas (2012) do with the stories of mothers of murder victims, demonstrates that girls and women of Juárez are capable of telling their stories, speaking back to narratives that revictimize them by portraying them as powerless, or speaking for them as though they are voiceless. Authors of fictional works and poetry are in a unique position to work with the scholarship on women’s experiences in Juárez and tell stories that reflect women’s interiority in a way that moves beyond the violence done to them. Working in more nuanced ways with girls’ experiences of growing up amidst the violence in Juárez, and demonstrating how it shapes their ideas about themselves and their futures, could help move popular media discourses beyond a construction of girlhood reliant on a false binary between innocence and experience.

Girlhood is as constructed as class, nationality and race. The boundaries of a girlhood identity following the US middle-class ideal that dominates depictions of young women in the literary examples cited above are dependent upon the resources to live a relatively sheltered life. By not attending to the construction of girlhood and the way it is deployed by those producing narratives and discourses about the violence in Juárez, we are failing to address a key part of the production of power relationships and the danger girls face. As we have seen above, girls are victimized because of their vulnerability, created by both the economy and gendered ideologies. If the literary and media accounts analyzed above can be taken as a representative discursive trend, girls are also not given a voice to tell their stories and to defend themselves in or against productions that continue to portray them as naïve victims, unaware of the systems that oppress them. In return, more critical attention to the construction and the portrayal of girlhood can help us to better understand the ways that systems of power work together to keep certain individuals oppressed while others, separated by something as arbitrary as a border, are able to live out the ideal of security.