Melissa W. Wright

A Manifesto Against Femicide

In Ciudad Juarez, a group of feminist activists has established the citys first sexual assault center, called Casa Amiga. They accomplished this feat after launching a social movement on several fronts against the notion that Juarense women are cheap, promiscuous, and not worth efforts to provide them a safe refuge from domestic violence, incest, and rape. The essay explores their efforts as a means for asserting the value of women in Ciudad Juarez, an assertion with reverberating effects in the maquiladora industry that has prospered based on this image of Juarense women. By combining a Marxist critique of value with post-structuralist analyses of the subject, the essay argues that projects such as Casa Amiga represent plausible sites for the organizing of alliances whose objective is to reverse the depreciation of laborers.

The Politics of Relocation: Gender, Nationality, and Value in a Mexican Maquiladora

In this paper, I combine a Marxist critique of the labor theory of value with poststructuralist feminist theories of subjectivity to illustrate how the decision to transfer a manufacturing operation out of Mexico revolves around the culturally constructed meanings of identity internal to the firm. I attempt to illustrate how the managers of a maquiladora establish patterns for designating national and sex differences among their employees to support an argument that the production of valuable commodities is a social process interwoven with the social construction of differential values in people. And I endeavor to show how these complicated processes for identifying value in things, and in the people who make them, have an impact upon the internal structure of the firm. The paper is based upon several months of ethnographic research conducted in a multinational maquiladora located in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua.

Paradoxes, Protests and the Mujeres de Negro of Northern Mexico

On November 25, 2002, thousands of people marched through the streets of Mexico City and demanded, in the name of social justice, an end to the violence against women in northern Mexico. ‘Ni Una Más’ (not one more) was their chant and is also the name of their social justice campaign. Their words referred to the hundreds of women and girls who have died violent and brutal deaths in northern Mexico and to the several hundred more who have disappeared over the last ten years. These Ni Una Más marchers, many working with human rights and feminist organizations in Mexico, are protesting against the political disregard and lack of accountability, at all levels of government, in relation to this surging violence against women. And the symbolic leaders of their movement are the Mujeres de Negro (women wearing black), who are based in Chihuahua City. In this article, I examine how the Mujeres de Negro demonstrate how feminist politics so often plays upon the negotiation of spatial paradoxes in order to open new arenas for womens political agency. For while the Mujeres de Negro of northern Mexico are galvanizing an international human rights movement that is challenging political elites, they are also reinforcing many of the traditional prohibitions against womens access to politics and the public sphere. And I explore how the Mujeres de Negro devise a spatial strategy for navigating this paradox in an increasingly dangerous political environment. Paradojas, Protestas y las Mujeres de Negro de Chihuaha En noviembre 25 de 2002, miles de personas desfilaron por las calles de la Ciudad de México y exigieron, en el nombre de la justicia social, un final a la violencia contra mujeres en el parte norte del país. Repitieron las palabras ‘Ni Una Más’, que también es el nombre de su campaña de justicia social. Esta frase se refiere a las mujeres que han sido brutalmente y violentamente asesinadas, y a los otros cientos de mujeres que han desaparecidos durante los últimos diez años. Los manifestantes, muchos que trabajan con organizaciones feministas y de derechos humanos en México, están reclamando por la negligencia y la falta de atención por parte de los oficiales públicos a todos niveles de gobierno. Las líderes simbólicas de este movimiento son las ‘Mujeres de Negro’, quienes tienen su base en la Ciudad de Chihuahua. En este artículo, investigo como las Mujeres de Negro enfrentan paradojas espaciales mientras intentan abrir nuevos espacios políticos para las mujeres en México. Aunque las Mujeres de Negro están estimulando un movimiento internacional de derechos humanos que está presionando a las exclusivas políticas, ellas están también re-imponiendo muchas de las prohibiciones tradicionales que han impedidos el acceso de mujeres a las políticas y espacios públicos. Examino como las Mujeres de Negro navegan estas paradojas en un ámbito político cada vez más hostil.

Justice and the Geographies of Moral Protest: Reflections from Mexico:

Protest movements offer a rich vernacular for investigating how the connections between social justice and creating political subjects always involve spatial transformations. In this paper, I put Jacques Derridas contemplations regarding justice as incalculable in conversation with critiques of public witnessing and the role of empathy for catalyzing political action, and I do so to present some speculations over why a social justice movement in northern Mexico has weakened domestically as it has gained steam internationally. The movement has grown since 1993 in response to the violence against women and girls and the surrounding impunity that has made northern Mexico famous as a place of ‘femicide’. By examining these events in relation to the debates on calculating justice and on the politics of witnessing, I hope to add to the growing literature within and beyond geography on the interplay of emotion and social justice politics while illustrating what is at stake in these dynamics for Mexicos democracy and for womens participation in it.

Urban Geography Plenary Lecture—Femicide, Mother-Activism, and the Geography of Protest in Northern Mexico

“This silence terrifies me,” said Esther Chávez, the director of a rape crisis center in Ciudad Juárez, the city that borders El Paso, Texas at the Mexico–U.S. divide. The silence she refers to is the quiet surrounding the ongoing violence against women in northern Mexico. “No one is protesting,” she said. “There are no press conferences. No marches. It’s like we’re back in 1993.” The year 1993 marks the beginning of what is widely recognized as northern Mexico’s era of femicide (feminicidio)—the killing of women surrounded by impunity (Monárrez Fragoso, 2001). The year also marks the beginnings of the protests that made this violence famous around the world. As I listened to Esther, a woman in her mid-70s, while she lay on her sofa and prepared for another round of chemotherapy, I wondered if I should state the obvious. “You know, Esther,” I said, “no one, anywhere, protests violence against women on a regular basis.” “Well,” she said, “we used to.”

Feminine Villains, Masculine Heroes, and the Reproduction of Ciudad Juarez

“The reality of Juárez is the reality of the whole border,” said Gustavo Elizondo, the mayor of Juárez. “You have a city that produces great wealth, but that sits in the eye of the storm. In one way it is a place of opportunity for the international community. But we have no way to provide water, sewage and sanitation for all the people who come to work. . . . Every year we get poorer and poorer even though we create more and more wealth.” —New York Times, 2 February 2001

Factory daughters and Chinese modernity: a case from Dongguan

Abstract This article investigates how a group of Hong-Kong Chinese managers of the offshore facilities of a US-based corporation extend their firm’s base in southern China while simultaneously establishing themselves as a new kind of “Chinese” manager. These new managers set out to accomplish what their colleagues in other corporate sites have not been able to do: control the turnover rate of a female labor force, described as sexually tumultuous and hormonally problematic. To control the labor turnover rate, these managers create a strategy for keeping workers “just long enough” before they lose their dexterity and attentiveness as a result of repetitive work. Their strategy relies on a discourse of in loco parentis to justify invasive policies for monitoring workers’ bodily functions and basic mobility inside and outside of the factory. To make this argument, the article combines a Marxian critique of value with post-structuralist theories of discursive subjectivity. The objective is to demonstrate how the negotiation of social identity within the capitalist firm proceeds through the representation of binary cultural and sex differences that reinforce the dichotomies of laborer and manager. However, these binaries unfold in unpredictable and uneven ways that can prove problematic for the capitalist endeavor. The material for this article comes from an ethnographic study of this company’s operations in southern China and in northern Mexico.

The Gender, Place and Culture Jan Monk Distinguished Annual Lecture: Gentrification, assassination and forgetting in Mexico: a feminist Marxist tale

In this article, I employ feminist and Marxist tools to expose the struggles over the constant plunder and expansion of global capitalism along Mexicos northern border, specifically in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua. In particular, I examine how an official politics – promoted by the Mexican and US governments – for forgetting the economic and social devastation of a transcontinental drug war contributes to the mechanisms for further exploiting the working poor. By combining a feminist focus on the daily struggle of social reproduction with a Marxist emphasis on accumulation by dispossession, I show how this official ‘forgetting’ segues with an international gentrification plan in downtown Ciudad Juárez that seeks to expand the rent gap by denying place, legitimacy and legal status to the working women and their families who have made this border city famous as a hub of global manufacturing. As such, I argue that the social struggles against the official forgetting are struggles against a violent political economy that generates value via a devaluation of the spaces of the working poor, even of the spaces of their literal existence.

Feminicidio, Narcoviolence, and Gentrification in Ciudad Juárez: The Feminist Fight

The fight against impunity continues along Mexicos border, especially in the industrial hub of Ciudad Juárez. In the 1990s feminists brought this fight to international attention as they launched a transnational justice movement against feminicidio, the killing of women with impunity. In this paper I create a feminist and Marxist frame to show that there is much to be learned from the fight against feminicidio for the ongoing struggles in a border city that is now also notorious for juvenicidio, the killing of youth with impunity, which is occurring in relation to the Mexican governments declaration of war against organized crime. By situating these justice struggles within a context of North American securitization and neoliberal gentrification along the Mexico—US border, I argue that the feminist fight against impunity exposes the synergy of symbolic and material processes within the drug war. And I argue that this synergy seeks to generate value through the extermination of whole populations, especially of working poor women and their families in this border city today.

Against the Evils of Democracy: Fighting Forced Disappearance and Neoliberal Terror in Mexico

On 26 September 2014, Mexican police forces in Iguala, Guerrero, attacked and abducted four dozen students known as normalistas (student teachers); some were killed on the spot and the rest were never seen again. Within and beyond Mexico, rights activists immediately raised the alarm that the normalistas had joined the countrys growing population of “the disappeared,” now numbering more than 28,000 over the last decade. In this article, I draw from a growing scholarship within and beyond critical geography that explores forced disappearance as a set of governing practices that shed insight into contemporary democracies and into struggles for constructing more just worlds. Specifically, I explore how an activist representation of Mexicos normalistas as “missing students” opens up new political possibilities and spatial strategies for fighting state terror and expanding the Mexican public within a repressive neoliberal and global order. I argue that this activism brings to life a counterpublic as protestors declare that if disappearance is “compatible” with democracy, as it appears to be within Mexico, then disappeared subjects demand new spaces of political action. They demand a countertopography where the disappeared citizens of Mexico make their voices heard. Activists demonstrate such connections as they compose countertopographies for counterpublics across the Americas landscape of mass graves, prisons, and draconian political economies, mostly constructed in the name of democracy and on behalf of securing citizens. Understanding how Mexicos activists confront the intransigent problems of state terror, spanning from dictatorships to democracies, offers vital insights for struggles against policies for detaining and disappearing peoples there and elsewhere in these neoliberal times.