Continued from Homepage
Visual Loudness, Insistence, and Remapping:
On the Continued Protest Against Feminicide in
Ciudad Juárez
by Laila Espinoza, University of California at Berkeley
Terrorizing Women: Feminicide in the Americas
Operating over 300 maquiladoras and situated at the US/Mexico border, Ciudad Juárez is considered the official birthplace of the maquiladora. Most of these duty- and tariff-free factories began settling in the colonias in 1993 when NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) was ratified between Canada, the U.S, and Mexico.² In the same year, girls and women began going missing. Some were found days or weeks later, their corpses showing signs of unspeakable atrocities committed against them, while many remain missing. There are many and varied reports about these cases, each one with different statistics depending on their various categorizations of gender-based violence and its most extreme manifestations. Some reports only take into account cases that culminated in murder and dismiss forced disappearances or kidnappings. What gets reported is strongly influenced by the authorities and politicians who repeatedly make public statements such as “she probably just ran off with the boyfriend” or enact other forms of victim-blaming, such as questioning how she was dressed and which bars she would frequent. Data from the reports include: 913 women reported murdered since 2010; 3,000 missing since the mid-1990s; in 2017, 86 feminicides reported; 2,413 cases reported between 1993 and July 2022, of which more than a quarter occurred since 2018; 21 cases of women murdered in 2018; 83 cases of feminicide reported between 2019 and 2023; and 123 cases of women murdered in 2023 alone, only 10% of which were classified as feminicide.²
These deeply disturbing and dizzying statistics are partial and unreliable because of three main factors. First, lack of physical evidence (especially in the case of missing girls and women). Second, intimate partner or domestic violence, even when it culminates in murder, is most often not considered a case of feminicide. And third, feminicide, as a category of human rights violations, is still relatively recent and its definition is contested, particularly in relation to the term “femicide,” which is defined as “the misogynistic murder of women by men” in the anthology Femicide: The Politics of Woman Killing by Diana Russell and Jill Radford. Feminicide, however, acknowledges and addresses the much more complex, intersectional, and multi-layered actions and circumstances of violence against girls, women, and gender non-conforming individuals. What was being witnessed in the early 1990s and continues to develop today in Ciudad Juárez is the terrifying phenomenon of girls and women being kidnapped in plain daylight, kept in captivity for several days, and then killed and dumped in the desert in many cases, while in others, they are dismembered and found in black plastic garbage bags in the street, parking lots, or train tracks. The utterly shocking scene of corpses increasingly turning up in public spaces showed what Elva Orozco Mendoza describes as “an inverted order of things whereby death occupied the spaces of the living” (356). It is within this context that the term and concept of feminicide was developed to address gender-based violence; as Julia E. Monárrez explains, it involves a combination of the following elements: women and girls are snatched in plain daylight; they are then taken to places where they are made to suffer extreme acts of physical and sexual violence; after this, they are murdered (131). In Marcela Lagarde Y De Los Ríos’s explication of it, feminicide “occurs when the historical conditions generate social practices which allow for attacks on the integrity, development, health, liberty and life of women” (xvi).
I would add to these definitions that violations of the integrity and freedom of girls, women, and gender non-conforming individuals also reverberate beyond the victims of feminicide and affect mothers- and sisters-turned-activists, as well as journalists and artists. These reverberations can take the form of victim-blaming, or ridicule by authorities, or anonymous death threats, or murders that include acts of torture, all of which force women to be home-bound, where safety may also be a concern, or force them to leave their homes altogether and suffer the hardships of displacement.
Though I began this essay with statistics and definitions, I also want to emphasize that, as visual journalists Erika Schultz and Corinne Shun write in their Disappearing Daughters Project, “…the missing and murdered women of Juárez are more than statistics and data points. They are much-loved daughters who have left an unimaginable and disconcerting void. They are the fuel of activism against impunity and injustice. They are the seeds of desolation that flourish in art.”³ Nohemi Medina Martinez and Yuliza Ramirez, a same-sex married couple with three children whose bodies were found in January 2022, and Diana Corina Medrano Escobedo, age 23, who went missing on July 7, 2023, fuel activism and seed the regeneration of life. The missing, murdered, and living women of Juárez represent not victimhood (as they are often represented in common media) but courage, refusal to forget, radical creativity, and enduring love. As a girl who grew up in Ciudad Juárez, I heard stories that illuminate how feminicide impacts those of us who survived. As a woman artist and scholar, I am compelled to detail the violence committed against girls and women with deep care and with the sole intention to show the gravity and urgency of feminicide. I am deeply mindful of what to include and exclude as my intentions are to keep the integrity of all girls and women intact. It takes courage to really hear the stories. It takes courage to refuse to forget.
The courage with which the women of Juárez insist on keeping the memory of their missing daughters and sisters alive has inspired fathers and entire families to become part of the Ni Una Más! movement, each in their own way. In turn, by witnessing how these families publicly mourn as they fight for justice, artists and activists help spread the “seeds of desolation” through symbols that speak against feminicide (such as the magenta pink cross) while simultaneously creating new ones that they paint and write all over the city. In doing so, they and I are in alignment with Indigenous Unangax̂ scholar Eve Tuck in “Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities,” where she invites scholars and researchers to move away from what she calls a damage-centered approach to oppression and to offer instead a desire-based framework as an antidote. Damage-centered research centers on the loss and suffering of marginalized individuals, communities or tribes, representing oppressed communities as broken, whereas desire-based research is concerned with understanding complexity, contradiction, and the self-determination of lived lives (413). Like Tuck, I want to shift perspective away from resistance, conceptualized as a way to see, interpret, and name the political movements of racialized, gendered, and classed communities and toward protest, which I see as abundant, generative, radical, sustainable, and enduring ways of demanding justice. Resistance is not sustainable—it is exhausting and doesn’t offer enough space to highlight the creative and transformative responses to violence that communities perform on a day-to-day basis. The forms of protest that I highlight in what follows, such as remapping the city via altars, memorials, and graffiti, are rooted in the intimate relationship between land, body, and spirit where culture, art, and spirituality serve as the common ground for a community’s shared language and codes.
At the maquiladora headquarters building, the phrase “STOP MAKILLA” is written on a massive white wall facing the street. The tag is rendered in large black capital letters with a red square drawn around the phrase “STOP KILL.” The black and red colors make a loud visual contrast that urgently demands the attention of people walking or driving by. “STOP MAKILLA” is a site-specific tag without individually or collectively marked authorship, an anonymous performance of what I see as an ongoing public denouncement of the exploitative practices of the maquiladora and its relationship to feminicide. In addition, “STOP MAKILLA” instantiates a refusal to be silenced and intimidated despite, as mentioned earlier, the death threats against and the murders and forced disappearances of workers, both women and men, who protest to demand justice and the return of their loved ones. As Maria Pia Lopez notes in her essay on the Ni Una Menos Movement in Argentina (inspired by the Ni Una Mas! movement in Ciudad Juárez), which was sparked by the horrific murders of Chiara Paez and Lucía Pérez in 2015 and 2016, “We read the uses of the street like a text” (129). The symbols, murals, memorialized objects, magenta crosses, and graffiti are the material traces of peoples’ movement in public space that mark the streets and the land with a language born out of shared grief. They are also expressions of local culture that spread information through a shared language accessible to everyone due to its public visibility.
The “STOP MAKILLA” tag demonstrates how strategies of site-specificity and the creative expression of language fuse together in what I call a bi-national border slang poetics. Created out of border culture, this tag appropriates the local slang word maquila, a shortened version of maquiladora. Significantly, the root of maqui-ladora comes from the word maquína, which means machine, elucidating how the border community understands what characterizes the relationship between modernity, capitalism, and globalization and how their labor becomes a part of this process. Mega murals in memory of missing and murdered girls and women painted throughout the city visually echo “STOP MAKILLA” as they depict information about the relationships among the U.S/Mexico border, the maquiladora industry, feminicide, and cultural machismo (male superiority over women expressed through chauvinism).
During the first years of the feminicide there was a common term that was used locally to refer to women who worked in the maquiladora: maquilocas. The word maquilocas is constructed by the two words maqui (root of the word machine in Spanish) and locas (mad or crazy in the plural, and grammatically constructed as a feminine adjective). Expressed in a derogatory manner, this idiom is directed towards the worker who happens to be a woman, relegating her to a non-intelligible space of madness — locura. Such social attitudes reflect how a misogynistic culture views women who want to earn money and gain some form of independence, rather than work as housewives or homemakers, despite earning only the meager average pay of $8 for an 8- or 10- hour day of work in unhealthy factory environments that pose critical health hazards and are rife with emotional, psychological, and sexual harassment.⁴ Additionally, because of the maquiladoras’ graveyard shift requirement for new workers, the term maquilocas was often interchangeable with the concept of “mujeres de la calle” (women of the street), which only contributed to more gender-based violence beyond the domestic space and into the workplace and public spaces.
Thinking along with Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi’s politics of translation, which she describes as operating “across multiple vectors—language, culture, space, time—and multiple scales—local, global, diasporic. . . ” (158), I translate “MAKILLA” conceptually as not only a denouncement of maquiladora exploitative practices, but also as an indication of the culturally misogynistic violence embedded in the expression maquilocas. As I mentioned earlier, “STOP MAKILLA” bears no authorship. Its anonymous composition is performed individually and collectively as a movement, not necessarily as an artists’ collective, but more so as an undefined group of individuals, some of whom are activists, artists, and maquiladora workers themselves. Its site-specific rendering extends beyond the walls of the maquiladora headquarters and onto other factories, and it is echoed visually in murals and other memorials throughout the city. “STOP MAKILLA” is not only a tag on the wall but also a call to action. Mobilized as a chant that is painted on banners and used in demonstrations and protests in front of maquiladoras, it is often followed with “TE ANIQUILA” (it annihilates you). It is related to the “Ni Una Mas!” movement and points towards the historical and modern violence attending the U.S/Mexico border, colonization, Black trans-Atlantic slavery, and Indigenous genocide. In The Terror of the Machine: Technology, Work, Gender and Ecology on the US-Mexico Border, Devon G. Peña writes, “the globe-trotting violence of primitive accumulation is the precursor to the imposition of wage labor as a means of survival.”⁵
Centering gender in this perspective on capitalism (i.e., primitive accumulation, modernity, and globalism) and connecting it with border rule and imperialist expansion allows for a better understanding of the relationship of the maquiladora industry and feminicide. Harsha Walia reminds us that “the formation of the US-Mexico border and its historical entanglements of war and expansion into Mexico, frontier fascism and Indigenous genocide, enslavement and control of Black people, and the racialized exclusion and expulsion of those deemed undesirable are inextricably linked to contemporary anti-Blackness, Indigenous erasure and ecological devastation” (21). Indeed, as Peña asserts, “the history of science [and I add, technology in the context of the maquiladora] is the story of the conquest and control of nature, women, workers, and colonies by means of a constant revolution in the tools of technological domination designed by experts” (27). In addition, Werner Bonefeld writes, “primitive accumulation describes not just the period of transition that led to the emergence of capitalism. Primitive accumulation is, in fact, the foundation of capitalist social relations and thus the social constitution through which the exploitation of labour subsists.”⁶ Strategies of conquest and control are most often manifested through extreme social performances in spaces of domination that are overlapped by violence, the creation and maintenance of poverty, exploitation, and a culture of fear and terror.
As a young girl growing up in Ciudad Juárez, I was haunted by stories I heard of girls and women going missing and how many of them were eventually found dead, their bodies unrecognizable even to their own families and friends, their identities only recoverable because of a piece of clothing, a shoe, or something they were known to have been wearing the last time they were seen alive. Somehow, the maquiladora, or la maquila, as we Juárenzes call it colloquially, was always at the epicenter of the story. I remember the first time I became aware of the maquiladora in my own colonia. We were on our way to school, which was on the other side of the train tracks. I saw masses of people in uniform sky-blue shirts walking down the highest hill. Among the descending crowd I recognized neighbors, schoolmates’ mothers, older sisters, and my dear auntie. I also noticed that they were mostly women. Later I learned that they worked at the maquiladora that had recently opened in la colonia and that the reason I kept seeing them coming home early in the mornings was because they worked the graveyard shift, a requirement for new employees. The large cement building could be seen from almost any side of the unpaved streets and through the front or back windows of houses since it loomed over the hill with an overpowering presence.
We discovered through our curiosity that the maquiladora was much larger than we had imagined. It not only rose higher above any other building in our colonia, but also extended outwards, with smaller buildings clustered around large parking lots taking up a vast area of what had been previously “unclaimed” land. The factory was enclosed with a metal bar gate and access was limited to a one way in, one way out system. We heard rumors that there were basketball courts and green lawns inside and we created human child ladders with our bodies to jump over the gate to find our new, temporary playground on the other side. Eventually, my auntie stopped working at the maquiladora and we were prohibited from going anywhere near it. In fact, we girls were admonished to never go beyond the front yard of our homes alone. From that day on, we had to always report the precise location of our whereabouts to the adults and always stay together as a group. In my colonia I never heard of any girl or woman going missing but, in my cousin’s colonia some miles away, the daughter of the owners of the mom and pop store where we would buy candy was found murdered on the other side of the dairy farm’s fence. She had been missing for two weeks. Her father committed suicide after her body was found and her mother fell into a deep depression that would eventually also take her life. These are just some of the stories girls in Juárez grow up with.
In 1995 eight bodies, girls and young women, were found in a vacant desert lot known as Lote Bravo. In 1996 the bodies of seven girls and young women were found in the colonia Lomas De Poleo with signs of sexual torture. In 2001 eight bodies again of girls and young women were found with signs of sexual torture in Campo Algodonero (Cotton Fields, across the street from the maquiladora headquarters). In 2012 the skeletal remains of three young women were found in Arroyo Del Navajo (Navajo Creek). Also in the same year, the remains of three girls were found in San Agustín, a town near Ciudad Juárez. In 2013 the remains of two more young women were found in Arroyo Del Navajo.⁷ This only touches the surface of feminicide on this border. Thousands have not been found.
In Ciudad Juárez there are altars everywhere. Planting magenta pink crosses has become, among many other strategies, a way for the mothers and sisters who became activists to insist on justice and keep alive the memory of missing and murdered girls and women. By remapping the city with these crosses, the community is also politicizing spirituality and their Indigenous ways of understanding and effecting change in society. Because the practice of making altars is based on the tradition of Days of the Dead (an Indigenous spiritual practice in Mexico, Guatemala, and many regions in Latin America), these magenta pink crosses also form part of an Indigenous epistemology of communal problem solving and help reproduce materially a dialectic in the community of confrontation, remembrance, and healing. The image symbolized by the cross of Christ sacrificed is replaced by the absent image of a girl or woman. And this absent image is conjured collectively by those who construct the altar and are witnesses to its absence. The mothers and activists make the cross itself a body, and by painting the body magenta pink they show that it is a gendered body via a color culturally recognized as feminine.
As the mother and sister of Sagrario Gonzales, who went missing in 1998, explain: “. . . every time an assassinated body of a girl was discovered. . . we’d get together to paint a cross in her memory, so that she would not be forgotten.”⁸ For Paula, Sagrario’s mother, the cross’s pink color represents women “because we live in a machista society and pink is usually associated with girls.” Guillermina’s sister shared a more pragmatic reason for their choice of pink: “When I envisioned the cross campaign, we decided to use the leftover pink paint from the painting of our house in the colonia Lomas de Poleo” (19). The courage of women like them to step out from behind the walls of their homes and their private suffering to install and paint altars everywhere a girl was last seen or where her body was found has ignited a movement against gender-based violence and its most extreme manifestation in feminicide. With a trail of home altars lining Ciudad Juárez, women have created a three-decade long (and ongoing) transgenerational ritual procession that has remapped the entire city.
In Mexico, as in most regions in Latin America, altars occupy a significant physical space in the home. The home altar is a spiritual-religious space of self-reflection, of devotion to deities via their images, and of remembrance of the dead, typically represented through a photograph. Along with ofrendas (offerings), personal objects of affection or remembrance are also included, such as a favorite food and a favorite color, and the altar is made and tended to as part of the home. Home altars function as anchors for memories, for identity and a sense of belonging to a place, and for relationships among family and self. As Fregoso affirms, “the home altar…is a private vernacular space for mourning and healing one’s own suffering. In taking the vernacular tradition to the streets, the mothers of Ciudad Juárez transformed the altar into an insurgent, radical act” (128).
In 2005, photographer Mayra Martell from Ciudad Juárez began taking photographs of altars that families made for their missing and murdered daughters in their homes. She based her project on the pesquisas she saw throughout her city, eventually visiting fifty home spaces. Her process, as Martell describes, was to visit the families, mostly the mothers, in their own homes. She sat down with them in conversation in their living rooms and kitchens, and in time the mothers would take her to the bedrooms of their daughters, which had been turned into altars that one could walk into. These intimate altars, as I call them, included a daughter’s clothes laid out on her bed; a perfect drawing of a girl’s face in pencil; a woman’s shoes; a list of personal goals, both short and long term; a daughter’s note to her father that said “eres el mejor papá” (you are the best dad) with a baby picture with a piece of hair attached to it; and a wall decoration for a girl’s Quinseñera (traditional Mexican celebration when a girls turns fifteen years old). These are the quiet and intimate moments of remembrance and mourning inside the home. Outside, the magenta pink crosses stand as the families gather their courage to protest again.
Some of Martell’s photographs of these intimate altars, originally titled “Ensayo de La Identidad—El Acto de Extrañar” (Essay of Identity—The Act of Missing), travelled beyond Ciudad Juárez in an exhibit titled “Cuartos Vacíos” (Empty Rooms) that was displayed in galleries and museums such as ArtexArte in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 2014 and The Museum of Memory and Tolerance in Mexico City in 2017. Martell’s public exhibition of the home altars is yet another way to make the private suffering of the families visible beyond the walls of their homes and more so, beyond the borders of the city. Her photographs reveal and affirm the mantra “the personal is political.”
In 2016, I created the “Huipil Fronterizo” (Border Huipil). A Huipil is a traditional dress worn by girls and women in Mexico and Guatemala meant to enshrine the female (and female identifying) body. It is a textile encoded with embroidered symbols that relate the identity of the woman who is wearing it as well as her community and customs. In addition to these traditional meanings and functions of the Huipil, I see this textile as a moving altar, which I correlate with my own personal experiences of growing up in Ciudad Juárez. Treating windows as mediators between the inside and outside of a home, between private, domestic space and public space, I transformed my kitchen curtains into a Huipil that spoke of my story, encoding it with embroidered and painted symbols that depict the desert, the steel wall that cuts through the land of my ancestors, migration, the maquiladora factories, and feminicide. Bright, colorful homes, our land with vegetation as it once was, flowers, and a vast blue sky speckled with an abundance of stars also formed part of the Border Huipil. At the center of the Huipil, on the chest area, I embroidered a large magenta pink cross.
I then traveled to Ciudad Juárez to visit my family and used the Huipil as a catalyst for talking about our collective experience. Not many words were exchanged. As the garment was passed around from hand to hand after dinner at an auntie’s house, I noticed that a subtle yet deeper form of communication took place in the family circle. This more gentle approach to addressing the traumatic topics encoded in my Huipil enabled us to reflect on family separation due to migration, which for my family, like so many others, is a forced migration as a result of extreme poverty and the horrifying violence of feminicide and of the drug cartel wars. As each family member touched the embroidered symbols on the Huipil, I saw this communal act as a type of ceremonial blessing and permission for me to perform the ritual I had planned for the following day. Joined by my collaborator and photographer, Valeria Puertas, an architecture student at Universidad Autónoma De Ciudad Juárez, I wore the Huipil for the first time as we visited the altars in downtown dedicated to the missing girls and women.
In Mexico, Central and South America, and in many other regions where syncretized forms of religio-spiritual practices fuse together Indigenous, African, and Catholic traditions, processions have historically functioned as ways for communities to gain attention from authoritative figures such as the church, unjust land owners, or the government for their shared struggles, losses, celebrations, or demands, as well as to publicly mourn the death of family and loved ones as they made their way to the cemetery. We began our two-woman procession from the cathedral at the edges of downtown Ciudad Juárez and walked towards the Paso Del Norte Bridge at the U.S/Mexico border where the Cruz de Clavos stands. My performance was simple. I walked slowly and intentionally with gentle undulating movements that revealed the symbols on my Huipil while stopping at every pesquisa altar. There I would remain, looking at the face of each and every missing girl and woman as I read the details of their personhood and whispered their names. I noticed painfully that many of the pesquisas were covered with pizza delivery fliers, job announcements, and rewards for the return of lost cell phones or laptops. I proceeded to carefully remove the various ads that had been taped directly on top of the faces and personal descriptions of the missing. Puertas’s photographs show several important elements in regard to the relationship between the performer, the performance itself, the “audience,” space (in this case the city, with its missing person ads of girls and women, and its magenta pink crosses or their variation, black crosses on magenta backgrounds), the documentation, and the photographer. The act of removing the taped ads off the altars was for me a deeply emotional experience. I became aware that passersby were observing me as I moved from altar to altar and repeated what now felt like a ritual, removing the taped ads. This ritual marked the beginning of my commitment to research feminicide in Ciudad Juárez and beyond.
Conclusion:
“Y LAS MUJERES DE MI CIUDAD?” (AND THE WOMEN OF MY CITY?)
Out of this question a new constellation of questions emerges. Some fall between the gaps in translation from Spanish to English, such as WHERE ARE THEY? WHAT HAPPENED TO THEM? WHAT ABOUT THEM? At the heart of this question is WHY US? I say US as in WE because feminicide leaves traces that are generationally carried in the bodies of the living and the spaces of the present, through stories, the magenta pink crosses, and the pesquisas showing the faces of the dead everywhere. And feminicide impacts girls, women, and gender non-conforming communities beyond my city, in Central and South America, in the Caribbean, and in the U.S., Canada, and beyond. How do we as artists, scholars, journalists, activists, and impacted communities address feminicide in ways that do not reproduce the violence (evoking Saidiya Hartman), that do not sensationalize it or fetishize it (evoking Rosa-Linda Fregoso)? How do we render something that is considered private (i.e., “domestic” violence) into something public, without causing more harm to those directly affected? How do we care for each other and heal along with the terror of feminicide? Feminicide is a form of social terror that’s not in the past and that also didn’t emerge solely as a consequence of globalism, neoliberalism, and extreme capitalism. Feminicide is gender-based terror with a history rooted in colonialism, slavery, racism, patriarchy, classism, and white supremacy.
When I returned to Oakland (my home for the past twenty years), I came across a missing person ad on my way to the bus stop on Telegraph Ave. Her name is Daria Fortune, a sixteen-year-old black girl reported missing on April 4, 2023. A couple of blocks away, there is a mural painted in memory of Nia Wilson. When I walk past these images I think about this fact: we continue to live and die in a world that does not see every human being as rightfully deserving of what global south philosopher Boaventura De Sousa Santos calls el buen vivir (a good life). What does it mean to live a good life? What is a good life and who gets to live it? I insist on these questions and those that arise from it. Who gets to be fully human (echoing Sylvia Wynter). Who gets to live free of systematic terror, poverty, and premature death? Echoing Saidiya Hartman, what does freedom even mean? How do we come to know freedom? What is our point of reference? And, can we imagine and create different possibilities?
End Notes
Fregoso, Rosa-Linda. The force of witness: Contra feminicide. Duke UP, 2023.
Lopez, Encarnacion, Maria. “Femicide in Ciudad Juárez is enabled by the regulation of gender, justice and production in Mexico.” The London School of Economics and Political Science Journal, Feb. 15, 2018.
Chin, Corinne and Erika Schultz. “Disappearing Daughters.” Seattle Times, March 8, 2020.
Garcia, Sandy. “Maquiladoras: All You Need to Know.” Accessed on May 21, 2025.
Peña, Devon G. The terror of the machine: Technology, work, gender, and ecology on the US-Mexico border. U of Texas P, 1997.
Bonefeld, Werner. “Primitive accumulation and capitalist accumulation: Notes on social constitution and expropriation.” Science & Society, 2011, pp. 379–399.
Mesa de Mujeres de Ciudad Juárez. “Timeline. Memory in the Desert: Femicide and Traces for Justice,” mesademujeresjuarez.org, 1993–2016.
Fregoso, Rosa-Linda. “The Art of Witness.” Chiricù Journal: Latina/o Literature, Art, and Culture, 2.1, 2017, pp. 118–136.
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