From Protests to Politics: Sex Work, Women's Worth, and Ciudad Juárez Modernity

Abstract

This paper combines ethnographic research with discourse analysis to discuss how the protests of women sex workers in downtown Ciudad Juárez also represent protests against a larger urban economy that valorizes the disappearance of women from urban space. In Ciudad Juárez today, these disappearances are taking place as women and girls vanish from the publicity regarding progress in the maquiladora industry. The disappearances occur as more women and girls are kidnapped and murdered, and the disappearances occur as the police remove sex workers from the downtowns of border cities long famous for prostitution. While these different types of disappearances are not equivalent—to be denied access to public space is not the same as to be kidnapped and murdered—they are knit together through a discourse deployed by the city's political and corporate elites that equates the removal of women from public space with urban development and industrial progress. By combining ethnographic research with discourse analysis, and Marxist with feminist critique, I am following the lead of several geographers who regard discourses as “sociospatial circuits” that are productive of urban, economic, and cultural landscapes. This approach allows for an analysis of how the women sex workers' efforts to reappear in public space represents a protest, with potential for creating political alliances with other activists, against those invested in generating value from the disappearance of women across the Ciudad Juarez industrial and urban landscape.

Key Words:

• political economy
• gender
• Mexico
• ethnography.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Estela Madero for her invaluable assistance on this project. I would also like to thank the many women who allowed me to interview them and poke my nose into their business. I cannot name them publicly. I am indebted to Nan Woodruff, who read more than her share of drafts and helped me figure out this project. I also would like to thank Don Mitchell, Vicky Lawson, Rosalba Robles, Sarah Hill, Patricia Price, Vinay Gidwani, David Harvey, Guadalupe de Anda, and the anonymous reviewers for their insights. I also appreciate the steady support of Beth Parsons, and my many friends in Ciudad Juárez/El Paso who help me in more ways than they can imagine. This research was partially funded by the National Science Foundation, the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences and the College of Liberal Arts at Penn State University, and the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Georgia.

Notes

1. Maquiladora refers to the export-processing facilities in Mexico. Sometimes, I refer to them by their common nickname of maquila.

2. The association of women workers with “traditional” women's work of prostitution, and, in turn, of prostitution with social decline is prevalent throughout industrial history (see, for instance, Lamphere 1987). For the Mexico/U.S. border context, Debra Castillo (1999) provides a good illustration of how women who work as sex workers in Tijuana contend with police harassment and abuse, which is justified by references to sex workers as indicative of social decline. Some of these women have organized around the questions of safety and work rights. Nathan (1999) has shown how female maquiladora workers continually face the charge that they are “prostituting themselves.”

3. Feminist scholars, across disciplines, have unraveled these discourses to examine the creation of the public sphere around the prohibition of female presences (see Landes 1998). For feminist scholars who have explored the meaning of identity for the creation of a capitalist categories and divisions, see Lawson 1999; Elson and Pearson 1989; Ong 1987.

4. Geographers who have focused on the intersections of social identity with power structures have used this combination of methods to demonstrate the spatial implications to identity formation and the exercise of power in everyday life. I have drawn from the work of several to think through this project. See, for instance, Kobayashi 1994; Katz 1996; McDowell 1997.

5. My thinking on the production of female disappearance as a spatial activity has some roots in Elizabeth Grosz's (1994) theorization of the body as a spatial site of discursive production. I also draw from Judith Butler's (1993) formulation of the body as a site whose meaning is never fully established and therefore constantly under production.

6. All interviews that took place in Spanish have been translated by the author.

7. The official police account of the serial murders as of 2003 was around 90. Many activists are suspicious of the official numbers and claim that the number is closer to 300 (see Amnesty International 2003). Some activists demand that domestic violence and other sorts of violence against women needs more attention.

8. A significant body of geographic research has employed such tools for investigations into the geographies of subject formation (Blunt and Rose 1994; Keith and Pile 1993; McDowell 1997); for explorations into the space-time of political economy (Barnes 1996; Gibson-Graham 1996); and for untangling productions of place from the discursive regimes of power that guide interpretations of social difference across urban landscapes (see Martin 2000; Mitchell 2000). As many scholars, inside and outside of geography, have observed, the interrogation of spatial politics has much to offer discourse analysis, across disciplines (Pred 1996).

9. For scholarship into the organization and representation of the “traditional” maquiladora, see Cravey (1988), Wright (1999), and Fernandez-Kelly (1983).

10. All informant names are pseudonyms.

11. Such descriptions are commonplace throughout the business literature as well as the academic literature that discusses the “old-style” maquiladora (see Gereffi 1991; Carrillo 1990).

12. Lourdes Portillo exposes this frequent question in her documentary, La Extraviada, that explores police negligence and that suggests a political cover-up regarding the murder investigations.

13. The party that formed in 1929 was the precursor to the contemporary PRI.

14. Political analysts widely believe that the current Chihuahuan governor's political future and presidential aspirations hinge on his abilities either to solve the killings or to quash the publicity over them.

15. Several activists described these allegations during interviews. Many of them have received hostile phone messages from anonymous sources who blame them for the economic downtown and lack of tourism.

16. This information came from an Internet listserv maintained by Frontera NorteSur on September 23, 2002. It was entitled, “Juárez Business Association Wants to Remove Memorial Cross at Downtown Bridge.”

17. Film maker Lourdes Portillo is the director of this documentary, which was released in 2001. It has aired internationally as well as on PBS's “Point of View.”

18. This informant asked me not to identify her or her organization after admitting that she had received calls from the managers of prominent maquiladoras, which also provided some funding to her organization.

19. This plan was later published in 2000 by the Municipio de Ciudad Juárez as the Plan Parciál del Centro Histórico de Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua.