The phenomenon of the female homicides in Ciudad Juárez, called in Spanish the feminicidios (“femicides”), involves the violent deaths of hundreds of women since 1993 in the northern Mexican city of Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, a border city across the Rio Grande from the U.S. city of El Paso, Texas. In 2002, the Mexican journalist, novelist and essayist Sergio González Rodríguez, best known to American readers for his cameo appearances as The Journalist in Roberto Bolano’s 2666, published Huesos en el Desierto (“Bones in the Desert”), revealing links between organized crime, local entrepreneurs and local and federal authorities and eventually leading to his kidnapping and assault. Ten years later he is publishing his first book on the subject in English, The Femicide Machine. Join us for a conversation with the author and María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo (Latino Studies, NYU) about this ongoing violence and its underlying causes, from narco-warfare to transient labor to gender to global capital.
https://vimeo.com/44756300