The Women's March in Juárez Today: A Few Notes
Note: Yesterday, March 8, 2020 was International Women's Day, celebrated by the United Nations since 1975. According to internationalwomensday.com (click here), however, it has been celebrated each year since about 1911, in one form or another. This year the global theme, provided by the United Nations since 1996, is I am Generation Equality: Realizing Women’s Rights. In reality there is no single organization, including the UN, that spearheads activities throughout the world. Since March 8 came on Sunday this year, Latin American women have organized marches throughout Latin America on Monday the ninth, to be more disruptive. The slogan of many organizers has been ¡el nueve ninguna se mueve! (on the ninth, no woman should move), a call for a day-long strike to demonstrate what the world would be like without women.
In Mexico information has circulated widely about activities through the hashtags, #unDíaSinMujeres and #unDíaSinNosotras, and the theme for the work stoppage is violence against women. The Los Angeles Times Spanish edition on March 5 reported the Tigres del Norte--one of the most popular musical groups on the US-Mexico border--both sides--have supported this theme, emphasizing that their songs--often drug-trafficking ballads or corridos--have frequently mentioned violence against women, including the 2004 hit song, Las Mujeres de Juárez.
Indeed, globally, in the movement against feminicide Cd. Juárez has been ground zero, largely due to the work of a handful of activists that began well over twenty years ago who publicized the large number of women who disappeared and/or were murdered there during the 1990s. Former El Paso Times investigative reporter Diana Washington wrote an excellent book about this phenomenon, The Killing Fields: Harvest of Women, in 2006.
On the Juárez side the late Esther Chavez Cano took on the male-dominated establishment law enforcement community in Chihuahua and Juárez, and fearlessly demanded answers. In doing so she exposed some of the darker sides of the municipal and state security apparatus. I remember an astonishingly blunt exchange--a gripping moment of truth--between Esther Chavez Cano and state and municipal law enforcement chiefs at a conference on the dead women of Juárez at NMSU's Center for Latin American Studies, probably in 1998. Washington, Chavez, and others broke the taboos on placing this on the social and political agenda for Juárez. They paved the way for this women's march today.
Indeed, globally, in the movement against feminicide Cd. Juárez has been ground zero, largely due to the work of a handful of activists that began well over twenty years ago who publicized the large number of women who disappeared and/or were murdered there during the 1990s. Former El Paso Times investigative reporter Diana Washington wrote an excellent book about this phenomenon, The Killing Fields: Harvest of Women, in 2006.
On the Juárez side the late Esther Chavez Cano took on the male-dominated establishment law enforcement community in Chihuahua and Juárez, and fearlessly demanded answers. In doing so she exposed some of the darker sides of the municipal and state security apparatus. I remember an astonishingly blunt exchange--a gripping moment of truth--between Esther Chavez Cano and state and municipal law enforcement chiefs at a conference on the dead women of Juárez at NMSU's Center for Latin American Studies, probably in 1998. Washington, Chavez, and others broke the taboos on placing this on the social and political agenda for Juárez. They paved the way for this women's march today.
Various workplaces In Juárez have offered varying levels of support for the day-long strike, including the city university (UACJ), the water utilities company, labor unions, local governments, hospitals and other health providers, and maquiladora plants. It is no longer taboo.
More to come!: **What Maquina de Fuego (see my last post) has to say about the march
You will be surprised!
**Is there more going on than simply a march by women in Juárez against violence?
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