Giulia Oros on "Murder in Juarez"

Many young women in Mexico were attracted to the chance of having an independent social life, which later brought them working in the city’s maquiladoras. However, what drew them to the city of Juarez also drew them closer to their deaths. Jessica Livingston writes about the sexist conditions in the city and in the maquiladoras that made their deaths possible. 

The maquiladoras primarily employed young women for the fact that they are capable and without family responsibilities. The women are cheap labor, hired for “unskilled” work, and work under deteriorating conditions. The workplace is very sexist since pregnant women are fired (the maquiladoras do not want to pay for social security coverage for women in their third trimester), beauty contests with cash prizes that are more than a week’s wages, and the women are sexually harassed by the managers. These conditions aggravate me because it would actually cause me to feel degraded and less of a woman since my body would be targeted by people at work and I would feel threatened by taking away something that makes me a woman – the possibility of having my own kids.

The author argues that “women and men in Juarez most likely could adjust to restructuring of the labor market if it did not undermine men as workers by constructing women in the workplace as cheap labor” (71). This means that in the end, it was the economical dynamics of the maquiladora and its effect on Juarez that lead to the murder of the female workers. The rise in male resentment and hostility was the result of men feeling threatened by the growing presence of female factory workers. It makes sense that men would feel that their masculinity was being taken away; Mexican men are often portrayed with the model of machismo and maintain power by violence and control. With more women spending more time in the workforce, the men would believe that the roles change. The assumption that women must work more and financially contribute more to the household leads men to presume that they will have to spend more time doing the domestic work; this degrades their sense of manhood and causes them to backlash, usually with violence. For instance, the continuous murdering of working women suggests resentment at the increasing economic independence of women. The whole system makes it possible and acceptable to kill the female workers without accountability because they are “cheap labor” and disposable within the maquiladora. I would think that if their position is easily replaced, then it would barely raise any concern to the disappearance of these women. This fills me with feelings of dismay because the families of these women suddenly lose their daughter.

My mother used to work in Italy, sewing in a factory. As a young immigrant from Romania, she was often discriminated by her female coworkers because of her ethnicity. My mother, like many young women from Romania, moved to Rome in search of work. My mom and other Romanian women were not treated so kindly since they were perceived to be competitors for the jobs that Italian women could get.  (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/04/23/in-italy-politicians-court-votes-by-stoking-racism-against-romanians/?utm_term=.9899ef960db8)

The situation was like the one in Juarez; a certain group of workers were becoming more dominant than the other group, and the larger group demeaned the work of the smaller group. In Juarez, the maquiladora was predominantly female with a smaller portion of men, and the men probably found their work demeaning and emasculating especially since they had the same wage as the women. The women of Juarez were perceived to be competitors for the jobs. This resulted in the rise of sexism and violence of women, and the murders were the result of displacement of economic frustration onto the bodies of the maquilas.

Is it the blame of the culture that raise men to believe that the manifestation of manliness is through power, control, and violence?