Desert Blood

Discussion

The true story of the Juarez Murders has been documented in many places and in different formats. Numerous articles have been written in newspapers and magazines and documentaries such as Lourdes Portillo's award-winning film Senorita Extraviada or a PBS series on maquiladoras (foreign-owned assembly plants constructed on Mexico's border with the United States), have brought attention to the atrocious and dangerous working conditions in these plants. Also, a number of nonfiction books such as Women and Work in Mexico's Maquiladoras (Rowman & Littlefield, 1998) or Desert Capitalism: Maquiladoras in North America's Western Industrial Corridor (Univ. of AZ Pr., 1996), while not concentrating on the murders, have nevertheless shown how NAFTA has failed to bring prosperity to the economy of Mexico as the American factories come to the Mexican border towns, make their quick buck, then start deserting in droves to the new 800-pound gorilla in the room, China, in pursuit of a new dirt-cheap labor force (Mata, 2010).

Well, Ms. Gaspar de Alba has reached out to a new audience, the exhausted reader who has neither time nor energy for nonfiction or PBS, but who likes to curl up with a good thriller in the evenings.

I was aware of the torture murders of the young female factory workers in Juarez, having heard occasional news broadcast or read an occasional magazine article. But despite the American fascination with serial killers, it has not been widely publicized here, perhaps because the American businesses who run the news media don't want us to know about anything that will interfere with their precious NAFTA. Also, three to four hundred bodies in ten years (1,000 by some counts) are a bit bizarre and unbelievable to Americans who think the Green River killer is the pinnacle of serial killerdom. Also, when you read about the cases, you realize that there may be multiple perpetrators and that the murders may be part of an economic treaty that is tearing apart the social fabric of Mexican society. At this point the average reader of murder mysteries falls asleep, thinking he or she graduated college 20 years ago, thank you very much, and wants the kind of literary entertainment dished out by Patricia Cornwell. Well, Ms. Gaspar de Alba knows how to deliver that kind of entertainment while meticulously explaining the various theories about the crimes and the social and economic consequences (Park, 2009).

Ms. Gaspar de Alba's hero, Ivon Villa, a social scientist aspiring toward her Ph.D. and a strong-willed lesbian with an adoring girlfriend home in California, has come home to El Paso (across the Rio Grande from Juarez) to adopt the infant of a pregnant maquiladora worker, Cecilia. But before she can meet Cecilia, Cecilia turns up dead, tortured and raped like hundreds before her. Ivon, who suffers from abuse and discrimination by the more traditional society of El Paso-Juarez because she is a lesbian (even her own mother spits the insult marimacha at her), wants to leave town as soon as she can. But her fifteen year ...