Our Lost Border by Sarah Cortez & Sergio Troncoso

Our Lost Border by Sarah Cortez & Sergio Troncoso

Author:Sarah Cortez & Sergio Troncoso
Language: spa
Format: epub
Publisher: Arte Público Press
Published: 2013-09-15T00:00:00+00:00


MIRRORS, GHOSTS AND VIOLENCE IN CIUDAD JUÁREZ

María Socorro Tabuenca Córdoba

My family and I returned to the great Paso del Norte (Ciudad Juárez) eight months after the assassination of President Kennedy. We drove along a narrow two-way highway called the “Panamericana” (this was before it was expanded into a four-lane avenue that would have its name changed three times before returning to its original “Pan-American Highway”). They say that the road begins in Juárez, right after San Lorenzo’s curve and ends in Tierra del Fuego at the tip of the Southern Cone. The airport at that time was a small adobe room, and between the airport and the city there was almost nothing: a few nightclubs, several homes, the lienzo charro Baca Gallardo, and the soon-to-be opened Tecnológico de Juárez. At that time, as children, we could play on the streets late at night and walk long distances without being afraid that something bad would happen. Certainly we knew about “robachicos,” child-snatchers that could take us if we didn’t behave well; however, we felt safe in our barrios of our city. As children we didn’t know the true meaning of the words violence and crime.

During the seventies, we would organize house parties or go to our high school dances in the various dance halls in town. Juárez nightlife had always been famous for its variety. You could have exclusive nightclubs on one street and brothels around the corner, but people knew how to navigate the streets. Basking in the afterglow of Saturday Night Fever, the streets of Juárez regained the splendor of the nightlife of the forties. Disco halls were opened not only on the strip but in other parts of town where the city had developed. Soldiers from Fort Bliss and underage teenagers from El Paso would come to look for a night of entertainment. We could go out dancing from dusk to dawn without fear that something adverse could happen. As teenagers, we didn’t know the true meaning of the words violence and crime. By this time the city had already changed its demographics and urban landscape. Many women had arrived from rural towns and poor cities of the northern states of Chihuahua, Durango, and Coahuila. They came to work in the maquiladora industry many years before NAFTA. Juárez’s middle class had also changed the way it perceived its inhabitants. Before the arrival of the maquila, we could blend easily; we knew who was rich, but it was harder to distinguish between the classes of the middle-high and the middle-low. Unfortunately, the poor and the poorest of the poor, as it happens in most societies, were easily overlooked by the rest until the arrival of the maquiladora. The poor people suffered from a lack of basic resources and services, but not yet from the generalized social violence they face now.

Working women from the factories were almost automatically classified as “loose women” because they were earning their own money, and most of the time they were the ones who supported their families.



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