The Little Old Lady Killer by Susana Vargas Cervantes;

Author:Susana Vargas Cervantes;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SOC004000 Social Science / Criminology
Publisher: New York University Press

The Novel: Ruda de corazón

Journalist Victor Ronquillo wrote a novel, published in 2006, based on the case of La Mataviejitas. In it, as in Amandititia’s video, Barrón’s and Ostrosky’s accounts, and news media reports, Barraza’s identity as La Dama del Silencio becomes one with that of La Mataviejitas.

First, the title of the novel, Ruda de corazón, makes reference to Barraza’s declaration on TV Azteca that she is an enthusiastic devotee of lucha libre, or a “ruda from the bottom of her heart.” Second, the novel narrates, in the third person, the life of La Dama del Silencio, including her difficulties training in a gymnasium, being a female wrestler, and working with a promoter who never really believed in her. The narrative places special emphasis on the photograph of La Dama del Silencio posing with the championship belt and imagines the wrestler’s pride.

Ronquillo’s book merges La Dama del Silencio and La Mataviejitas when he introduces two fictional cops, Luciano Nuñez and Gerardo Silva, who visit La Dama del Silencio. Nuñez is extorting her and stops by her house to collect his payoff. The wrestler pays him with a ring that has “a shiny stone.” Years later, Silva, now a taxi driver, looks at the photographs of La Mataviejitas published in the newspapers and realizes that he had met her with Nuñez years before—that she was La Dama del Silencio—and he would never forget “the hands of the wrestler.”115 In reality, Barraza had indeed been extorted by police officer Moisés Flores Domínguez, who in 1996 discovered that Barraza had been burglarizing houses and demanded twelve thousand pesos in exchange for not arresting her.116 Except for one news report, this extortion, which probably lasted years, is rarely mentioned. Domínguez was supposed to be in police custody, but I have not been able to find out if he has been convicted.

Ruda de corazón mixes journalistic reports into the fictionalized story, tracing the life of La Dama del Silencio, the victims, the killings, and the police response as the years progressed. This is a rare instance in which Barraza’s life is used not as an explanation of her pathology but as way to show that she herself was a victim too, as Ronquillo explains, of a “society that is enormously machista, exclusive and unequal.”117 Ronquillo stated that he is not interested in “denying the legal responsibility” of Barraza but in showing that the serial killer of elderly women is a “lamentable result of the social degradation that Mexico City experiences.”118 The novel is, in his own words, a response to the “stigmatization and media lynching” of Barraza.119

Although Ronquillo sees Barraza as a victim and not only a victimizer, he, too, displaces the identity of La Dama del Silencio onto that of La Mataviejitas as evidence that Barraza is the serial killer. In the novel, the killings of elderly women are, in contrast to Amandititita’s video and song, not comedic performances but a result of the victimization characteristic of a machista society.

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