Desert Blood

Before last week I had no idea that the women of Juarez, Mexico were being kidnapped and subsequently murdered consistently for over the past ten years. Watching the documentary in class on the missing women and hearing family members of the deceased speak of their encounters with the Juarez judicial system rocked me to my core. The police ignore requests for help and destroy evidence from crime scenes, blaming the destruction on disease and other kinds of contamination. All patterns found linking the missing girls to the actual number of dead bodies are ignored and the government claims the death toll is much lower than it actually is. But you know all of that. I just had to type it all out and really express how much this bothers me, and probably will continue to bother me, which isn’t a bad thing. Hey, it brings about awareness, right?
Alicia Gaspar de Alba’s Desert Blood encompasses every one of the things I listed above, delving into issues I didn’t even think were relevant to the Juarez murders at all. Throughout reading her novel, I noticed the underlying sexuality that permeated every chapter. Gaspar de Alba establishes very early on the Ivon is a lesbian who has come out to her conservative Mexican family, who received her with malice, save for a few characters, like her sister Irene. I couldn’t help but wonder what Gaspar de Alba was trying to get across to her readers when she placed sexuality at the forefront of a novel that has its main focus set on the Juarez murders.
I thought about it for a while and it hit me: Gaspar de Alba could be comparing homophobia to the violence against women in Juarez. It may sound far-fetched, but I think there could be something there. Gaspar de Alba does a very good job communicating how intolerable homosexuality is in the Mexican culture and throughout the world in general by showing us the scene in the beginning of the novel where Father Francis asks Ivon not to tell Cecila’s family she is a lesbian because if they knew they wouldn’t let her adopt the baby (pg.36). We also see Ivon’s mother call her all sorts of atrocious names when she goes to visit her after she finds out Cecilia had been murdered.
Gaspar de Alba links the verbal violence against homosexuality to the physical violence against women. By showing the reader the abuse Ivon endures because she is a lesbian next to the gratuitous abuse the women of Juarez suffer from, Gaspar de Alba makes the connection that these two crimes are the same on some level. The women being tortured and killed in the novel are merely objects and Ivon herself lesser-than human for her difference in sexuality. Gaspar de Alba subtly builds this image for the reader, leaving the message that the treatment of homosexuals as objects or freaks is in some way akin to torturing and killing women. Again, I know how out-there this all sounds, but it’s worth thinking about.
Gaspar de Alba also delves into the issue of same-sex couple adoption in her novel, but fails to elaborate on it entirely. However, given that this novel’s main focus isn’t adoption and is murder it’s understandable that she wouldn’t go into more detail about the process, but it’s something to be considered because it plays a big role in the fear of homosexuality that the world still harbors. We won’t let gay couples adopt without practically having them jump through hoops of fire, which is simply ridiculous. I think the issue of same-sex adoption is one that Gaspar de Alba feels very strongly about and one that probably could have been explored more in the novel if not for clarity’s sake, then for the sake of emphasizing the negativity felt toward homosexuality today, which would in turn emphasize the parallel we see between violence against women and homosexuality.
All in all, this week has been really eye opening. It sickens me to think that there are women dying horrible deaths across the country as you and I read these words. They say a baby is born every minute, or every few minutes, but in Juarez’s case, women are dying. I wish there was something I could do, something the United States would do, to help end this, but it looks like our government doesn’t really care about what’s going on “over there” in Mexico. It’s just like Enloe said. Women need to become more aware of global issues because they affect all of us. If one woman is murdered, we all feel it.

-Paige