Truth v. truth

This week we read Desert Blood: the Juárez Murders by Alicia Gaspar de Alba and watched Señorita Extraviada: Missing Young Women by Lourdes Portillo. Although Señorita Extraviada is a documentary and Desert Blood is a fictitious novel, they both use different ways to tell an audience about under reported crimes that are happening rather close to home. Many Mexican and Mexican-American women between the ages of twelve and twenty-five are being abducted, raped, and murdered. These atrocities have been going on since 1993 and they continue to happen today. Both Gaspar de Alba and Portillo use their art as feminist activism to let people know that this is a serious concern and needs to be given more attention and stopped.

Of the two choices, Desert Blood is the most effective at getting the true message across to Gaspar de Alba’s readership. The novel gives more of an insider view on the crimes; readers understand what is happening to the victims’ families and the dangers in investigating or researching the Juárez murders because they are on the same level as the character in this third-person limited prose. Also, it gives a glimpse into the situation as a captive. Irene’s character in the book, as well as the maquiladora workers, allows readers to understand what a captive must deal with in such circumstances. Her pain and fear hit a chord with readers and, although much of her story is based on speculation rather than actual accounts, those passages give readers more of a reason to identify with the nameless Mexican women who are murdered still today. The documentary is not nearly as effective to a non-Spanish-speaking audience simply because the subtitles are difficult to connect with the emotions of the speaker. The carefully chosen words of Gaspar de Alba are meant to invoke certain emotions. In interviews, the men and women are saying whatever comes to mind. This can be a very effective means to stir compassion within the audience… if they aren’t concentrating on the subtitles at the bottom of the screen, emotion and inflection of the men and women on screen completely lost on gringos squinting at the small words.

One bad thing about using a novel to convey an actual event is that everything cannot be taken as fact. Alicia Gaspar de Alba, no matter how thoroughly she researched to give us an accurate picture of the characters in her novel, takes many liberties. For some characters, she takes real people and makes parodies of them, and with others, she completely fabricates them. Also, to function as a novel, there has to be a climax and resolution. The true nature of these murders does not come with a nifty ending that wraps up everything nicely. The Juárez murders create an unending mystery that cannot be solved. The last pages that quell your sense of uneasiness are giving you something that shouldn’t be there: satisfaction and peace of mind. Many of the families and friends of victims don’t have that luxury and to give the reader that is a dishonest portrayal. Señorita Extraviada does a much better job of letting the audience know that there is no definite answer when the narrator asks “Who is responsible? The Egyptian? The gangs? The bus drivers? The police?” The audience knows that no one really knows. It’s everyone and no one.

Señorita Extraviada: Missing Young Women is the most accurate and definitely most truthful of the two mediums. You are given the information pertaining to these crimes straight from the source. Many of these different perspectives do not coincide and the audience has to come up with a conclusion of their own, much like the citizens of Juárez. What the documentary lacks in actual emotional involvement of the viewer it makes up for in music and cinematography. There are sequences in which young women are walking slowly across the desert and it seems as if they are disappearing. When there aren’t interviews, there are lots of still shots of sad faces and silhouettes. Between the cheerless faces and the gloomy music it isn’t difficult to realize that this is a somber topic.

There are a few things that both the documentary and the novel include. They both have some sort of focal symbol. For the documentary, it’s more tangible: the pink blocks with black crosses that we see being painted on tree trunks and telephone poles. For the novel, it’s pennies. The main difference is the cross is used as a symbol of hope, or at least remembrance, whereas the pennies are not only a symbol of the expendability of women, they become advantageous clues to the killers. These symbols function as a catchphrase or slogan for the movement which is helpful in keeping the feminist message alive within the audience. Also, they delve into different perspectives other than the loss of a loved one. Desert Blood and Señorita Extraviada discuss police brutality. It’s not just the criminals who are the “bad guys,” the “good guys” are bad too. Portillo conveys this message through the interview she has with the woman who was raped by police. Gaspar de Alba uses the interaction between Ivon and her cousin with the judiciales. Although neither of these mediums directly accuse the police of being the perpetrators of the murders, they illustrate the corruption of the entire system and give the audience an idea of how hopeless it often is for families of missing young women.

Although I preferred the novel to the documentary for its entertainment value, I realized that I needed both to fully understand the complexity of these femicides. I am not familiar with the culture represented and, because of that, I didn’t understand many of the characters Gaspar de Alba uses to represent real people and actual occurrences. The documentary was helpful in distributing facts about certain people and instances that allowed me to better appreciate the novel. What it comes down to is the truth versus Truth. Sometimes it’s helpful to know facts, dates, and specific pieces of information. When much of that data is hard to relate to, it is often easier to find work that gives an audience a more personal point view.

This novel and documentary are helpful to our Community Action Project because it helped me to explore different ways to convey our message about female sexuality in the media to our audience. I now know what types of things I would like to do with our documentary in respect to the Portillo created. Both of these mediums also reinforced how important it is to inform people. There are too many men and women who do not even realize the extremity of issues that result in the oppression of women. These projects reiterate how important it is that I Wanna Be Like Britney gets its message across as well.

~Katie Frye