Desert Blood: The Juarez Killing is a 2005 mystery story by author Alicia Gaspar de Alba based on the violence, kidnapping and murder that took place in Ciudad Juarez in 1998.
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Plot
Ivon Villa, a lesbian professor who lives in Los Angeles, returns to El Paso to adopt a baby boy from Cecilia, a Mexican maquiladora who lives across the border in Juarez, and attends a family reunion. However, in his horror, Cecilia dies in the desert, with her lulled baby, the victim of a murder epidemic of young women from southern Mexico emigrating north for better work. Things got worse when Ivel's sixteen-year-old sister, Irene, was kidnapped while attending an exhibition in Juarez. The search for his sister caused Ivon to find a frightening conspiracy involving everyone from the Border Patrol to the corrupt villain in Juarez.
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Character
- Ivon Villa : the story protagonist. She is a Hispanic lesbian woman who studied professors who decided to stay in El Paso after Cecilia's death for a horrific death research for her dissertation. He is hot angry and stubborn, especially driven by his mother's attitude towards him.
- Ximena : Ivon's cousin, a social worker living in Juarez, who arranges to meet with maquiladora for adoption. Accompany Ivon in his quest for Irene.
- Irene : Ivon's sixteen-year-old sister, was kidnapped while swimming in the Rio Grande. The swimming team captain and his class farewell speech, he's caught in a world of decadent child pornography.
- Father Francis : a pastor of Our Lady of Guadeloupe Church, he is the head of the Contra el Silencio a non-profit organization organized to speak out against violence against women, he also leads rasteros walk around Juarez to search for the missing corpse. Lila Villa and Irene, a very religious Catholic woman. She hates Ivon for being a lesbian, blaming for her husband's death for alcoholism.
- Raquel : Ivon's former lover (and Ximena at the moment), he runs an ESL school in Juarez. Accompanied Irene at the exhibition but later lost her. Afterwards, he helps Ivon find Irene, though her love is still there for her.
- Rubi Reyna : TV reporter from Juarez. Organizing an event called '' Mujeres Sin Fronteras '' a news program about the killings in Juarez.
- Pete McCuts : rookie detective with El Paso Police Department. He investigated Irene's kidnapping at the request of her father, a powerful judge. He then keeps Ivon at the top of the novel.
- Mireya : young barbers in Juarez looking for a better life. Just appeared in the POV chapter when he was accidentally kidnapped by J.W. His body was later discovered by Ivon and the others.
- JW : alias Chief Border Patrol Detention Officer Jeremy Wilcox, the Border Patrol agent Ivon originally met on a flight to El Paso at the beginning of the story, was actually declared the administrator of an extreme internet pornography website, which specializing in dirty films. He was killed at the end of the novel.
Themes
Some of the themes in this novel include poverty in Juarez, femicide, and especially corruption of government institutions on both sides of the border, such as the INS, and judicales. In his essay "Transfrontera Crime: Representation of Femicides Juarez on Fiction and Non-Fiction Accounts Recently," author Marietta Mesmer wrote, "Like Rodriguez and Portillo, Gaspar de Alba also shows that authorities on both sides of the border are active and direct involved in crimes "describes an incident in a book where police burned victims' clothes, and discussed the role of JW in a pornographic ring. Both sides benefited from the exploitation of Mexican women because of NAFTA: the US had them work in factories as maquiladoras, while the Mexicans exploited them for prostitution.
Along with this theme, Alba also touched the media's indifference and silence to report the killings, with American media failing to show that the victims are also young Mexican-American girls, wanting the reader to believe that it is just a Mexican Problem.
Another theme in the novel is the conservative Mexican gender role that exists throughout this novel, as Mexican authorities blame the women for being victims, for wearing makeup and looking nice. Author Irene Mata observes that "Young women who work for maquiladora are often represented in the media as loose, immoral lazy mujeres (bad women)." In looking at the theoretical construct of femicide, Julia MonÃÆ'¡rrez Fragoso points out that the social phenomena of crime against women and girls "is bound into a patriarchal system that affects, to a greater or lesser extent, that women are killed." This idea further extends to American girls as well, with the authorities blaming Irene for being kidnapped in the first place. The recurrent symbol in the novel is the phrase "So far from the Truth, So close to Jesus", showing Mexico in harmony with religion, but too chaotic to know the madness of murder.
Reception and rewards
The novel won the 2005 Lambda Literary Award for "The Best Lesbian Mystery" and the 2006 Latino Book Award for the Best English Mistery.
Many reviews were quite positive. In a review for San Antonio Current , Alejandro Perez writes that "As Gaspar de Alba points out through its graph, a disturbing description of the words and actions of the perpetrators, a climate that allows intense verbal and physical violence. against women encompassing all aspects of society, in Mexico and the US The part of his novel is shocking and disturbing, but this story must be shocking and disturbing, like a real-life horror story, if only to underline the conspiracy of silence surrounding the case. " Similarly, Darla Baker admired that "While not following the traditional detective genre, with a happy final resolution that links all the facts, Desert Blood finds some of the guilty parties and shows it is almost impossible to make a single culprit, and power relations understands: those who have the power to escape murder, and the poor have no choice but Gaspar de Alba holds, all members of modern society are responsible. "
References
External links
- Official website
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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