In this Issue of Voices of Mexico
Content

Our Voice

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Territories of Violence

Violence in Mexico
Organized Or Authorized Crime?
Óscar Badillo Pérez

One of the most tragic episodes in recent Mexican history took place in August 2010, at least 150 kilometers from the U.S. border: fifty-eight men and fourteen women, mostly from Central and South America, were brutally murdered in the border municipality of San Fernando, Tamaulipas, by an organized crime group. This ominous event, known as the “Massacre of 72,” was only one of the multiple acts of organized violence perpe-Strated against the civilian population in the border region during the so-called “war against drug trafficking.”

 

Necromasculinity
Sayak Valencia

In feminist studies, it is well known that gender models change with time and context, and that the desire to become part of those models is not a 100-percent free choice, but depends, rather, on intersectional relationships of hierarchy and exclusion. However, today, when violence has become the fundamental driving force of the economies of death, it is a priority to think about masculinity and its relationship to violence and crime not as a primary or essentialist condition, but with the understanding that masculinity, as a project that governs populations, impregnates state structures.

 

Feminicide, A “Normal” Crime
Mariana Berlanga Gayón

The battle to transform language is one of the characteristics of our era. The different feminisms existing in Mexico and the world show that. In recent years, we women have begun to take the floor after centuries of silence, or, rather, after having been repeatedly silenced. However, when we take the floor, we also change language. So, it is appropriate to ask what the power of words is. To what extent can the revolution in language cause changes in women’s reality?

Violence, Risking Writin About it
Marilu Rasso

What is written in a country where, on average, every day, ten women are the victims of feminicide for being women?
Ten women silenced by death. Ten men who murder ten women, showing, once again, the risk it is to be a woman and not do what is expected of them in a country where the levels of impunity and social complicity allow and reproduce normalized and naturalized violence.

 

Portrayal of Rape of Women
In Hollywood Fiction Films
Verónica Cervantes Vázquez

In 2017, the word “rape” began occupying an uncharacteristically prominent place in U.S. media. Why? We can trace it to a renewed outpouring of rage at the silence imposed on victims of sexual violence, which gathered strength in the context of protests that preceded Donald Trump’s election as president of the United States that very year.

 

Dead Bodies on Streets
Will Straw

On the back page of the February 12, 2023 edition of the Mexico City tabloid La Prensa, under the headline “¡A Sangra Fria!” (In Cold Blood!), a photo shows the body of a corpse lying in the middle of a street. The headline reads “¡A Sangra Fría!” The caption adds that this is the body of a man “shot to death” in the Mexico City district of Tultitlán.

 

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Art and Culture

From Personal Experiences
to Collaborative Art. Interview with María Ezcurra
Teresa Jiménez

Born in Argentina, raised in Mexico, and now living in Canada —specifically in Tiohtià:ke [Montréal]— the places where María Ezcurra has lived have left their permanent artistic and experiential imprint, driving her work. The body, gender, memory, identity, belonging, violence, and immigration stand among the topics that concern her, cause her pain, and have led her to investigate and experiment with an array of forms of expression, formats, and materials, almost all of them second-hand and carrying specific meanings.

 

 

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