A Terrible Day in Juarez

As anyone who knows me is already aware, I have been doing research on the border city of Ciudad Juarez for over 7 years. As I sat tonight and worked on writing my prospectus concerning the relationship between femicide and the drug war, I received a Google alert telling me the latest news. Fifteen people were killed last night as gunmen stormed into a boy's 15th birthday party. I have posted the news story below to supply the necessary details of this massacre.

What the news didn't mention is that this is the second time that this has happened this year. I have seen footage of the protests that responded to that massacre of young people who were at a party celebrating a sports victory. A mother whose son had been shot stood on stage and told President Calderon (who was visiting at that time in response), "You are not welcome here." That woman was so brave, as are all of the residents who stay in Juarez despite the violence, kidnappings, uncertainty, and extortion.

In the past couple of years I have had the opportunity to spend a little bit of time at the border. I have not crossed over into Juarez because frankly, I am scared that I won't make it back alive. As many of my friends and colleagues have heard me say before, my dissertation is not worth dying over. No one is going to bronze my bust and place it in the halls of my university. Grad students die all the time in the field. No one remembers them and I don't care to be a statistic.

With all of that said (sorry for the digression), I have been able to spend time in El Paso and have met numerous people who are from Juarez, have family there, work there, have lived there, been educated there, and so forth. Juarez and El Paso are two sides of the same city that was once divided by the Rio Grande and later by political boundaries drawn during the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.

Why do I emphasize how many people I know from Juarez, you ask? Well, my heart breaks for these kind people. I first showed up in the borderlands less than a month after my father had suddenly passed away from a heart attack. I was a devastated mess with a research grant that had to be used or else (or else what I don't know). I came to the border with a camera, a tape recorder, a broken heart and tearful eyes. It was there that I have met the kindest, most giving people that I have ever known in my life. Following an interview with an activist nun, she innocently asked me where my parents were. When I broke down crying and let the sheath of my professionalism fly away in the hot El Paso sun, it was okay as she comforted me. I think that I told every person that I interviewed there what I had just experienced, and they expressed so much empathy.

Here I was receiving sympathy from people who have lost friends, family, colleagues and neighbors to senseless and uncontrollable violence. Other people might have scoffed at my one loss in the face of their losses, but not the borderfolk. They were the kindest people I have ever known and yet this continues to happen to them.

Someone please stop this violence.