The Little Old Lady Killer

The Little Old Lady Killer
Author: Susana Vargas Cervantes
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 279
Release: 2019-08-20
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1479876488

The surprising true story of Mexico’s hunt, arrest, and conviction of its first female serial killer For three years, amid widespread public outrage, police in Mexico City struggled to uncover the identity of the killer responsible for the ghastly deaths of forty elderly women, many of whom had been strangled in their homes with a stethoscope by someone posing as a government nurse. When Juana Barraza Samperio, a female professional wrestler known as la Dama del Silencio (the Lady of Silence), was arrested—and eventually sentenced to 759 years in prison—for her crimes as the Mataviejitas (the little old lady killer), her case disrupted traditional narratives about gender, criminality, and victimhood in the popular and criminological imagination. Marshaling ten years of research, and one of the only interviews that Juana Barraza Samperio has given while in prison, Susana Vargas Cervantes deconstructs this uniquely provocative story. She focuses, in particular, on the complex, gendered aspects of the case, asking: Who is a killer? Barraza—with her “manly” features and strength, her career as a masked wrestler in lucha libre, and her violent crimes—is presented, here, as a study in gender deviance, a disruption of what scholars call mexicanidad, or the masculine notion of what it means to be Mexican. Cervantes also challenges our conception of victimhood—specifically, who “counts” as a victim. The Little Old Lady Killer presents a fascinating analysis of what serial killing—often considered “killing for the pleasure of killing”—represents to us.

The Palgrave Handbook of Criminology and the Global South

The Palgrave Handbook of Criminology and the Global South
Author: Kerry Carrington
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 1061
Release: 2018-01-12
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3319650211

The first comprehensive collection of its kind, this handbook addresses the problem of knowledge production in criminology, redressing the global imbalance with an original focus on the Global South. Issues of vital criminological research and policy significance abound in the Global South, with important implications for South/North relations as well as global security and justice. In a world of high speed communication technologies and fluid national borders, empire building has shifted from colonising territories to colonising knowledge. The authors of this volume question whose voices, experiences, and theories are reflected in the discipline, and argue that diversity of discourse is more important now than ever before. Approaching the subject from a range of historical, theoretical, and social perspectives, this collection promotes the Global South not only as a space for the production of knowledge, but crucially, as a source of innovative research and theory on crime and justice. Wide-ranging in scope and authoritative in theory, this study will appeal to scholars, activists, policy-makers, and students from a wide range of social science disciplines from both the Global North and South, including criminal justice, human rights, and penology.

Ciudad Juárez

Ciudad Juárez
Author: Oscar J. Martínez
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Total Pages: 345
Release: 2018-03-27
Genre: History
ISBN: 0816538190

Juárez is no ordinary city. Its history is exhilarating and tragic. Part of the state of Chihuahua and located on the border with the United States opposite El Paso, Texas, Juárez has often captured the world’s attention in dramatic fashion. In Ciudad Juárez: Saga of a Legendary Border City, Oscar J. Martínez provides a historical overview of the economic and social evolution of this famous transnational urban center from the 1848 creation of the international boundary between Mexico and the United States to the present, emphasizing the city’s deep ties to the United States. Martínez also explores major aspects of the social history of the city, including cross-border migration, urbanization, population growth, living standards, conditions among the city’s workers, crime, and the circumstances that led to the horrendous violence that catapulted Juárez to the top rung of the world’s most violent urban areas in the early twenty-first century. In countless ways, the history of Juárez is the history of the entire Mexican northern frontier. Understanding how the city evolved provides a greater appreciation for the formidable challenges faced by Mexican fronterizos and yields vital insights into the functioning of borderland regions around the world.

More or Less Dead

More or Less Dead
Author: Alice Driver
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Total Pages: 222
Release: 2015-03-26
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0816531161

In Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, people disappear, their bodies dumped in deserted city lots or jettisoned in the unforgiving desert. All too many of them are women. More or Less Dead analyzes how such violence against women has been represented in news media, books, films, photography, and art. Alice Driver argues that the various cultural reports often express anxiety or criticism about how women traverse and inhabit the geography of Ciudad Juárez and further the idea of the public female body as hypersexualized. Rather than searching for justice, the various media—art, photography, and even graffiti—often reuse victimized bodies in sensationalist, attention-grabbing ways. In order to counteract such views, local activists mark the city with graffiti and memorials that create a living memory of the violence and try to humanize the victims of these crimes. The phrase “more or less dead” was coined by Chilean author Roberto Bolaño in his novel 2666, a penetrating fictional study of Juárez. Driver explains that victims are “more or less dead” because their bodies are never found or aren’t properly identified, leaving families with an uncertainty lasting for decades—or forever. The author’s clear, precise journalistic style tackles the ethics of representing feminicide victims in Ciudad Juárez. Making a distinction between the words “femicide” (the murder of girls or women) and “feminicide” (murder as a gender-driven event), one of her interviewees says, “Women are killed for being women, and they are victims of masculine violence because they are women. It is a crime of hate against the female gender. These are crimes of power.”

Ultra-Intensity Patriarchy

Ultra-Intensity Patriarchy
Author: Menara Guizardi
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2021-10-19
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3030857506

This book analyzes the experiences of women living and working across the busiest and most transited frontier in South America, the Paraná Tri-Border Area (TBA), between Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay. From a feminist approach, it shows how, in these territories, the gender violence is intensified, configuring an expression of ultra-intensity patriarchy. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted for two years along with Paraguayan women living and working between Ciudad del Este (Paraguay), and Foz de Iguazú (Brazil), the authors analyze, on the one hand, the intricate connection between gender violence and ethnicity on these borders; and, on the other hand, the persistence of a female care that appears to offer a fundamental tool of resistance, of vital female drive. The work is divided into three parts. The first is intended to read like a trip to this complex and fascinating corner of South America through a visual and ethnohistoric journey of the region, as well as a theoretical debate that defines gender violence and its particular condensation on border territories. The second part explores the women’s stories in-depth and follow the narrative thread of their biographies, rebuilding their experiences from their families of origin to their productive insertion on the TBA. Finally, the third part takes an in-depth look at the complex links between the social reproduction obligations that fall on women, and the gender violence on the TBA, stressing how they develop strategies to change their life conditions by establishing transborder circuits of care. Ultra-Intensity Patriarchy: Care and Gender Violence on the Paraná Tri-Border Area will be a valuable tool for researchers from different disciplines, such as anthropology, sociology, population studies and gender studies, interested in the growing field of studies of feminism, borders, and migration from an intersectional perspective.

The Force of Witness

The Force of Witness
Author: Rosa-Linda Fregoso
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 170
Release: 2023-02-27
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1478024380

In The Force of Witness Rosa-Linda Fregoso examines the contra feminicide movement in Mexico and other feminist efforts to eradicate gender violence. Drawing on interviews, art, documentaries, and her years of activism, Fregoso traces the micro and macro scales of misogyny and the patterns of state complicity with gender violence. She shows how different forms of witnessing—from activist-mothers’ bearing witness to the memories of their daughters and expert witnesses in court cases to communal witnessing and a scholar-activist-citizen witnessing her own actions—are key to resisting feminicidal violence. Fregoso situates these forms of witness in the histories, contexts, structures, bodies, and intersectional struggles they emerge from. By outlining the complexities of feminicidal violence in relation to witnessing processes, Fregoso challenges the notion of witness as an individual or autonomous subject inscribed solely in the legal or religious arenas. Rather, she theorizes witness as a force of collectivity and a constellation of multiple social locations and intersectional practices that work together to abolish feminicidal violence.

Frontera Madre(hood)

Frontera Madre(hood)
Author: Cynthia Bejarano
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Total Pages: 471
Release: 2024-09-17
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 081654669X

The topic of mothers and mothering transcends all spaces, from popular culture to intellectual thought and critique. This collection of essays bridges both methodological and theoretical frameworks to explore forms of mothering that challenge hegemonic understandings of parenting and traditional notions of Latinx womxnhood. It articulates the collective experiences of Latinx, Black, and Indigenous mothering from both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. Thirty contributors discuss their lived experiences, research, or community work challenging multiple layers of oppression, including militarization of the border, border security propaganda, feminicides, drug war and colonial violence, grieving and loss of a child, challenges and forms of resistance by Indigenous mothers, working mothers in maquiladoras, queer mothering, academia and motherhood, and institutional barriers by government systems to access affordable health care and environmental justice. Also central to this collection are questions on how migration and detention restructure forms of mothering. Overall, this collection encapsulates how mothering is shaped by the geopolitics of border zones, which also transcends biological, sociological, or cultural and gendered tropes regarding ideas of motherhood, who can mother, and what mothering personifies. Contributors Elva M. Arredondo Cynthia Bejarano Bertha A. Bermúdez Tapia Margaret Brown Vega Macrina Cárdenas Montaño Claudia Yolanda Casillas Luz Estela (Lucha) Castro Marisa Elena Duarte Taide Elena Sylvia Fernández Quintanilla Paula Flores Bonilla Judith Flores Carmona Sandra Gutiérrez Ma. Eugenia Hernández Sánchez Irene Lara Leticia López Manzano Mariana Martinez Maria Cristina Morales Paola Isabel Nava Gonzales Olga Odgers-Ortiz Priscilla Pérez Silvia Quintanilla Moreno Cirila Quintero Ramírez Felicia Rangel-Samponaro Coda Rayo-Garza Shamma Rayo-Gutierrez Marisol Rodríguez Sosa Brenda Rubio Ariana Saludares Victoria M. Telles Michelle Téllez Marisa S. Torres Edith Treviño Espinosa Mariela Vásquez Tobon Hilda Villegas

Listening to Sicarios

Listening to Sicarios
Author: Arturo Chacón Castañón
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 129
Release: 2022-02-28
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3030941183

Listening to Sicarios presents new insights into the lives of paid assassins of Mexico’s drug trafficking syndicates from the perspectives of the assassins themselves. Based on an extraordinary series of ethnographic interviews carried out in the wake of the record levels of narcoviolence experienced in Ciudad Juárez between 2008 and 2012, this study analyzes the ways in which these young men interpret their actions across four key thematic axes: border infrastructures, youth and responsibility, masculinity and sentiment, and ethics: good vs. evil. It argues that sicarios follow a career path within a criminal corporate infrastructure that is especially robust in Mexican border cities. It also explores how sicarios understand youthful innocence in relation to adult accountability in the realm of violence that is frequently meted out by young men on other young men. It then analyzes sicarios’ expressions of feelings of power that may boost their sense of virility, as well as feelings of fear and regret that imply weakness. Finally, it examines how sicarios defend their personal integrity in the face of a public discourse that views their acts as savage.

Call the Mothers

Call the Mothers
Author: Shaylih Muehlmann
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 261
Release: 2024-09-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 0520314573

A gripping portrait of the relentless women taking missing persons, kidnapping, and extortion cases into their own hands—and building a movement for one another. In this riveting exploration of the lives of mothers whose children are among the 100,000 disappeared in Mexico’s war on drugs, Shaylih Muehlmann shows how families have mobilized on the ground to get answers and justice. It is often mothers who confront government corruption, indifference, and incompetence by taking on the responsibilities of searching for missing persons and dealing with kidnapping and extortion cases. In bringing the voices of these women to the fore, Muehlmann demonstrates how the war on drugs affects everyday life in Mexico and how these activists have become detectives, forensic specialists, and even negotiators with drug traffickers. Call the Mothers provides a unique look at a grassroots movement that draws from the symbolic power of motherhood to build a network of collectives that redefine traditional gender roles and challenge injustice and impunity.

Handbook of Research on Digital Violence and Discrimination Studies

Handbook of Research on Digital Violence and Discrimination Studies
Author: Özsungur, Fahri
Publisher: IGI Global
Total Pages: 837
Release: 2022-04-08
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1799891887

Digital violence continues to increase, especially during times of crisis. Racism, bullying, ageism, sexism, child pornography, cybercrime, and digital tracking raise critical social and digital security issues that have lasting effects. Digital violence can cause children to be dragged into crime, create social isolation for the elderly, generate inter-communal conflicts, and increase cyber warfare. A closer study of digital violence and its effects is necessary to develop lasting solutions. The Handbook of Research on Digital Violence and Discrimination Studies introduces the current best practices, laboratory methods, policies, and protocols surrounding international digital violence and discrimination. Covering a range of topics such as abuse and harassment, this major reference work is ideal for researchers, academicians, policymakers, practitioners, professionals, instructors, and students.