Breaking the Silence
The Strange Case of an Eco-Cosmopolitan Chicana Detective
Abstract
This article analyzes the strange eco-cosmopolitan detective attributes of Ivon, the protagonist in Alicia Gaspar de Alba’s 2005 novel Desert Blood: The Juárez Murders. Through this willful, queer, and feminist mestiza character, who continually trespasses and transgresses cultural borders, Gaspar de Alba challenges the standards of crime fiction in numerous ways, as argued in this paper. Moreover, she also manages to expose the transnational dimension of the exploitation, mistreatment, and even murder of women in Ciudad Juárez. Simultaneously, Ivon’s eco-cosmopolitanism acknowledges how the expendability thinking of free trade that partly sanctions the murder of women, also results in the environmental degradation of, and the free flow of toxins and pollution in the border. Ultimately, Ivon’s strange, eco-cosmopolitan investigative traits, serve as the tools to break the silence and start confronting the feminicides in Ciudad Juárez as well as the socio-environmental exploitation of the US-Mexico border region, fostering a positive socio-environmental change.
Downloads
References
Ahmed, S. (2014). Willful Subjects. London: Duke University Press.
Ahmed, S. (2000). Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality. London: Routledge.
Anzaldúa, G. (2012). Borderlands/La Frontera. (4th ed.). San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books.
ASARCO. Company History. ASARCO, www.asarco.com/about-us/company-history/. Accessed 13 January, 2021.
Bauman, Z. (1995). Making and Unmaking of Strangers. Thesis Eleven, 43, 1-16.
---. (1988-1989). Strangers: The Social Construction of Universality and Particularity. Telos, 78, 7-42.
Caputi, J. & Russell, D. E. H. (1992). Femicide: Sexist Terrorism against Women. In J. Radford & D. E. H. Russel (Eds.), Femicide: The Politics of Woman Killing (pp. 13-21). Maidenhead: Open University Press.
Fregoso, R.-L. and Bejarano, C. (2010). Introduction: A Cartography of Feminicide in the Américas. In R.-L. Fregoso & C. Bejarano (Eds.), Terrorizing Women: Feminicide in the Americas (pp. 1-44). London: Duke University Press.
Funari, V. & de la Torre, S. (Directors). (2006). Maquilapolis: City of Factories [Film]. ITVS.
Gaspar de Alba, A. (2010). Poor Brown Female: The Miller’s Compensation for ‘Free’ Trade. In A. Gaspar de Alba & G. Guzmán (Eds.), Making a Killing: Femicide, Free Trade, and La Frontera (pp. 63-93). Austin: University of Texas Press.
Gaspar de Alba, A. 2005. Desert Blood: The Juárez Murders. Houston: Arte Publico Press.
Gaspar de Alba, A. & Guzmán, G. (2010). Feminicidio: The “Black Legend” of the Border. In A. Gaspar de Alba & G. Guzmán (Eds.), Making a Killing: Femicide, Free Trade, and La Frontera (pp. 1-22). Austin: University of Texas Press.
Gavin, A. E. (2010). Feminist Crime Fiction and Female Sleuths. In C. J. Rzepka & L. Horsley (Eds.), A Companion to Crime Fiction (pp. 258-269). Chichester: John Wiley and Sons. doi: 10.1002/9781444317916
Heise, U. (2008). Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Jiroutová Kynčlová, T. (2019). Woman Killing and Adoption in Alicia Gaspar de Alba’s Desert Blood: The Juárez Murders (2005). Ex-centric Narratives: Journal of Anglophone Literature, Culture and Media, 3, 76-92. eISSN: 2585-3538. Retrieved from ejournals.lib.auth.gr/ExCentric/article/view/7550
Kinsman, M. (2010). Feminist Crime Fiction. In C. R. Nickerson The Cambridge Companion to American Crime Fiction (pp. 148-62). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lagarde y de los Ríos, M. (2010). Preface: Feminist Keys for Understanding Feminicide. Theoretical, Political, and Legal Construction. In R.-L. Fregoso & C. Bejarano (Eds.), Terrorizing Women: Feminicide in the Americas (pp. xi-xxv). London: Duke University Press.
López-Lozano, M. (2010). Women in the Global Machine: Patrick Bard’s La Frontera, Carmen Galán Benitez’s Tierra Marchita, and Alicia Gaspar de Alba’s Desert Blood. In H. Domínguez-Ruvalcaba & I. Corona (Eds.), Gender Violence at the U.S.-Mexico Border: Media Representation and Public Response (pp. 128-53). Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
Maloof, J. (2006). Review of Alicia Gaspar de Alba (2005). Desert Blood: The Juarez Murders. Arte Publico Press. Latino Studies, 4(1-2), 184-85.
Marotta, V. P. (2010). The Cosmopolitan Stranger. In S. van Hooft & W. Vandekerckhove (Eds.), Questioning Cosmopolitanism (pp. 105-20). Springer. Doi: 10.1007/978-90-481-8704-1_7.
Martín Junquera, I. (2012). “Muchachas del Sur:” Ecofeminism and the Murder of the Next Generation at the Border. In P. Coleman & S. Matterson (Eds.), ‘Forever young?’: The Changing Images of America (pp. 241-250). Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter.
Mata, I. (2010 ). Writing on the Walls: Deciphering Violence and Industrialization in Alicia Gaspar De Alba's Desert Blood. MELUS, 35(3), 15–40. Retrieved from JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/25750713
Messmer, M. (2012). Transfrontera Crimes: Representations of the Juárez Femicides in Recent Fictional and Non-Fictional Accounts. American Studies Journal, 57. Retrieved 22 January, 2021 from www.asjournal.org/57-2012/transfrontera-crimes/#. doi: 10.18422/57-03.
Ms. About Ms. Retrieved November 2020 from msmagazine.com/about/
Peña, D. G. (1997). The Terror of the Machine. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Pérez, L. (2015). Subjects of Terror: The Ethical Impulse in Alicia Gaspar de Alba's Desert Blood. Chicana/Latina Studies, 15(1), 88-108. Retrieved from JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/43943382.
Pérez Ramos, M. I. (2020). Eco-Cosmopolitan Strangers: Migration, Toxicity, and Vulnerability in the Us-Mexico Border through a Revision of Lucha Corpi’s Cactus Blood. Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses, 81, 43-59. ISSN: e-2530-8335. doi: 10.25145/j.recaesin.2020.81.04
Radford, J. (1992). Introduction. In J. Radford & D. E. H. Russel (Eds.), Femicide: The Politics of Woman Killing (pp. 3-12). Maidenhead: Open University Press.
Ramirez-Dhoore, D. (2010) Dissecting Environmental Racism: Redirecting the Toxic in Alicia Gaspar de Alba’s Desert Blood and Helena Maria Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus. In A. T. Kane (Ed.), The Natural World in Latin American Literatures: Ecocritical Essays on Twentieth Century Writings (pp. 175-195). Jefferson: McFarland.
Rodríguez, R. E. (2005). Brown Gumshoes: Detective Fiction and the Search for Chicana/o Identity. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Rodríguez Álvarez, A. (2019). Emotional geographies, strangers and mobilities in the urban crime fiction of Denise Mina and Louise Welsh. Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation, University of Oviedo, Spain.
Simmel, G. (1964a). The Quantitative Aspect of the Group. In K. Wolff (Ed.), The Sociology of Georg Simmel (pp. 87-174). Glencoe: The Free Press of Glencoe.
---. (1964b). The Stranger. In K. Wolff (Ed.), The Sociology of Georg Simmel (402-408). Glencoe: The Free Press of Glencoe.
Snell, M. B. (2006). Going for Broke: How a copper giant plans to make the public pay for its toxic mess. Sierra Magazine. Retrieved December 2020 from vault.sierraclub.org/sierra/200605/goingforbroke/page1.asp#top
Tani, S. (1984) The Doomed Detective. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
Villagran, L. (2016). Before Flint, Before East Chicago, There Was Smeltertown. Natural Resources Defense Council. Retrieved December 2020 from www.nrdc.org/onearth/flint-east-chicago-there-was-smeltertown
Walton, P. L. & Jones, M. (1999). Detective Agency: Women Rewriting the Hard-Boiled Tradition. London: University of California Press.
Walton, J. L. & Walton, S. (2018). Introduction to Green Letters: Crime Fiction and Ecology. Green Letters, 22(1), 2-6. doi: 10.1080/14688417.2018.1484628
Washington Valdez, D. (2006). Harvest of Women: Safari in Mexico. Burbank: Peace at the Border.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
The works published in this journal are subject to the following terms:
1. The Publications Services at the University of Murcia (the publisher) retains the property rights (copyright) of published works, and encourages and enables the reuse of the same under the license specified in item 2.
2. The works are published in the electronic edition of the magazine under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial Share Alike 4.0.
3.Conditions of self-archiving. Authors are encouraged to disseminate pre-print (draft papers prior to being assessed) and/or post-print versions (those reviewed and accepted for publication) of their papers before publication, because it encourages distribution earlier and thus leads to a possible increase in citations and circulation among the academic community.
RoMEO color: green
