A DYNAMO OF VIOLENT STORIES: READING THE FEMINICIDIOS OF CIUDAD JUÁREZ AS NARRATIVES by Roberto Ponce-Cordero Bachelor in History, Literature, and Media Theory, University of Hamburg, 2003 Master of Arts in Hispanic Languages and Literatures University of Pittsburgh, 2009 Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Hispanic Languages and Literatures University of Pittsburgh 2016 i UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH KENNETH P. DIETRICH SCHOOL OF ARTS AND SCIENCES DEPARTMENT OF HISPANIC LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES This dissertation was presented by Roberto Ponce-Cordero It was defended on December 8, 2016 and approved by Hermann Herlinghaus, Ph.D., University of Freiburg Juan Duchesne-Winter, Ph.D., University of Pittsburgh John Beverley, Ph.D., University of Pittsburgh Dissertation Director: Áurea María Sotomayor-Miletti, Ph.D., University of Pittsburgh ii Copyright © by Roberto Ponce-Cordero 2016 iii A DYNAMO OF VIOLENT STORIES: READING THE FEMINICIDIOS OF CIUDAD JUÁREZ AS NARRATIVES Roberto Ponce-Cordero, Ph.D. University of Pittsburgh, 2016 Over the past twenty-three years, several hundreds of women have been kidnapped, tortured and murdered with absolute impunity in Ciudad Juárez, an urban Moloch on the Mexican- American border. Because of these crimes, the city has become a symbol for all of what is wrong with globalization, transnational exploitation and the Latin American form of masculine domination known as machismo. Terms like femicidios or feminicidios have been coined in order to express that women, far from being this crime wave’s collateral damage, are rather their specific target, and that their sex is the factor that gives this vortex of violence its inner logic and coherence. For these crimes are, indeed, recurrently represented as a single crime wave that follows, moreover, an adamant logic. A myriad of different truths about and around that supposed logic has been elaborated by detectives, journalists, scholars, political activists, state officers, artists, social workers, etc. Both the crimes and the search for their logic have also appeared in prominent literary, musical, filmic and other cultural artifacts. My dissertation takes these multiple truths and these artifacts and analyzes them equally as narratives that are advanced to explain murderous violence against women and, in the process, acquire a life of their own by virtue of competing with each other, variously complementing each other, and being set in perpetual motion by a dynamo of violent stories that gyrates around the female corpses on the ground, clouding the access to said corpses and to the “facts” of their murders, ultimately constituting what I, throughout the text, will call the discourse on Ciudad Juárez. The goal of this dissertation is to map out this discourse, to iv examine the ways in which different, often contradictory stories are mobilized within it and obtain the status of “truth,” and to propose a perspective from which to look at the feminicidios of Ciudad Juárez without succumbing to the temptation to look for easy answers and for single, individual culprits and causes, coming to terms with the enormity and chaotic nature of the social phenomenon being described and with its fundamentally ungraspable character instead. v TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ..................................................................................................viii vi vii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS A text is always a collective effort, especially when it has taken one years –way more years, indeed, than one is eager to admit– to conceptualize, to turn around, to write and to rearrange, to rewrite. In the case of this dissertation, it is undoubtedly “mine,” but it would not be there at all, and much less in its present form, were it not for a series of persons who, through different kinds of interactions at different stages of the process of my developing and actually drafting the text, influenced my thinking, my writing and, ultimately, my life. As pretentious as it may sound, the first person I have to thank, in this context, is someone I have never met (I went to three of her concerts, though!) and do not really expect to meet, ever: without Tori Amos, I certainly would have heard about the feminicidios of Ciudad Juárez at some point, and I would pretty likely have become interested in them, but I probably would not have been passionate enough about the topic to decide to write a whole dissertation on it. For better or worse, then, her music, and particularly her song “Juarez,” kicked off the process that led to this text years before I entered the Ph.D. program at Pitt. The Department of Hispanic Languages and Literatures at Pitt deserves my deepest thanks, too, because the teaching fellowship awarded to me to be a part of its Ph.D. program made my current life possible, as well as this dissertation. Some professors at said department also helped me enormously, either by guiding my thoughts on the issue at hand, by inspiring me with their research about other topics, or by convincing me of my ability to even try to viii accomplish this when I needed convincing, which was way more often than I would have wanted and expected. Hermann Herlinghaus, John Beverley, and Juan Duchesne-Winter, who are all members of my dissertation committee, have been real role models for me, as scholars, and I am honored to count them as my friends. When I started conceiving this project, I received lots of input from Todd Reeser and from Giuseppina Mecchia, professors in the Department of French and Italian Languages and Literatures, and I hope that the final result fulfills their expectations. Joshua Lund, my original dissertation director, was a decisive figure in the process of this endeavor taking its form and of my own thinking becoming a little bit more focused and a little bit less free-styling. I owe him big time and could not have written this without his innumerable insights and suggestions. Last but not least, Áurea María Sotomayor-Miletti, my dissertation director, was the motivational force behind the completion of this project, and managed to push me to finish it in spite of my own resistance through a mixture of motivational techniques and sharp, challenging corrections and comments; I cannot thank her enough! My peers at Pitt, Gina Villamizar, Alejandra Canedo, Carolina Gainza, Jungwon Park, and César Zamorano, were both intellectual sparring partners who pointed at flaws in my arguments, thus helping me to improve –or discard– them, and dear friends who were always there for me when despair took over (this happened regularly) and when all that I needed, and all that was possible for me to do, was having a couple of beers instead of conducting academic research, or having some conversation about anything but feminicidio. My brother, Rafael Ponce-Cordero, who was also my peer at Pitt, belongs to this group, too, but deserves a special mention because blood is thick, of course, but also because he has been accompanying this process for more years than anyone else except for my aunt, Mariauxi Cordero, who is a scholar at Pitt, as well, and has always been there to help me and to put pressure on me in equal amounts. Thanks! ix Speaking of blood being thick, I have to thank my parents not only because they are, well, my parents, but also because they made this possible in a more concrete and direct sense: my father, by teaching me, at a very early age, how to argue, even when I am not quite sure of being completely right; and my mother, by raising me to fully believe in equality and by making a feminist out of me, if only by virtue of her great example. Finally, I want to thank my wife, Marcela, who is the person who has had to listen to my points about Ciudad Juárez, as well as to my excuses for not finishing the dissertation and to my doubts about even being capable to do so, over and over again, for years, without panicking or getting upset more than once or perhaps twice (maybe a couple of times more than twice). Rather than reacting that way more often, she has always offered me her unconditional love, patience, and support, and together we have had two beautiful, healthy children, Emiliano and his soon-to-be-born sister (name pending at the time I am writing these lines), who really are the reason I wake up every morning and are, in that sense, also to be blamed for this dissertation. ¡Gracias muchas! x Ponce-Cordero I. INTRODUCTION: THE TWILIGHT ZONE It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call the twilight zone. Rod Serling (The Twilight Zone)1 Over the past twenty-three years, several hundreds of women have been kidnapped, tortured and murdered with absolute impunity in Ciudad Juárez, an urban Moloch on the U.S.- Mexican border in which the industries of drug traffic, illegal migration and maquila production reign. Mainly because of these heinous crimes (albeit more recently also because 1 This is the opening narration for every episode of season 1 (1959) of the legendary television series The Twilight Zone, created –and narrated– by screenwriter Rod Serling. Not to be confused, here, with two later versions of a lesser quality, which were broadcasted from 1985 to 1989 and from 2002 to 2003, nor with the movie from 1983 with the same title, Serling’s The Twilight Zone, which lasted from 1959 to 1964, is generally considered a highly influential classic for the genres of film, television, and literary science fiction, mystery, and horror.