Staging Femicide/Confronting Reality: Negotiating Gender and Representation in Las Mujeres de Juárez

Abstract

Focusing on the maquiladora system and the cases of femicide that continue to take place on the U.S.-Mexican border, this paper asks how theatre, in performance and as dramatic literature, can be employed in the form of "staged narrative" to explore human rights violations around the world. I will use Anzaldúa's transfronterista feminist lens, Saldaña's qualitative research framework for ethnodrama, and a feminist view of Brechtian performance theories, in an attempt to unpack some of the gender-based violence issues that seem to be causing the city of Ciudad Juárez to implode on itself. Using Las Mujeres de Juárez by Rubén Amavizca, I hope to reinforce Arriola's conclusion that "[i]n general, what can be said about the maquiladora system is that it is hardly a humane system of employment and hardly something the knowing United States citizen would want to support" (809).