At a workshop today at El Colegio de la Fontera Norte, Juarexz, Mexico, on violence, gender and borders, CJRC researcher Professor Kerry Carrington from the School of Justice, Faculty of Law, will present her research on frontier violence, masculinity and femicide.
The presentation draws links between the machismo of violence on the mining frontier in outback Australia and the frontier violence on the contested border between Mexico and the United States. The territory was once Mexico’s, lost to the American’s in the 1840 Guadalupe-Hidalgo Treaty. Today that border between Juarez, Mexico and El Paso Texas is divided by a heavily guarded iron wall.
It is the site of considerable violence, between drug cartels, para military police and the systemic rape and murder of hundreds of young female maquiladora workers.
Juarez has many monuments in the memory of these women, but none that memoralise the deaths of thousands of young men. The paper explores the attractions of Maschismo to vulnerable men because it provides survival skills in an economy of drugs and arms smuggling.
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