ABSTRACT
Chapter 5 turns its attention to writing, selecting three case studies from the corpus of written texts on feminicidio: the mystery novel Desert Blood: The Juárez Murders by Chicana writer Alicia Gaspar de Alba, which is examined alongside the much less known, but equally intriguing, Ciudad final [Final City] by author and academic Kama Gutier. I bookend the discussion of these two texts with an appraisal of the collaboratively assembled text, El silencio que la voz de todas quiebra [The silence that breaks the voice of all women], and one of the first written texts about the feminicidal crime wave that erupted in Ciudad Juárez in the early 1990s. All of the writers considered in the chapter are activists in the sense that they seek out social and political change at the same time as they craft their creative responses to the crimes. Indeed, their texts shed light on the blurred boundaries between art and activism, exposing the limits of writing as well as its power. I will explore the texts’ function of ‘making visible’ [visibilizar]; not just in terms of naming and re-humanizing the victims of the crimes but also in terms of their revelation of those structural layers that make the violence possible. The reliance on hybridity in the texts further showcases the need to go beyond traditional generic boundaries to identify more fluid ways of moving between these structural layers. In the texts’ symbolic investment in making the crimes visible, they are located within a wider panorama of much current writing in Mexico about violence including that of Cristina Rivera Garza. In the final section, reading through Rivera Garza’s reflections on writing as a response to pain and her innovative rethinking of the role of the Mexican writer working from a ‘wounded place’ (2015), I ask how these texts might form part of her wider envisioning of comunalidad.
