Gulf News recently published a story on Mexican narco wives (check out the picture). ¨Narco-¨ is a prefix that continues to gain currency in international news about Mexico, but the recent outburst of reporting around narco wives is particularly interesting in terms of how women are portrayed in relation to el narcotráfico. Certainly, there has been reporting around Mexican women and drug trafficking, but the Gulf News story offers a particularly egregious (not to mention garish) depiction of Mexican women. After describing the ascension of Sinaloan beauty pageant winners into the highest levels of narco life, the article ends curiously saying that ¨these women become untouchable.¨ What, exactly, is it about these women that makes them untouchable? Who determines what can and cannot be touched? The article is about, well, women, right? It says so in the title. However, no women´s voices are recounted in the story, and their supposed choice to enter narcodom is the only piece of information that hints at an agentic existence. In fact, the article reduces the wives to silenced beauties or narco arm charms, at best.  Still, the last word lingers uneasily: untouchable. If they cannot be touched, what does it mean to be touched?

Amidst these women´s secluded yet treacherous lives, Mexico, which was recently named a potential failed state, ¨is fighting for its survival against narco-terrorism”. As organized crime dominants headlines about Mexico, los narcotraficantes are not the only ones making money in Mexico; the empires of Carlos Slim, who controls most of Mexico´s telecommunications and is the second richest man in the world, and Walmart, which owns multiple supermarkets and cheap restaurants in Mexico, continue to boom. While international news would have us think that Mexico is full of narcos running wild, women, especially those in urban and suburban areas, perform the quotidian chores required to maintain their households and take care of their families. Filing through grocery stores with their children, middle, lower, and working class women finger through cilantro, t-shirts, packages of Wonder tortillas, bottles of Ajax. When the women return home, either they or domestic workers, who are overwhelmingly underpaid women, sort through and wash carefully selected produce and clean the house. Indeed, the Mexican household hardly goes a day without encountering in some way the effects of the decisions of Slim, Walmart, narcotraficantes, and México-U.S. policies.

From narco nails to the price of tortillas, Mexican women continue to navigate shifting geographies of consumerism, security, and survival that shape the contours of the global household.

(Photo Credit: Women’s UN Report Network)

Refugees have been in the news a lot lately. The strikes on Gaza offer one of the most prominent and horrifying examples happening right now.  Zimbabweans fleeing the Mugabe regime, often classified as economically displaced, fall under the category of ¨refugee¨ in mainstream reporting. The U.S. occupation of Iraq has led to the displacement of millions of individuals and families, creating a massive refugee crises in which over 4 million have left their homes to find refuge in other parts of Iraq, Syria, Jordan, or other neighboring countries. Reporters cover humanitarian crises in Darfur, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Chad, Georgia . . . and the list continues. Given this broad naming of displaced individuals around the world as refugee, it would appear that all of these groups fall similarly under the category of refugee, although the historical and geopolitical contexts are markedly different. 

This undifferentiated category of refugee seems to pop up, well, everywhere.

After reading a recent article in The Nation about New Orleans and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, referenced in Dan Moshenberg´s recent post, I was caught off guard by A.C. Thompson´s mention of refugees.  Recounting race-specific violence following the storm, Thompson says, ¨Facing an influx of refugees, the residents of Algiers Point could have pulled together food, water and medical supplies for the flood victims.¨ Refugee is just sort of slipped in there, no? Indeed, refugee became the contentious, yet popular, way of identifying displaced New Orleanians following the storm.  However, while Thompson takes on the very important task of discussing forgetten histories of extreme white on black urban violence, he refers to the refugees rather nonchalantly.  Information about where the refugees came from and why they might have fallen into the category of refugee remains curiously absent. Moreover, his portrayal of New Orleans is decidedly male, or at least male-normative, as all of the active players in the article are men. As we continue to remember Hurricane Katrina, we must ask the following question that few critics taken into consideration: where were/are New Orleanian women displaced by the storm, the majority of whom were poor and black? How did refugeeness following the storm differ along the lines of race, class, gender, location, age, and ability?

It is the frequent, unspecific, and gender-neutral use of the label refugee that concerns me.  While the United Nations and individual nations maintain their respective legal definitions of refugee status, the name is used all too frequently in reporting about conflict and disaster to describe those who are victimized and desperately in need of aid, often perceived as coming from the largesse of the West.  It seems that refugees, whether considered to be economic, political, religious, or otherwise, remain largely nameless, faceless, and desperately in need of help.  

One of the most curious examples I have recently seen is the labeling of refugees fleeing Ciudad Juarez and moving to El Paso.  According to Alfredo Corchado of the The Dallas Morning News, Senator Eliot Shapleigh says, “Just like the good people of Houston took in the refugees from New Orleans, El Pasoans will also help the refugees from Juárez.¨ Similar to Thompson´s portrayal of Algiers Point, all of the active players in the El Paso-Ciudad Juarez area are men. Given the use of label refugee to describe crises around the world and the increasingly high levels of femicide in Ciudad Juarez, this portrayal of ¨refugee¨ as narco-economic, male migrant is painfully shortsighted and disturbingly problematic.  

In the majority of representations of mass displacement, the situations of women, especially women of color, remain obscured.  These women, the third world `others´ lost in the traffic of disaster, conflict, and humanitarianism, exist outside of and below public intelligibility and political recognition. Given current reporting practices concerning refugees, especially those circulating in the U.S. public sphere, these feminized groups remain largely un-trackable and unspeakable.

(Photo Credit: CNN)