Ciudad Juárez

I have a small identity crisis every time I am asked where I’m from. My first instinct is to say I’m American. However, I always struggle to say it because of how I look. I’m not your average blue eyed and blonde haired American; I’m your brown eyed, brown haired, and tan skinned American that lives right by the border and is always asked to be a translator. One thing I failed to mention, I can only say about three phrases in Spanish. It’s hard to believe that my first words were in Spanish. It’s even harder to believe that I could speak it fluently as kid. I could carry out conversations with my grandparents and speak to my nanny about what I wanted to be when I grew up. However, after I started Pre-school almost all of that went away. What I was once fluent in, now became a “broken” language to me. To be completely honest, it didn’t bother me that I wasn’t fluent in Spanish anymore. I liked surprising people with my very American accent and my American way of speaking Spanish because they didn’t expect it. To them, I was someone who may have grown up with English as my second language, which wasn’t entirely wrong, and have a hard time with it. I was in third grade when I realized this. I couldn’t hear the substitute from where I was sitting so I raised my hand for help and she looked at me and started to speak to me in Spanish to help me understand what was going on. Now you can only imagine how much more confusing this was to me. I…

focus on the women’s voice on the issue, and they argued that they were limited by the pool they were allowed to choose subjects from, which involved groups that were a part of the Gente a favor de gente project. They stated it would be advisable for future studies to broaden their focus to as many subjects from varying statuses and factors as possible. D. Terminology List • Gente a favor de gente- A non-profit organization with the mission to help and support marginal areas of Ciudad Juarez,…

It was a vacation tip my parents where planning for about two or three months. I would just hear them talk about how the weather was going to be nice, see long time family members, see a different atmosphere, and enjoy eat a lot of food. Everything seems like a perfected vacation. I thought we were going to go to Houston Texas, or San Francisco California. I was completely wrong we were going to Mexico! I could not believe it Mexico. I asked my parents why there? Did they not love their children…

Sicario, a thriller starring Emily Blunt, Benicio Del Toro, and Josh Brolin, opened in theaters nationwide this week to warm reviews, as well as controversy. Sicario finds Kate Macer (Blunt), a straight-laced F.B.I. agent thrown into a world of high-intensity, life-or-death scenarions, as she ahs been recruited into a cartel-busting task force led by Matt Graver (Brolin), and associate Alejandro (Del Toro), who are at the opposite end of the personality spectrum from Macer; they are unorthodox…

Exactly, who is El Chapo? Why is his name provoking fear and admiration in Mexico? Joaquín Archivaldo Guzmán Loera, or known as “El Chapo (Shorty) Guzmán” for his 5 feet 6 inches stature, despite not being well-known by most Americans, is the head of the El Chapo Sinaloa Cartel, currently the biggest drug empire in the history. Over the years, he has built a corporate that makes him billions of dollars from selling synthetic drugs such as: marijuana, cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamine. In…

Intro and Thesis: In the Reading of “A Living Call” by Rafael, Luévano he depicted in Mexico the hundreds of women who have gone missing or have been murdered by men. The main cause of this is globalization, which created that NAFTA put our factories in Mexico for cheap labor. This caused women to go to these areas for jobs, but live in slums outside of the factories. Another cause is the lack of law enforcement, because most are dealing with the drug trafficking which causes them to oversee…

States President George H.W. Bush, Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, and Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney signed the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA. What many are not familiar with is how Texas border cities with Mexico, particularly the borderland of El Paso, TX, and Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, saw a significant increase in gender violence after the signing of NAFTA. Since the early 1990’s to the early 2000’s, Ciudad Juárez became the central stage for the most…

only a handful of identifications had been made, but they were enough to send 6 military officers to prison. This group, led by Snow and his expertise, helped create a protocol for gathering evidence that was non-existent. Bulldozers were often used in unearthing Argentine mass graves, destroying and mixing whatever remains were available. Doretti worked on desaparecidos’ remains for years to come. In fact, some of the evidence she collected is still moving through the legal system today. She…