Brainstorm 5 - Haleh Mawson

I was not really prepared for Señorita Extraviada. I knew about the killings in Juarez, but distantly, mixed in with the din of all the other massacres that occur worldwide and far from my home. This is my first thought.

In the film, the families of the missing girls are shown holding photos of the deceased. Their stance at times resembles a family portrait, like they're all together in some way still. But then, too, there are photos taken with them as models, the ones that are described as a possible way for the killers to pick their victims. And there is the photo Charles Bowden keeps in his desk, "a wooden mask" that he apparently likes to gawk over (Fregoso 16). For those who love and remember the dead, photos are a way to cherish their memory and stay strong against a culture of violence. For others, the photos and the young women are essentially similar, pretty and interesting and all too easy to burn up and throw away.

Fregoso lays the blame for these killings not on the state or global capitalism, but on all those individuals and institutions who exploit and exterminate those without power. This can include the state and the structures of global capitalism, but she argues that an overemphasis on any one cause can erase the humanity of the deceased and render them twice-over commodified, used, and discarded.

-Haleh