The Russian Federation Book

For the author, gender is an importunate motif underscoring many relationships in this society and without. Staudt heads up a far more adventurous path. Rather than falling into clichés that would otherwise relegate it to blogosphere protoanalysis, Staudt talks about femicide in Juarez as a tragedy in which governmental failure and civilian complicity on many levels have linked with profit to a conspiracy of silence unlike anything else in Mexico. Such fears have been expressed before, but rarely so passionately as they are in Activism.

Notions of female subservience captured in images like La Malinche, valid though quaint, are not clearly contextualized in either work, brave attempts notwithstanding. There is no denying there may be particularly sexist qualities in Mexican or Latin American culture. But while economic globalization is seen as a major source of Ciudad Juarez’s miseries, global systems of patriarchy are largely spared the same rebuke. As another University of Texas Press release, Drugs, Thugs, and Divas: Telenovelas and Narco-Dramas in Latin America by O. Hugo Benavides, acknowledges, popular culture plays on racialized notions of Mexican/Latin American men (and, by extension, Black men and men of color generally) as distinctly macho, brash and disrespectful of women in ways white men are not. This sort of positioning often occurs absent of history.

While Frantz Fanon astutely pointed out postcolonial societies without a strong understanding of race and class are doomed to repeat the mistakes of their colonial overseers, putting the proper context to thoughts that postcolonial societies are somehow more primitive in their approach to issues like gender misses the point of understanding dependency theory and cultural imperialism. Whiteness pervades Mexican culture as much as in any other postcolonial country, and its impact on race, class and gender is more forcefully thrashed out elsewhere.