Las Mujeres de Juarez

Las Mujeres de Juarez

Since 1993 about 400 young Mexican women have been/are missing or have been murdered in Juarez, Mexico. Many groups have formed and fought to end the violence on the border, but the government of Mexico, and the US have done nothing to control the situation.


Often it happens, the rite of passage for a woman
here is forgetting she is somebody’s baby
to make fast money
from the men across the border.
her body is a machine
that turns on at night.

You ask for trouble going out at night,
says la madre thinking of the young woman
whose body was stuffed in a washing machine
after she was beaten by the man who called her his baby.
The red tape still hangs around the boarded
laundry mat that used to eat her money.

Mamá, we need the money.
I can’t help what goes on at night.
La madre frets while she quilts a border
With the small and nimble fingers of a woman
on the blanket she is making for the baby.
Be home by daylight. That baby wakes like a machine.

Carmen loads the thread into the sewing machine
calculating exactly how much time for money
she will exchange for formula for her baby
who awakes from the sirens and gunshots at night
and his abuelita prays he doesn’t grow up to bully women
like a rooster enforces territory on a garden border.

On the sunny side of the border
nobody believes life is lived before a fevered machine
and on the pitch-black path home the woman
clasps a coin purse of money
and vanishes in the night
blown out like a feline sucking breath from a baby.

"Help us find our babies!"
las madres cry, "we can’t do nothing on this side of the border"
too many men turn crazy here at night,
smash their beer bottles and gamble on machines
cursing over their lost luck and money
blood-shot eyes and teeth seething by the factory for a woman.

An 18 year old woman six months with baby
traded money for a ride over the border
one punch—her jaw clacks like a machine hot in the night.