Art is largely powerless against evil.
This point is likely to plague more than a few visitors to the touring exhibition, Mujeres de Juarez: Art Against Crime, at the Nevada State Museum. Certainly the aim of the exhibition, organized by the bi-national artists collective Viejaskandalosas and presented by the Hispanic Museum of Nevada, is honorable: to draw attention to the mostly unsolved murders of more than 320 young women over the last decade. If the roughly 40 paintings, sculptures, photographs and mixed-media works in the exhibition manage to accomplish what others have failed to do so far, we should all rejoice.
But intensive investigations on both sides of the border, including those of Amnesty International, the El Paso Times and the Orange County Register, have only amplified the anguish of the victims' families, who find themselves stumped by a justice system that is by turns incompetent, negligent or potentially complicit. The murdered women were mostly from poor families and worked at the maquiladoras, or factories, that pack the city just south of El Paso. Many were abducted and sexually brutalized for days before their bodies were disposed of in wastelands.
Several works in the exhibition merely seek to record the pitiful nature of the crimes, such as "El Eterno Femenino," an embossed and painted metal piece by Michoacàn artist Ruben Chuela, depicting a woman's body in a scarred landscape. "Intolerancia," by Lourdes Huerta of Baja California, is a large-scale notebook page inscribed with names and folded into an origami crane. (It might be ceramic, but no medium is identified with any of the works here.) A few pieces broadly hint that the poverty and powerlessness of the women lies behind both their deaths and presumed cover-ups. Jose Feria's "Es Sólo Mujer / It's Only Another Woman," for instance, presents a surreal figure tied, stabbed and distorted by hooks.
Other works point fingers, perhaps an inevitability in the case of a mass crime which has frustrated investigators at nearly every turn. With the murderers unknown, or at least unpursued, the target shifts to putative underlying causes. Crosses are plentiful, possibly implicating the Catholic Church or raising the age-old question of why God allows such horrors. A plastic sacred-heart figure of Jesus is blindfolded by plastic strips, binding it to a shrine-like assemblage of tumbling crosses in "Cruzes de Oro / Crucifixes of Gold," by Reyes Rodriguez. The four-panel "La Cruz," by Antonio Escalante, centers a ghostly female figure on a cross.
"Soy Una Mujer / I am a Woman," by Gabriela Escarcega, takes a critical feminist view of the murders. A robed figure is pinned with Spanish words for qualities the male world attaches to women, instruments of the virgin/whore dichotomy. "Muerta," or death, is pinned to the figure, as well.
But some works cast a scornful eye northward. Mark Justiniano's painting, "Gigante / Giant" presents a striped trouser-leg and leather shoe towering over a female figure, the shadow of the next victim visible beside her. And Alicia Galindo's mixed-media piece, "Basta Ya / Enough Already," as if its grotesque victim visage were not itself enough, offers a bilingual text, chained to the piece in a plastic sleeve, in which "Victim #800" blames Fortune 500 companies.
Clearly the maquiladoras attract young women from around Mexico to their low-wage jobs. It is reasonable to ask that the companies operating them apply more pressure on Mexican authorities, but to implicate them in the deaths is a polemical stretch.
Still, art only alerts. It will take more than moral outrage to end this horror, and some forceful anger from the owners of the maquiladoras might be the answer.