Not One More! offers a vivid and visceral history of the more than 2,000 feminicidios (femicides) that have been perpetrated in the border city of Juárez, Mexico, since the 1990s. Author Nina Maria Lozano argues that feminicidios in Juárez must be viewed and addressed through a materialist framework that can make maquiladoras visible as spaces where gendered violence is perpetrated through and by wealth disparities. Maquiladoras are assembly factories that are integral to neoliberal economic projects such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). In these maquiladoras, owned by U.S corporations, poor Mexican women are hired to work in exploitative conditions assembling consumer products. Lozano argues that these conditions make “the women workers in Juárez. . . materially readily disposable and easy to replace” (50).
In developing the concept of “border materialism” as a theoretical corrective to the “new materialist turn,” Lozano’s study of the border city of Juárez contributes to a body of work that links together feminicidio, globalization, and free trade. Lozano argues that new materialism assumes that all entities (organic, inorganic, objects, subjects) have agentic power, in effect erasing specifically human agency and accountability. As Lozano demonstrates in each chapter, the new materialist turn not only fails to explain the materiality that causes feminicidios by its disavowal of human agency, it also dismisses the real material forces that facilitate the killing of the women employees. Lozano develops border materialism as a theoretical framework to “examine how object-oriented things and matter intersect with bodies—in particular, women’s bodies—rooted in neoliberal economic structures within specific geographical boundaries mediated by human agency for political change” (8). Lozano’s alternative framework examines the intersections of objects (new materialist turn) as well as how those objects interact and intersect with human bodies for social change.
The book is divided into five chapters and a conclusion, each functioning as a separate case study that “embodies instantiations of border materialism” (9). Using border materialism to analyze interviews with the victims’ family members and with activists, Lozano connects regimes of power that create the materiality of feminicidio. Throughout the five chapters, objects such as pregnancy sticks, trash receptacles, spray-paint cans, and shovels are revealed to play a powerful role in the production of the feminicidios, and to be strategic tools for activist action.
The first chapter provides a clear analytical history of the femicide waves starting from 1993 to the present day. Chapter 2 links neoliberal free trade policies with feminicidios through a critique of “the assemblage of things” and offers a technique of “re-assemblages” to challenge those policies. For instance, managers often coerce female workers to take pregnancy tests. The pregnancy sticks serve to control women’s bodies, to circumvent antidiscrimination laws, and to reinforce the rhetoric of women as disposable if they get pregnant. The economic and gendered precariousness of women is exploited not only in the maquiladoras; in addition, governments do not provide any infrastructure (housing, roads, electricity, potable water, waste), which also enforces the idea of women as disposable objects.
At the same time, Lozano illuminates the strategies of resistance used by mothers and activists. For instance, mothers and activists have engaged in bringing awareness, denouncing corporate-state femicide, demanding justice, and warning other women of feminicidio by spray-painting objects such as trash receptacles (a metaphor for the disposal of bodies) with pink crosses and painting murals of victims’ faces. In chapter 3, Lozano juxtaposes the Mexican government’s memorials of the disappeared women with the mothers’ and activists’ own public memorials to remember the victims. The latter challenge and disrupt the government’s memorials and complicity in feminicidio through the concepts of “thing power” (69) and “matter-memory markers,” which are represented through pink crosses painted on trash receptacles (69). These markers show the disposability of women, serving to warn and remind that feminicidios are real and common.
In chapter 4, Lozano theorizes artists’ and activists’ murals of feminicidio victims using Avery Gordon’s concept of the “haunting” and Emmanuel Levina’s trope of “the face.” Here, spray-paint cans produce murals of the “Faces of Femicide” as a visual rhetorical project to “haunt” the state and public imaginary, as well as to portray the lived history of the victims as always present. Chapter 5 analyzes the rastreos (trackings or searches) of the victims’ remains conducted by family members and activists through a critique of “vibrant matter,” which posits that matter is inherently vibrant and agentic. When state agents destroy the shovels and DNA collected by the rastreos, this evidence loses its vibrancy or agentic power to prove the identity of the missing victims.
In demonstrating the persistence of gendered genocide in Ciudad Juárez, this book challenges readers and scholars to engage in activist scholarly work, to understand the complicity of neoliberal states, and to confront these injustices. The book may be particularly useful for scholar-activists who organize against systemic gender violence, “[offering] scholars studying the feminicidios—and similar ongoing devastating effects of globalization—new theoretical tools and insights to build upon” (136).
