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Abstract
Using evidence from ethnographic work in the US-Mexico border region, this article develops the term "the funeralization of the city" as a novel category through which to analyze the protests that emerged in Ciudad Juárez and Chihuahua City to denounce the murder and disappearance of nearly 1,500 women and girls since 1993. The funeralization of the city, a peculiar repertoire of protest that operates through the public display of memorial objects, like pink crosses, monuments, graffiti, victims' photographs, and others, extends the activists' struggle to make feminicide visible amid widespread attempts to conceal it. The article contributes to ongoing debates on object-oriented ontology beyond the scope of environmental and green politics by providing a rich description of both, the objects themselves and the activists' interpretations of their role in the anti-feminicide struggle.
To perceive the landscape is therefore to carry out an act of remembrance, and remembering is not so much a matter of calling up an internal image, stored in the mind, as of engaging perceptually with an environment that is itself pregnant with the [present].1
Tim Ingold, "The Temporality of Landscape."
1. The Feminicide2 Machine
Since 1993, Ciudad Juárez began to resemble a perpetual crime scene, full of danger, fear, and violence. The inexplicable disappearance of dozens of women and girls, followed by the appearance of female corpses dumped in the desert, gave the city a frightening reputation. The murdered women suffered unspeakable cruelties.3 They were snatched on their way to and from work or school and have never been seen again. Others were found dead. Their bodies-severely beaten, raped, shot, stabbed, or strangled-were discarded in the [End Page 351] city's outskirts where passersby found them semi-buried in the dirt, desert sand, or filthy garbage.
Gender-based violence, however, was not leftuncontested. From the very beginning, the victims' mothers, artists, independent activists, and human rights defenders took to the streets to demand justice. Protest activity in Ciudad Juárez took many forms, including direct action, teaching rallies, caravans, press conferences, marches, vigils, funerary processions, and community work. At the same time, activists relied on the public display of everyday objects to denounce feminicide and enforced disappearance. But while the anti-feminicide protests have been discussed for more than two decades now, less attention has...