Human Rights and the Limits of Empathic Attachments in Cristina Michaus' Mujeres de Ciudad Juárez

• In Event: “México AlterNATIVO: The promise of alternative citizenships in binational and Mexican cinema, performance, and theatre”.

Abstract

As exemplary of documentary theatre, Cristina Michaus’ Mujeres de Ciudad Juárez relies on archival and ethnographic research to denounce the violence against women living on the México-U.S. border. The Mexican state has failed to put an end to the decades-long femicide, leaving this continuous death and disappearance of women and girls in Ciudad Juárez unsolved. In turn, the escalating violence throughout the country signify the continuous demise of national citizenship. Michaus’ play specifically tackles the absence of the law sanctioning life along the border by staging a serious critique of the failures of both the state and civil society to uphold their duties protecting citizens. What she proposes with Mujeres is “to move the people towards compassion as they face the most abject of crimes” targeting Mexican women, and to induce in her publics an affective attachment to women by “being aggressive with the spectator, presenting [to them] theatre as a true instrument of self-reflection, not as simple enjoyment. [To] give them different recourses of action (against the femicide): collecting signatures, marches, that they talk about it at home.” Michaus’ “recourses to action” point to theatre’s ability to incite a political movement (from the streets to the home to the state itself) precisely by creating a conscious imprint on public affect, to force her audiences to recognize and to identify with the deterritorilization of both life and citizenship on the borderlands so that we may enact a different form of citizenship in the present.

Author

• Armando Garcia, University of Pittsburgh