LAS MUJERES DEL OTRO LADO: A CRITIQUE OF THE REPRESENTATIONS OF MEXICAN WOMEN AT THE U.S.-MEXICO BORDER BYAdriana Martinez-Fernandez This dissertation analyzes cultural representations of Mexican border women and their interactions with their political and social environment. Short stories, novels, documentaries, plays, testimonial literature and films on the Mexican women at the U.S.-Mexico border are crucial to the understanding of gendered constructions at la frontera, as they formulate a metacommentary to a variety of complex issues `on the ground.' That is to say, the portrayals of border women unquestionably attest to often-clashing perspectives on culture, nation, sexuality and class. This dissertation focuses on the following texts: Chapter 1 centers on Ciudad Juárez, examining Alicia Gaspar de Alba's novel Desert Blood: The Juárez Murders (2005) and the documentary film La Batalla de las Cruces (2005), directed by Rafael Bonilla. These texts have been chosen because their portrayals of juarense women address the discourse of victimization from different perspectives within the context of the hundreds of murders of women that have afflicted this city with impunity since 1993. These texts reflect the paradoxes that emerge either from underlining the helpless condition of the victims or from creating a public persona for the activists campaigning against the murders. Chapter 2, which deals with the depictions of women from Tijuana, uses three short stories by Rosina Conde and the documentary Maquilápolis: City of Factories (2006) by directors Vicky Funari and Sergio de la Torre, Ackowledging that in Tijuana the figure of the prostitute and other "public women" constantly appear as symbolic presences, these texts best address reinterpretations and recreations of the "public woman," with all of its paradoxical negotiations, from contrasting feminist perspectives. Chapter 3 centers on the feature films Bread and Roses (2000) and La Misma Luna (2007) and the testimonies compiled by Alicia Alarcón La migra me hizo los mandados [The Border Patrol Ate my Dust] (2002) in order to study the portrayals of women migrants, These texts are analyzed through the discussion of the iconic Malinche, as all women represented in them are touched, in one way or another, by the shadow of La Malinche. This Mexican icon symbolically interacts with the female protagonists of these texts as they are also risking being associated with the "treachery" of leaving their own culture and accepting a different culture as migrants. Finally, Chapter 4 examines the representation of the women who stay in Mexico while their loved ones leave to cross la frontera, through the play Mujer on the border (2005), adapted by María Muro and Marta Aura, and the documentary film Letters from the Other Side (2006), by Heather Courtney. These cultural representations are poignant because the women characterized in them present ambivalent responses to traditional roles as mothers and to the forces of globalization. This chapter explores how the antithetical forces of resistance and acquiescence affect the women who stay. The imaginary created by the U.S.-Mexico border generates paradoxical interconnections between the private and the public, between reproductive and productive women's work, between traditional and non-traditional women's roles. At the intersection of gender and sexuality, national identity and globalization, this study examines how the representations of Mexican border women paradoxically contribute to both erasing and reifying sexualized and maternal stereotypes while also performing a circumscribed agency, which fits the inherent ambivalence of the border.
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