Ending the Culture of “Disposable Women”

Her name was Claudia Urias Berthaud. She was 14 years old. She had been walking to her grandmother's house in Chihuahua City, south of the Mexican border town of Ciudad Juarez, when she disappeared.

It wasn't unusual. Although not a precise count, it has been estimated that since 1993, 400 young women from Ciudad Juarez and the surrounding area had been murdered, and 600 more had vanished. The impunity of these crimes has been given a name: feminicidio, serial sexual feminicide. The victims are poor young women, powerless in Mexican society, many employed by the maquilas (factories) on the outskirts of Juarez, working 45-hour weeks to make $35 a month. Many women are single mothers with few opportunities to improve their economic position through education or job training. According to local human rights activists, the crimes perpetrated against them are largely ignored by local, state and federal police. In their minds, in the minds of many townspeople, the women cease to exist. But in the minds of those such as Claudia's family, they will live forever.

In 2006, Amy Pennington '07, in Ciudad Juarez to conduct research for her senior thesis, accompanied Claudia's family and local activists from the group Justicia Para Nuestras Hijas (Justice for Our Daughters) to a memorial held at the site where the girl's body had been found the year before; she had been dumped in a ravine in a desert field on the outskirts of Chihuahua. They carried a cross crafted by area steelworkers, to honor their daughter, sister, niece, friend. At the site, year-old police tape flapped in the breeze, flags made of sticks haphazardly marking the area as a crime scene; it was obvious to the mourners that the investigation, such as it was, had been abandoned. On the way to the site, activist Lucha Castro (the leader of Justicia) pointed out to Pennington the places along the highway where 10 more women had been found. She knew all of their names.

In the days following, Pennington barely ate, barely slept, driven by what she'd heard and witnessed to complete her application for the Davis United World College (UWC) 100 Projects for Peace grant, in the hopes that, with this money, she and fellow applicant Anna Marschalk-Burns '07 could give the women of Ciudad Juarez the opportunities that had been denied Claudia and her peers. Opportunities for higher education, for meaningful employment, for a life that extended, as it should, well beyond adolescence.

Pennington and Marschalk-Burns first learned of the dire situation in Juarez in Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Peace and Conflict Studies Leslie Dwyer's class,“Violence, Terror and Trauma.” In the fall of '06, anthropology major Pennington also attended a conference on the feminicidio at Swarthmore, where she met activists and mothers of victims.  She planned to base her senior thesis on this topic.

“One of the activists [Irasema Coronado, a dean at the University of Texas-El Paso] suggested that the best way for people to help out was not by investigating—it had been done, there was nothing we could do, we'd put ourselves in danger and at this point it was voyeuristic,” says Pennington.“She recommended starting a scholarship fund and contributing to the cause of ending the incredible economic and educational divide between poor women and wealthier men.” Education would bring long-term empowerment to the women, giving them access to resources otherwise out of their reach. A larger goal: transform the societal attitudes towards lower-class working women, the idea of them as irrelevant, insignificant.

Just a couple of days after she was inspired to start this fund, Pennington received an e-mail about the UWC Projects for Peace initiative, started in 2006 by internationalist and philanthropist Kathryn Wasserman Davis, who celebrated her 100th birthday by committing $1 million to fund more than 100 $10,000 grassroots projects for peace across the country. Pennington and fellow anthropology major Marschalk-Burns saw this as the perfect opportunity to put their ideas into action. Once they had been selected as recipients, they traveled to Ciudad Juarez in the summer of 2007 to meet the women they would help, and to understand first-hand the situation they hoped to combat.

Pennington had been in Juarez before, but it was Marschalk-Burns' first visit, and the true nature of the city defied everything she had imagined.“I pictured a deserted road, sparse back roads,” she says.“But it's incredibly modern, Westernized, and there's a really obvious divide between the wealthy and poor sections.” The wealthy areas, she says, are like“America times 10”—huge buildings, gaudy advertisements—while up in the hills, the poorer communities or colonias are stark shantytowns, where some houses are made of cardboard and plastic bags discarded from the factories.

Marschalk-Burns and Pennington spent five days at Casa Eudes, a home for neglected and abused young girls and women run by nuns.“The dearth of resources was obvious,” says Marschalk-Burns,“and was contributing to the fact that the girls were bored. They weren't even conscious of the fact that they were lacking in opportunities.” However, their talent and intelligence were evident:“We saw how they were drawn to certain things. Amy and I brought computers, and they were obsessed with them.”

The Fords also got a tour of a maquila from its manager, where they saw hundreds of women working by hand to make invisible tooth alignment retainers.“The purpose of our project was to allow the women to look beyond the maquilas for job opportunities,” says Marschalk-Burns,“but currently, that's a good job for women in Juarez. It pays horribly, but it's better than the alternatives (one of which is the illegal drug trade).”

However, Marschalk-Burns was saddened to learn that even the maquilas would not be viable employment options for much longer: During their tour, the manager indicated machines that would perform all of the necessary work in the future, resulting in the dismissal of 50 employees.“That moment was heartbreaking to me, that even these jobs were being erased,” says Marschalk-Burns.

“The problem with maquilas is not just that they don't pay well,” says Pennington,“it's that the workers are totally disposable.”

Pennsylvania State University professor Melissa W. Wright, Pennington explains, has taken this theory of the“disposable woman” a step further, pointing out the town's discursive idea of women from the maquilas being associated with immorality.“These women are independent, earning their own money, going out to bars on their own—it's all new,” says Pennington.

Also, maquila employees need to be young and female because it is believed in Juarez that women's“agile hands” are appropriate for this menial work.“The longer you work there, you get worn out and can't work anymore, you get arthritis and bad vision,” says Pennington.“You're like a product, no longer efficient.” Most troubling is the fact that many of these women have daughters who drop out of school to support their families by working in the factories—and in time, their daughters will do the same.

It was a cycle that seemed destined to remain unbroken, but Pennington and Marschalk-Burns were determined to sever it.

At the start of summer 2007, both Pennington and Marschalk-Burns had idealistic—and ultimately unrealistic—visions of how they would use their 100 Projects for Peace award.

“We had the foolish expectation that in a month we would find girls, hand out scholarships, find people to mentor the girls, give all the money away and have it monitored,” says Marschalk-Burns.

They didn't consider the post-9/11 restrictions on bringing $10,000 across the U.S. border and donating it to a foreign individual or nonprofit.“The original donors can have opinions and advise how the money should be spent, but they aren't allowed to make the final decisions about where the money goes,” explains Pennington.“There's a fear that someone might be funding terrorist cells somewhere.”

On the advice of University of Texas dean Irasema Coronado, Pennington and Marschalk-Burns gave the $10,000 to her El Paso-based organization, Frontera Women's Foundation, one of many organizations in Juarez and Chihuahua City working to help the communities most affected by the crimes. Frontera would then set up an advisory committee that would oversee the distribution of the scholarships.“The idea was to have someone down there who would more or less take over the project,” says Pennington. They also found a site from which to recruit applicants, a women's organization based in a colonia called Siglo 21, where they could build an infrastructure of women mentoring young girls.

It was Coronado who encouraged the Haverford women to structure their scholarship fund as an endowment.“It will be better to give out fewer scholarships each year but have it continue further into the future,” says Marschalk-Burns.“It enables us to fund the women's scholarships based on the interest accrued each year.” Setting up an endowment gels with the Haverford women's original idea to create something that would end the cycles of poverty and meager education in the community.

“If we funded the women all at once, they would do their thing and scatter,” says Marschalk-Burns.“But if it's rooted in a specific community, the women who are funded will then mentor women who will be recipients in the future. When you help someone get ahead and make something of themselves that she otherwise couldn't, she ends up being the most willing and hardworking in terms of giving back to others.”

In establishing the fund, Pennington and Marschalk-Burns had to be aware of cultural sensitivities, especially in creating the application.“We didn't want it to be intimidating enough that people would be discouraged from applying,” says Marschalk-Burns.“But we also struggled with how we would choose the women, what qualities we were looking for—they're so nebulous, and it's awful to have to choose among worthy applicants.” They tried to include open-ended questions, unlike the traditional Western model where applicants need to sell themselves.

“Activists down there told us not to use a question: ‘What are your good qualities?'” says Marschalk-Burns.“These women have such intensely low self-esteem that if they see that question, they won't even complete the application.”

As it stands now, the advisory committee will choose among the applicants based on their own criteria, and will make home site visits to ensure that the women seeking scholarships are truly the most in need. Frontera will give the $10,000 directly to select universities in Ciudad Juarez, who will then award it to the women who are chosen. This system of distribution is due not only to post-9/11 rules against giving money to an individual, but also to an effort to cement relationships with trusted schools and to put less social pressure on the young women themselves.

“Everyone has dire financial needs,” says Pennington.“If the money was given directly to the women, how could they excuse hanging onto it for education?”

Because of the nature of the endowment, Frontera won't be giving away all $10,000; instead, each year they will give as scholarships the money earned by the endowment, often approximately eight percent of the money invested.“This is part of the importance of our continuing work to expand the fund, since more money invested means more money earned, and thus more scholarship money each year,” says Pennington.

Although Marschalk-Burns and Pennington have commitments that keep them in the Philadelphia area—Marschalk-Burns is a Haverford House Fellow and paralegal at Community Legal Services, and Pennington works for a local women's shelter—they are keeping a close eye on developments in Juarez. They expect a current Haverford student or two to spend the summer there as Center for Peace and Global Citizenship interns, checking on the distribution of the money and the progress of the young recipients. Pennington and Marschalk-Burns will also continue fundraising to ensure a long and healthy life for the scholarship fund.

It goes without saying that both are thankful for UWC and the 100 Projects for Peace program, for allowing them to help the women of Ciudad Juarez.“After I visited the first time and went to Claudia's memorial, I kept imagining her family and thinking, ‘I have to do something,'” says Pennington.“I'm so grateful to have been able to give something back.”

For more information or to contribute to the scholarship fund, contact juarezwomensfund [at] gmail.com or visit www.juarezwomensfund.org.

-Brenna McBride