Juarez: The Laboratory of Our Future

by Charles Bowden, Eduardo Galeano (Afterword), Noam Chomsky (Preface)

Focuses on relations between the border towns of Juarez and El Paso to illuminate relations in general between Mexico and US, challenging media and government proclamations of milk and honey. Vivid and often gruesome images created by anonymous street photographers accompany descriptions of impoverished urban settlements, workers in foreign- owned factories, victims of drug and gang violence, the hardships of women and children, and other aspects of daily life for all but the privileged few. Noam Chomsky contributes the preface. No index or bibliography. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

Genres: Nonfiction

131 pages, Hardcover

First published April 15, 1998

About the author

Charles Bowden was an American non-fiction author, journalist and essayist based in Las Cruces, New Mexico.

His journalism appeared regularly in Harper’s GQ, and other national publications. He was the author of several books of nonfiction, including Down by the River.

In more than a dozen groundbreaking books and many articles, Charles Bowden blazed a trail of fire from the deserts of the Southwest to the centers of power where abstract ideas of human nature hold sway — and to the roiling places that give such ideas the lie. He claimed as his turf "our soul history, the germinal material, vast and brooding, that is always left out of more orthodox (all of them) books about America" (Jim Harrison, on Blood Orchid ).

Reviews

[Jack Waters · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bob Dylan: I’m not gonna read TIME magazine, I’m not gonna read Newsweek, I’m not gonna read any of these magazines, I mean cause they just got too much to lose by printing the truth. You know that.

TIME: What kind of truths are they leaving out?

Dylan: Well anything, even on a worldwide basis, they’d just go off the stands in a day if they printed really the truth.

TIME: What is really the truth?

Dylan: Really the truth is just a plain picture.

(Excerpt from TIME Magazine’s interview with Bob Dylan as seen in the documentary “Don’t Look Back”)

“We do not wish to look at Juarez, we do not vacation there, we do not speak of the place. When it briefly comes to our attention, we dismiss it as a grotesque exception to what matters, what is, and what will be.” (pg. 48)

This book is filled with images of a city whose violence is upfront, often, brutal, highly-selective although jettisoned with hands-off disregard. The snapshots of former lives caught in the crossfire; answers and motives are usually buried deeper than the bodies themselves. The photographs, from local photojournalists[Javier Aguilar, Jaime Bailleres, Gabriel Cardona, Julian Cardona, Alfredo Carrillo, Raul Lodoza, Jaime Murrieta, Miguel Perea, Margarita Reyes, Ernesto Rodriguez, Manuel Saenz, Lucio Soria Espino, Aurelio Suarez Nunez] are chilling. If we don’t look, did the inhumanity ever occur?

Charles Bowden has been writing about Juarez since the mid-nineties. This book grew from his Harper’s piece, “While You Were Sleeping’ in which Juarez photographers expose the violent realities of free trade.

“We must stop pretending and start living. We already have lives of double exposure. Just as the photographers cannot really stay on one side of the camera, we cannot really stay on one side of the line. We will cross it, we have crossed it, we are in play. We have many options and none of them are easy. But the one option we do not have is to continue our past habits into the future, We cannot pretend such places do not exist. We cannot pretend such places can be contained. We cannot pretend such places will magically remedy themselves. We are exposed and we should be. And we are exposed to the future and this future will be hard, but it can also be good or bad depending upon what we do We are free to act. If we act in time.” (pg. 114)

Keep in mind: this book came out almost a decade before the war on drugs was officially declared by newly-elected President Calderon in 2006. He calls Juarez the laboratory of the future, and it is happening 30 feet across the river from El Paso, Texas. The area serves as an ecotone(borderland between two biological assemblages -- think of the forest edging the meadow) of the US & Mexico.

“Where an ecotone occurs there is more life and life is louder and more grasping because two or more groups of plants and animals overlap, boosting life’s pitch and intensity [...] That is what is happening now on the border of Mexico and the US, where a huge ecotone of flesh and capital and guns is rubbing up against itself as two cultures and two economies and two languages meet and mingle and erupt into something we cannot yet name.” (ps. 48)

Bowden’s writing is incredible; he masterfully describes the city and situations with eyes wide open. Squeamish realities deserve squeamish words and visuals. His words show the possibility of caring with vigor when answers seem nowhere to be found.

Noam Chomsky wrote the introduction, and he rightfully attacks NAFTA, showing how it maintains the status quo for the richest and most powerful while also waging war on the rights of workers and consumers. Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano offers and cogently answers a question in the afterword: Should the Third World really aspire to be like the First World? (spoiler alert: no)

“It is time for everyone to talk. It is time for everyone to talk despite the thickets of racism, of foreign-policy considerations, of the growing and ominous military presence on the border, of the barbarism festering in our agencies that expresses itself in the mistreatment of illegal immigrants from Mexico. It is time to talk because silence only makes matters worse, bodies cold, murder sanctioned, and poverty invisible.” (pg. 112)

[Dan Sharber · Rating 5 out of 5]

wow. very powerful book. it's basically a long form article accompanied by pictures. i would call it an anti-capitalist coffee table book. the writing and photography are both beautiful in their rawness and vivid in their darkness. the goal of this book is to make you SEE. and make everyone finally see what is going on. juarez is everywhere. it is our future. and it is also why we fight.

[Stan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good not great.

This book consists largely of photos by Juarez photographers befriended by Bowden, accompanied by his narration that alternates between straight-up reportage, lament, protest, call to action, hallucination, and recollected dream — vaguely reminiscent of Michael Herr's reportage from Vietnam published as Dispatches (1977). Herr wrote the voiceover narration Martin Sheen delivered as Capt. Willard in Apocalypse Now, so if you're familiar with those monologues you've got a sense of Bowden's narrative style in Juarez: The Laboratory of Our Future.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dispatc...

Here are samples of Bowden's writing; the underlinings are mine.

And it is a very safe and warm room as the summer night roasts the city and the air hangs like velvet from the sky. ... A train hurls toward the future. (24)

She looks at me and says “None of this seems real until it happens to you.” That is when I hear the roar of the A train knifing through the warm velvet of the hot summer night and making a blood-red tear across the sky. (25)

I want to know about the river, about the imaginary line, about the green fields next to the big dusty Mexican city of Juarez. I want to know about over there. I want to know the smell of the streets at 2 AM, the taste of the whore under the streetlight, the greasy feel of the juice rolling down my chin from the taco bought at a stand near dawn. (29)

I believe that Juarez is one of the most exciting places in the world. I am struck by the electricity that snaps through the air in a city saturated with grief. ... We should accept this tension between the desire for peace and quiet, and the excitement of mayhem. We all experience this sensation as we slow down and stare at the bad car wreck on the highway. And so we will come to know ourselves, a people of gardens with one foot on the third rail. (41)

The things I see on the streets seem unreal, the images on the screen in my motel room feel solid, sure, and true. It reminds me of being drugged in the ‘60s. Only now I am straight and the sense of disorientation is yet stronger. Juarez does not compute with what I read and hear. (42)

[Juarez] has the throb and drive of nineteenth-century Chicago, the most significant human community on the planet following the American Civil War, yet commands the attention of some nameless suburb of real life. We do not wish to look at Juarez, we do not vacation there, we do not speak of the place. (48)

I have been a hunch player all of my life. In the ‘60s, I sensed that the center of human energy had shifted to shacks in the Mississippi Delta, where poor black people were achieving what American presidents and congresses could not dream would ever be possible. ... At times in the ‘60s anyone could sense that more power and energy were pouring out of electric guitars than out of cannons, a fact that almost toppled governments on several continents in the year 1968. (48)

I am a creature of hope, a glass of wine in the evening, and music always in the air. (58)

I have never believed for one instant in John F. Kennedy’s famous line about asking not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country. If your country does not serve you, then why should it exist? Government has no purpose except to benefit its citizens. None. (59)

So I wind up in a pleasant room with a glass of wine, surrounded by photographers, and I bathe in the flow of images. (61)

I think that [the Juarez photographers] are capturing something: the look of the future, and the future to me looks like the face of a murdered girl. This future is based on the rich getting richer, the poor getting poorer, and the industrial growth producing poverty faster than it distributes wealth. Until recently in Mexico the workers got one-eighth the wages of their U.S. counterparts. Such generosity no longer prevails and wages now flutter somewhere between one-tenth and one-fifteenth of those in the U.S. In the auto industry ... U.S autoworkers at union plants average $16.75 per hour, Mexicans take home the equivalent of $4.50 per day. (61)

Juarez is not a backwater but the new City on the Hill, beckoning us all to a grisly state of things. I’ve got my feet propped up on a coffee table, a glass of wine in my hand, and [then he watches a slide show of grisly Juarez photos]. (61)

Since December 1994, the currency has lost over half its value, prices have more than doubled, and jobs have disappeared wholesale. ... You are counted as employed if you work one hour a week. ... No one knows how many people live in Juarez, though the current ballpark figure is closing in on two million. (64)

The work week is generally six days, forty-eight hours. ... At least 40 percent of the Mexican labor force now lives off the underground economy, which means they stand in the street and try to sell things, anything, including themselves. ... The World Bank reported that 75 percent of all Mexicans live below the poverty line. (81)

Labor is functionally limitless, as tens of thousands of poverty-stricken people pour into the city each year. (82)

There are over 450 gangs in Juarez. They, not the police, define the borders in the city. They, not the government, represent authority to the human beings in the colonias. They provide work selling narcotics. And they kill and steal all the time to protect what little sphere of power they have. They are not a progressive force, they are simply the force that grows when a society offers no progress. They have blossomed over the last three years as several factors made them inevitable: the slow decomposition of the Mexican government created a vacuum. The explosive growth of the drug industry created a livelihood. The mutilation of the main bulwark of Mexican culture, the family, created a need. For the women, the assembly plants are sometimes liberating since they are able to leave their homes and for the first time in their lives have their own money. But there is a price. The collapse of marriages and of families increases (91-2).

In Juarez you find Stone Age parents staring helplessly at Computer Age children. Nothing the adults know or can provide has much value here, and the fabric that has held families and Mexico together tears right before your eyes. (92)

After a while, after several months, things in Juarez begin to haunt me. I try to put my finger on what exactly is bothering me. ... Finally, I can say what I have sensed for months: in Juarez you cannot sustain hope. (96)

The authorities announced back in November of 1995 that 520 people had disappeared in Juarez that year and “an important percentage of them are female adolescents.” By March of 1996 the mothers of the missing were demonstrating and demanding justice. Then in April the police made a sweep of the red-light district, bagged 120 suspects, and the next day announced that they had solved the case. The authorities explained that the slaughter was the work of eight apparently gregarious sociopaths who hung out in a bar called Joe’s Place. ... A year later girls were still disappearing and mothers were still protesting in front of the Juarez city hall. (101)

Sometimes I drift into a fantasy about a whore I met in Juarez and the life we will build together. ... She is a good-looking woman who never got to be a girl and now thinks she will never get to be a person. (105)

The history of the United States for the most part, and the national fable in every version, is this: things get better. In México and many other parts of the world this belief is absent. (109)

Mexico is the bridge to the twenty-first century and we are terrified of crossing this bridge. (110)

What we now think is not true. What we now do no longer works. What we see in the photographs actually exists. This is not darkness at the edge of town. This is going to be our town. And not because the dreaded Mexicans are coming but because we are planting ruin about the world and calling it our economic policy. ... We cannot pretend such places do not exist. We cannot pretend such places will magically remedy themselves. (114)

If people are paid less than they can live on, they will eventually either die or act to stay alive. (114)

———————————————————

Noam Chomsky writes in his introduction:

Labor’s share of personal income in Mexico declined from 36 percent in the mid-1970s to 23 percent by 1992, . . . while fewer than 8,000 accounts (including 1,500 owned by foreigners) control more than 94 percent of stock shares in public hands (p. 19).

One consequence of the globalization of the economy is the rise of new governing institutions to serve the interest of private transnational economic power. Another is the spread of the Third World social model, with islands of enormous privilege in a sea of misery and despair. ... Increasingly, production can be shifted to high-repression, low-wage areas and directed to privileged sectors in the global economy (19).

The basic goals [of NAFTA] were lucidly described by the CEO of United Technologies, Harry Gray : “a worldwide business environment that’s unfettered by government interference”.... This is the predominant human value, to which all else must be subordinated. Gray does not, of course, object to “government interference” of the kind that allows his corporation, an offshoot of the Pentagon system, to exist. Neoliberal rhetoric is to be selectively employed as a weapon against the poor; the wealthy and powerful will continue to rely upon state power (20).

———————————————————
Eduardo Galeano writes in the Afterword:

Mexico City grows at the rate of half a million people and thirty square kilometers per year; it already has five times as many inhabitants as all of Norway. By the end of the century, the capital of Mexico and the Brazilian city of Sao Paulo will be the largest cities in the world. (123)

[Kelly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Published in 1998, "Juárez: The Laboratory of Our Future" is essentially an expanded magazine article by Charles Bowden on his impressions of Ciudad Juárez as reflected by various freelance photographers. The focus is primarily on a series of ongoing and infamous female homicides (often associated with the ubiquitous maquiladoras), with additional musings on narcotraficante violence, economic privation, and the unrelenting pressure that NAFTA and border policy continue to exert on the people of Cd. Juárez. Many of the photographs included in the book are meant to shock the conscience; the operative assumption being that certain gruesome realities of the rape, torture and murder can best be understood viscerally.

I was interested in reading this book as a kind of supplementary companion to Roberto Bolaño's novel, "2666" (a purpose for which it seems particularly well-suited). Bowen's writing is both lyrical and blunt, evocative of the universal despair attendant to most incidents of systemic poverty on a grand scale. The overwhelming impression is that Juárez represents something ghastly, inescapable and prophetic for human society generally. The vagueness of Bowen's existential insights are actually (and oddly) more acutely truthful than the detailed political harangues that bookend the text as its Preface (Noam Chomsky) and Afterward (Eduardo Galeano).

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

A critical look at the devastating effects of globalization. What do we do with the victims? How to do create or develop greater parity for all? This book left me with these questions.

[Random 75 · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a Great Book, the info its verry direct, strong, hard to believe, but is true ...
The reality in the BORDERLINE its far from our imagination.