406 Milagros Pe ̃na
Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848. Tensions continue with the influx of “new”^1 immigration,
both legal and illegal. Mexicans represent a poor and disenfranchised transnational
labor force that is used as a reserve army of labor for the United States. In both low-
skill and low-wage occupations Mexicans are exploited, particularly the women who
work in the border factories (Ruiz 1987). Border residents complain of intimidation by
border patrol agents at checkpoints or when asked for legal documents when leaving
food stores. The strains that come with the U.S.–Mexico border reality for people of
Mexican descent, especially for women, have created a range of nongovernment orga-
nizations that provide social services and strive to raise political consciousness of the
social problems faced by border communities.
In response to the social needs in these communities, several Catholic and non-
Catholic religious organizations are actively involved in helping Latinas/os mobilize
against the violence and economic exploitation occurring along the U.S.–Mexico bor-
der. The plight of migrant women along the El Paso/Juarez border, with reports esti- ́
mating between one hundred and two hundred cases of murdered women in Juarez ́
since 1993, has served as a rallying point for issues relating to violence against women.
Church groups responding to this reality have become an important moral and fi-
nancial support to Latinas and their families. That there is a religious connection in
the mobilizing of Latinas should come as no surprise. Pardo’s (1998) research shows
that several of the founders of Mothers of East Los Angeles (MELA – an organization
dedicated to neighborhood improvement) were encouraged by a local Catholic priest.
Parish networks proved important to women organizing in East Los Angeles by pro-
viding them with space to meet and the mechanism through which they could tap
into one another as resources in fixing or cleaning up local parks abandoned by city
government. Thus, Latinas’ emphasis on grassroots activism and the survival politics
of everyday life, suggests expanded possibilities when they can tap their own com-
munities’ social networks and those of organizations such as church groups, that lend
themselves to grassroots organizing.
Religious groups on the border, many of them influenced by the legacy of the Civil
Rights Movement and feminist ideals, have joined Latinas in their struggle for human
rights. The surge in the number of NGOs in the border region (61 percent of the NGOs
in my border study cluster were established after 1990), and especially of church groups
engaged in community work, can only be understood as a product of particular border
realities, U.S.–Mexico politics, and the social strains that they produce. For example, for
religious groups in El Paso/Juarez, the issue of violence against women highlighted by ́
the murders in Juarez led to an awareness of broader issues concerning border women’s ́
struggles and helped the formation of alliances among community groups.
Cubitt and Greenslade (1997) note that the specific focus on violence and economic
exploitation is the basis for understanding Mexican women’s increasing empowerment
in social movement activism. I argue in the following section that this extends to
understanding women’s mobilization on the border. At the same time, the numbers that
have died crossing the U.S.-Mexico border give pause to the notion that social life can be
divided into public and private realms. For Latinas, and the non-Latinas on the border
(^1) Considering that Mexico lost a large percentage of its territory to the United States with the
signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, whether Mexican immigrants entering the United
States, or Anglo immigrants entering the Southwest Latino/a homeland should be considered
the “new” immigrants is a point of contention.