Latina Empowerment and Border Realities 407
who support them, violence against migrant women is articulated as not the migrant
woman’s personal matter, but a matter for all women. As Cubitt and Greenslade (1997:
61) note, treating women’s issues as personal matters cripples women’s ability to act
politically to advance their interests, and in the process undermines all people’s capacity
to participate in and transform civil society and public policy. In other words, to leave
one woman’s narrative and the dangers and exploitations she experiences crossing the
U.S.–Mexico border at the individual level is to miss the larger communal pattern of
these border experiences.
FAITH-BASED COMMUNITY ORGANIZATIONS IN EL PASO-JUAREZ ́
Latinas and non-Latinas, linked by their common concern for women in the greater El
Paso/Juarez area, have developed a number of mobilization strategies to bring attention ́
to problems facing women in the region. The relational ties among the thirteen NGOs
identified in my border research between 1996 and 1999 show a strong link to a mobi-
lization process tied to, or having been sparked by, members of religious organizations.
Such patterns reflect how community and faith-based organizations that lend support
to NGO activism along the U.S.–Mexico border are embedded in its sociopolitical real-
ity. Ruben Garcia, one of the cofounders of Annunciation House in El Paso, spoke about
it and Casa Peregrina, both of which are shelters for predominantly illegal homeless
immigrants who come looking for work in El Paso and Juarez. He recalled: ́
...Because of the economic development of the border you have this incredible
migration from the interior of Mexico to the border areas. You know the maquilado-
ras, the famous maquiladoras. The year before Annunciation House came into being,
the first maquila opened in Juarez – the RCA plant over at the Bermudez industrial ́
park – and hired the first three thousand maquila workers. Well, twenty-two years
later, there’s three to four hundred maquiladoras, employing two hundred thousand-
plus people.This mass migration to the region created problems for social service organizations
who were quickly overwhelmed by the number of people, many of whom found it
difficult to find housing. As the numbers of homeless people increased, church groups
responded by forming nonprofit organizations that provided shelter and other services
to homeless migrants.
Reflecting on the circumstances under which Annunciation came into existence,
Garcia recalled that in 1978 there were no other shelters except for the men’s Christian
home, there were no transitional living centers, and there were no battered women’s
shelters. Garcia said that he and a few others made personal commitments to working
with the border’s poor:
Little by little, by word of mouth, Annunciation House filled out....It also so
happened that coming into existence in 1978, coincided with the explosion that
took place in Central America and the mass of exoduses of people from Guatemala,
Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras. And so, as these people made their way up to var-
ious kinds of borders, El Paso was one of the major crossing points for people. So, we
found ourselves doing an immense amount of work with the refugees from Central
America, along of course, with the people who have historically crossed over from
the interior of Mexico.