| Description |
In August of 2013, Roberto Flores and Alfredo Zárate, two Ciudad Juárez bus drivers, were killed while working. The murderer, according to eyewitnesses, was a woman between 30 and 50 years old. She purportedly wore a blonde wig and a baseball cap to conceal her identity. Eyewitnesses also told investigators that the murderer made remarks before killing the bus drivers, such as "you think you're so bad?" Ciudad Juárez was once considered the murder capital of the world, so the news of two more murders was hardly "news." Thus, this dissertation presents a case that demonstrates the normalization of quotidian violence-a process achieved through everyday cultural acts. Days after the murders, local news media received a confession. The author, who called herself Diana la Cazadora de Choferes (Diana, the hunter of bus drivers), claimed that she had vengefully murdered the bus drivers in response to the raped and murdered female maquiladora workers of Ciudad Juárez. This confession brought together a variety of discourses about maquiladora labor in Mexico, feminicidios (the unsolved murders of women in Ciudad Juárez), organized crime, and governmental impunity. From a rhetorical perspective, this confession also hinted at discourses of rhetorical agency, social movements, the rhetorical construction of truth and credulity, and the role of mythology within modernity. Throughout this dissertation, I take a variety of critical, cultural, and rhetorical approaches as I construct and contextualize "Diana," following McGee's (1990) fragmentation theory. McGee argues that "rhetors make discourses from scraps and pieces of evidence. Critical rhetoric [as opposed to rhetorical criticism] does not begin with a finished text in need of interpretation; rather, texts are understood to be larger than the apparently finished discourse that presents itself as transparent" (p. 279). Thus, in this dissertation I examine several scraps of discourse that together, point toward one rhetorical construction of Diana la Cazadora de Choferes-not a complete or finished construction, but one that is put forth toward a specific telos: the illustration of what I term retórica moribunda, precarious rhetorics of life and death in contemporary Mexico. |
