Hola,
my name is Desirre Flores and I am a student at UCLA. I am one of many students helping our profe Dr. Alicia Gaspar de Alba organize a three day conference at UCLA on the maquiladora murders. I am sending this to you in hopes that you will forward it to all who may be interested in attending, volunteering or maybe even donating funds to help us make this possible. If you cannot attend and you would like to learn more about it please visit the website, it will give you info & links. Please read on below I have attached a description of the event that is also available on the website:
http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/chavez/maqui_murders/
This conference is FREE however you MUST PRE-REGISTER ONLINE OR BY PHONE because we need a count for each day so we do not go over capacity in the event location.
Please take the time to forward this, we are trying to help to get this issue into the world AND especially the American public eye, remember many of the products and clothes that are in OUR homes are made by these women. We can all contribute to stop this brutal violence against mujeres and help to save lives.
¡Ni una más!
"THE MAQUILADORA MURDERS, OR, WHO IS KILLING THE WOMEN OF JUÁREZ?"
On Days of the Dead, 2003, the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, in co-sponsorship with Amnesty International, will be hosting an international conference on the unsolved, ten-year crime wave of kidnappings and murders of over 300 women, many of them young, mestiza maquiladora workers, in Ciudad Juárez, across the border from El Paso, Texas.
The conference will take place from October 31 - November 2, 2003, to mark a decade since the murders started, and will bring together scholars, journalists, artists, activists, writers, and policy specialists from the U.S., Mexico, and Europe, as well as families of the victims in a series of roundtable discussions and presentations.
The purpose of the conference is to facilitate more scholarly inquiry into the crimes, but also to examine the social, political, economic, and cultural infrastructure in which those crimes continue unabated. The press has described these crimes as "Jack-the-Ripper style serial killings." The bodies were immolated, mutilated, dismembered, or beaten beyond recognition. At least ninety of those murdered women were also raped. In February 2003, four new bodies were discovered, one a six-year-old girl with multiple stab wounds and her eyes removed.
The conference will include a screening of Lourdes Portillo's award-winning documentary, "Señorita Extraviada," a keynote speech delivered by Eve Ensler, founder and artistic director of V-Day, celebrity appearances, literary presentations, a silent auction, and a multi-media student exhibition of written, aural, and visual materials collected in a year-long undergraduate research internship. Starting this summer, a conference web site will provide information on the conference and a chronology of actions being taken around the world to end the crimes, as well as an updated comprehensive bibliography of related online and print documents.