In The Force of Witness Rosa-Linda Fregoso examines the contra feminicide movement in Mexico and other feminist efforts to eradicate gender violence. Drawing on interviews, art, documentaries, and her years of activism, Fregoso traces the micro and macro scales of misogyny and the patterns of state complicity with gender violence. She shows how different forms of witnessing—from activist-mothers’ bearing witness to the memories of their daughters and expert witnesses in court cases to communal witnessing and a scholar-activist-citizen witnessing her own actions—are key to resisting feminicidal violence. Fregoso situates these forms of witness in the histories, contexts, structures, bodies, and intersectional struggles they emerge from. By outlining the complexities of feminicidal violence in relation to witnessing processes, Fregoso challenges the notion of witness as an individual or autonomous subject inscribed solely in the legal or religious arenas. Rather, she theorizes witness as a force of collectivity and a constellation of multiple social locations and intersectional practices that work together to abolish feminicidal violence.

Rosa-Linda Fregoso is Professor Emerita of Latin America and Latino Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, coeditor of Terrorizing Women: Feminicide in the Américas, also published by Duke University Press, and author of meXicana Encounters: The Making of Social Identities on the Borderlands.

Acknowledgments  ix
Prelude  1
1. Chronicles of Witness  13
Interlude 1: Re-Memory for the Dead  58
2. Mexico’s Longest War  63
3. The Artist and Witness  96
Interlude 2: Redressing Injustice  115
4. The Art of Witness  119
5. Witnesses to Mexico’s “Living Dead”  138
Interlude 3: Flor de Arena  159
6. Stolen Lives and Fugitivity  163
Postlude  183
Notes  185
Bibliography  211
Index  229