Professor’s New Book Examines Femicide in Mexico

St. Lawrence University Associate Professor and Coordinator of Caribbean, Latin American, and Latino Studies Martha Chew Sánchez recently combined her research and experiences to provide an in-depth and comprehensive examination of femicide in Mexico.

In her new book titled Coloniality, Feminism, and Neoliberalism, Chew Sánchez, whose research and teachings focus on Latino studies, cultural studies, musicology, border studies, ethnic studies, and cultural ecology, introduces readers to the realities of Mexican society and the emergence of femicide in neoliberal politics of the 1980s. The book traces how the concepts of modernity and coloniality are intertwined, and how the ideologies of exploitation of capitalism, patriarchy, and racism feed on each other. Her work is the result of research carried out in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, a border area of Mexico and the United States where she examined the structural issues that women and girls have faced throughout history to present day. 

An editor of the book, Dr. Elsa Lever Montoya, shares, “At a time of constant denunciation of gender violence, in which one of the moments of the greatest cruelty against women and girls is experienced in a systematic way and with impunity, and in which conservative groups have used femicide to put the state in check, this book is dedicated to the mothers of the victims of femicide -the genuine lawyers, researchers, and politicians-, to ‘rebuild their memory and restore the dignity that criminals and the State denied them.’ The future will be feminist or it will not be.” 

Chew Sánchez has guided St. Lawrence students on educational trips to the U.S.-Mexico border and the Yucatan Peninsula, as well as teaches courses on Ethnic Studies and Social Justice, Latino Popular Culture, Theories of Cultural Studies, and Latino Cultural Expressions: Music, Literature, Film, and more. Chew Sánchez graduated summa cum laude from Escuela Nacional de Maestros, earned a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree from the University of Texas at El Paso, and holds a Ph.D. from the University of New Mexico. She is the author of Corridos in Migrant Memory published by the University of New Mexico in 2006 and is currently editing the manuscript “Performing Mexican Identity.”