November 13, 2019
Page 5
Confronting the Erasure of Women in Juarez
o PinionAted
J udge
by
d arleen
o rtega
“La Ruta” comes to Portland with the
purest of intentions; playwright Isaac
Gomez sought to bring attention to the
plight of missing and murdered women
at the U.S.-Mexico border, who since
1993 have been easy targets along the
unprotected bus route to their low-wage
work in U.S.-owned factories in Juarez,
Mexico. After a successful world-pre-
miere of the play at Steppenwolf Theater
in Chicago, Artists Repertory Theater
sought to further develop the play for
Portland audiences, who now have the
opportunity to sit with the neglected sto-
ries on which Gomez based his play.
There is much to admire in the effort.
The play shifts back and forth in time,
before the disappearance of a partic-
ular 16-year-old girl, scrambling our
perception of events and our sense of
the play’s characters -- the disappeared
young woman, her mother, her mother’s
friend (whose own young daughter has
also gone missing) and other women em-
ployed in the same maquiladora.
Without the scrambling, we would
tend to focus more on solving the ques-
photo by K athleen K elly /c ourteSy a rtiStS r ep
Cristi Miles and Naiya Amilcar in ‘La Ruta,’ a harrowing story that gives a voice to
women who have disappeared or been murdered from the border community of
Juarez, Mexico. Plays through Dec. 1 at Portland Opera, 211 S.E. Caruthers St. For
tickets call 503-241-1278 or visit artistsrep.org.
tion of who (in an individual sense) is
responsible for the young woman’s dis-
appearance and would miss the opportu-
nity to experience disorientation which
resonates, if only slightly, with the ex-
perience of the women themselves. As
the play reveals, the women live without
answers, without the information need-
ed to even draw a timeline, let alone to
obtain anything resembling justice. The
materials provided to audiences fill in the
context further: Most of the disappeared
women are young, between the ages of
12 and 22, and most of the bodies recov-
ered show signs of sexual assault. Their
bodies are typically dumped in the desert
or in garbage dumps and sewage ditches,
as though to emphasize that their lives
have no value. They are often women
new to Juarez, who have come from ru-
ral areas to grab the bleakest of economic
opportunities.
The play’s focus is less on plot and
more on the emotional truth of the wom-
en. How do the women deal with the risk
they face going to and from their jobs?
How do they make sense of things that
make no sense? How do they deal with
unrelenting loss and disregard? With un-
answered questions? With the inability to
seek protection without exposing them-
selves to further risk? We spend some
time with them in the factory; we listen to
friends and rivals argue; we watch them
react to fear and despair and exist in a
world in which unthinkable things hap-
pen regularly and no one cares enough to
take effective action.
Shining light on stories of such op-
c ontinued on p age 12