I screened Ghost Dog in my English class this week. Today we watched the last half of the film, from Ghost Dog's defense of his boss, Louie, to the climactic ending on the street in front of Raymond's ice cream truck when Ghost Dog hands Louie his copy of Hagakure. It was interesting to see the film again after watching Senorita Extraviada last night. Suddenly I was more aware of the violence in the film. Each assassination, even those presented with humor, made me cringe.

It's so easy to get accustomed to seeing one killing after another. Our eyes see them on the TV or movie screen and our minds dismiss them. We hear about real murders and dismiss them nearly as quickly, it seems. At least when they are distant from us, in another town, another country. It's not so easy when they're close to home. When we got back to New Orleans two months ago, we met a man through a mutual friend who, like many of our friends down here, was writing his dissertation. Two weeks later he and his mother were murdered in their home a few miles from where we live. A tenant of theirs, it's assumed (no one's been arrested), was angry over a dispute over rent or something equally meaningless. He stabbed them both, set fire to the house afterwards in an attempt to cover the evidence, then fled.

I didn't know him well, had only met him once. The days following his murder, he was another statistic for the local paper in their weekly tally of violence, written about in a brief article and then forgotten. New Orleans is a rough city. Its danger is notorious and murders are common enough to seem, dare I say it, ordinary. Even so, I'm still haunted by the story of his murder. His house sat on the street I travel down to get to school. I look at the houses every day wondering which one was his: the one with two "For Rent" signs, or the one with the closed shutters, the dark windows? Why can't I tell which one was his? Would I really want to know if I could?

I've often wondered how a place is affected by the violence that occured there. I read a book years ago about Boudicca, the Celtic warrior queen who defended England from the Romans for a brief moment before they were conquered. One account of her sack of the Romans' Londinium said there was so much blood shed during the battle that a "red layer" was present for years afterward. Nearly two thousand years later, archaeologists confirmed the "red layer," a visible geological stratum marking the place of death.

I wonder, does the land itself remember? Beyond visible changes to the earth, is there a fundamental change to the landscape? Something not visible but there nonetheless? I think probably not, though I wish there was. It seems there ought to be something in the land itself to remind us, some sort of presence that keeps the memory of the events alive in our minds. But there's no "red layer" in Juarez; it's desert. And the houses on Carrollton look the same as they always did, their gangly live oaks stretching out over the street, their overgrown bushes pushing out from water-soaked lawns.

I just got home from seeing Senorita Extraviada (Missing Young Woman) at Tulane University. It's a documentary about Juarez, Mexico, the city across the Rio Grande from El Paso where hundreds of women and girls have been raped and murdered since 1990. As you'd expect, it was a powerful film.

I first read about the murdered women of Juarez in Harper's back in 1995. It was an article by Charles Bowden, an investigative journalist out of Tucson who later wrote a book, Juarez: The Laboratory of Our Future, detailing much of the violence of Juarez. He traveled with several street photographers through Mexico's most notorious city, following them to the desert where bodies had risen up out of the sand, and into the colonias where young men had died trying to steal electricity, their charred bodies hanging from electric wires. The book is, most of all, an indictment of NAFTA and our ongoing role in the suffering of Juarez' poor.

The movie focuses mainly on the families of a handful of victims, but also discusses some of the political issues surrounding the murders, in particular the corruption of the local and federal police agencies and the overwhelming power of both the narcotraffickers and the maquiladoras (the foreign-owned factories that lure young women from pueblitos with the promise of cash). The movie points out that most of the narcotics are headed to the US just as most of the maquiladoras are American-owned.

The young girls, shuffled to and from work in buses, often before dawn and after dusk, are paid the typical Mexican minimum wage: 42 pesos/day (about $4). They live in neighborhoods that spring up from nothing, in houses made of cardboard scraps or broken-up pallets. There is no running water, there are no sewers. Though many of the girls are school-age, they work instead of study. They are kidnapped at all hours of the day. The government shifts blame of the murders from suspect to suspect, though they rarely arrest anyone. An Egyptian national was blamed first (even for murders that occured when he was in jail -- supposedly he paid gangs to murder the women for him), then they blamed narco gangs, then a handful of busdrivers. Men are brought in, the governor gets his photo-op and declares the murder spree over. Inevitably, tragically, another girl is found dead a day or two later. Meanwhile, the families paint the city with black crosses, warding off the evil as they remind everyone of their losses.

I wrote an essay about this in graduate school back in 1997 and a prose poem last year. The poem's from a series of "Our Lady of the New Millenium" poems. It's heartbreaking to see that nothing has changed except the number of murdered, which seems to rise as inevitably as the sun does each morning. The girls still go to the maquiladoras, the maquiladoras still eat them up. Their broken bodies are scattered across the desert; their fingerprints still wet on our TVs, our VWs.