Nasty Women: The Politics of Female Identity in Antonio Ortuño’s La fila india

Abstract

Provoked by the outbreak of femicides in Ciudad Juárez in the 1990s, a wave of socially critical narrative has circulated in Mexico since the turn of the twenty-first century. Taking into account this broader corpus of literature, the article contextualizes Antonio Ortuño’s 2014 novel La fila india within a unique sector of this critical narrative, which highlights the interaction of gender violence and migration. The violent novel exposes an expansive social hierarchy that has developed in response to migration in Mexico, and which discriminates against all women, but targets migrant women in particular. Ortuño steps away from traditional characterizations of the Third World female migrant as a helpless victim, and instead orients his narrative around this figure’s means of achieving agency in the face of intense discrimination and violence. The article demonstrates how Ortuño interweaves systemic, symbolic, and subjective violence and subverts the chingón-chingada relationship in order to offer a pessimistic, but revolutionary view of both Mexican and Central American women’s future in Mexico. By tracing narrative strategies that normalize violence and uncovering Ortuño’s connection of gender and ethnic discrimination, the author invites us to reconsider both the genre of social criticism in Mexico and the politics of female identity in the face of violence.

Keywords

• gender violence
• female identity
• migration
• discrimination
• social criticism
• La fila india
• Antonio Ortuño