84 pages • 2 hours read
Desert Blood: The Juárez Murders
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Summary and Study Guide
Overview
Desert Blood: The Juárez Murders is a 2005 thriller by American novelist, poet, and essayist Alicia Gaspar de Alba. The novel takes place in 1998 when Juárez, Mexico is experiencing a spate of brutal killings of poor young women and girls, mostly factory workers. The protagonist, Ivon Villa, is a women’s studies professor from Los Angeles who returns to her hometown of El Paso, Texas—just across the border from Juárez—to adopt a baby. When the mother of the unborn baby is murdered, Ivon investigates the murders herself. The disappearance of her younger sister increases desperation to solve the mystery. Ivon discovers a vast conspiracy, involving many levels of government on both sides of the Mexico-United States border, one fueled by sexism, racism, and classism.
Desert Blood was the 2005 winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Best Lesbian Mystery. Though the characters in the novel are fictional, the murders are real; in a disclaimer, Gaspar de Alba writes that she hopes “to expose the horrors of this deadly crime wave as broadly as possible to the English-speaking public” (vi).
Plot Summary
Ivon Villa is a Women’s Studies professor at Saint Ignatius College finishing her dissertation on how bathroom Unlock all 84 pages of this Study Guide Plus, gain access to 8,900+ more expert-written Study Guides. Including features:
