so much violence!

I'm with Adrienne on not fully understanding the argument of engendering in Margolles's works. Amy Sara Carroll had me sighing and rolling my eyes multiple times throughout my reading of her article. I do have a question, though, about Margolles's pieces: If we are considering her work to be performative, is it more effective with the element of site-specificity, as in "Bathing the Baby" and "Self-Portraits in the Morgue," or with the implied existence of dead bodies, as in "Vaporization"and "Operativo: Part 2"?

After watching the interview with Charles Bowden, I began to wonder about the people from Ciudad Juarez who flee north to the United States... How is it possible that any or many of them will ever become legal citizens of the United States? If you're a refugee (fleeing your country because of persecution or fear of persecution from the government or a group the government is unable or unwilling to control, as seems to be the case in Juarez), your main goal is to enter the country and apply for asylum. But the laws of asylum as they currently stand are such that, if the condition you fear is a condition everybody in your country reasonably fears, you won't be granted asylum. If there's nothing particular about you (race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group or political opinion) that causes a social body to persecute you, you have no shot. With uniformly bad country conditions and thus without many hopes for asylum (unless, of course, they lie about other types of persecution), where can these refugees turn? I guess this is more of a technical question than a theoretical one. I just am really curious about it.

In "The World's Most Dangerous Gang," it's said that the United States, in attempting to rid itself of gang problems, deported gang members and thus facilitated the spread of gang violence into Latin America, thus creating a stronger, more viral problem. Is there a case imaginable in which it would seem a good idea, ethically and/or tactically, for the U.S. to funnel its problems into third world countries and hope for a solution?