A History of Violence

Maya Goded and Mayra Martell are two Mexico City–based photographers who chronicle the stories of families whose daughters have been murdered or disappeared in Ciudad Juárez. Martell has worked her whole life—first in Juárez, her hometown, and then across Latin America—on the identities and vestiges of young women who are absent, yet present in the places they used to inhabit. She has also documented those affected by other forms of violence, such as the mothers of people murdered by the Colombian Army or the everyday nature of drug culture in Sinaloa.

In turn, Goded’s work has been, as she describes it herself, “exploring the subjects of female sexuality, prostitution, and gender violence in a society in which the role of women is narrowly defined and femininity is shrouded in myths of chastity, fragility, and motherhood.” Goded has done so by photographing sex workers in Mexico City and on the U.S.-Mexico border, Afro-Mexican communities, and traditional Indigenous healers defending their territory.

In this conversation, Goded and Martell speak with Mexican journalist Marcela Turati about their work portraying the violence suffered by women, how they deal with the pain they photograph, their hesitations and lessons learned, and the conflicts surrounding their lives in Mexico, a country where people continue to disappear—more than forty thousand in the past twelve years.

Marcela Turati: Maya, how did you discover and decide to explore violence against women? And Mayra, how did you decide to go deeper and explore the same issue in your hometown, having grown up in Ciudad Juárez?

: I am the daughter of a single mother of two, who juggled two jobs. It was very hard to see how the rest of the family and our environment treated her. I noticed violence right then. In Ciudad Juárez, I learned how to treat people very lovingly because you never know what others might be going