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Ciudad Juarez is a poor factory town in Mexico notable for the ridiculously high percentage of violent crimes against women. Women in Juarez live in fear of rape and murder as they toil away their lives in hell-like factories, an existence that I cannot imagine. And now, a U.S. cosmetics line owned by Estee Lauder and Rodarte have released products named “Quinceanera,” “Ghost Town,” “Factory,” and “Juarez.”
MAC is taking a lot of heat for glamorizing a drug-addled, violence-prone place. Especially disturbing is the fact that fashion house Rodarte is headed by part-Mexican sisters Kate and Laura Mulleavy who openly admitted that Juarez was an inspiration for a recent clothes line as well …
… as the MAC cosmetics.
Criticism is strong, with writers such as Mexican resident Sarah Menkedick speaking out on the site Women’s Rights:
In a sweep of total insouciance, for chic U.S. women, ‘Factory’ is an abstract consumable concept, a shade of mint frost, whereas for Mexican women in maquiladoras, it’s a sweaty, oppressive place where they’re frequently harassed, threatened, raped, and killed.
There seems to be an impression of Americans as lazy, self-obsessed people of the sort who appear on Jerry Springer. This action by a U.S. company encouraging women to wear freaking lipstick named after a Mexican ghetto certainly doesn’t do much to change that image.
I mean, I’m well-educated (on paper, anyway) and I had never heard of Ciudad Juarez until I started researching for this article [Ed. Note: I ended up there by accident once while on a drunken jaunt with friends in Austin, Texas] … and the driving force of said research was the pretty appalling schtick of using words with a foreign flair to sell make-up. I’m kind of ashamed of my own ignorance.
Anyway.
Yeah, you can view pics of Rodarte’s fashion line “inspired by workers in Mexican maquiladoras walking half-asleep to the factories in Juarez, after dressing in the dark” here.
Clearly the models’ attire looks very much like that worn by the Mexican women hard at work in the photo above. And if you’re missing the sarcasm there, it doesn’t. A bit.
In response to the criticism, MAC said in a statement posted on Facebook on Friday that it will donate all global profits from the limited-edition make-up line to a “newly created initiative to raise awareness and provide on-the-ground support to the women and girls in Juarez.”
The statement came after a meeting in Mexico City between MAC officials and representatives of Mexico’s commission on violence against women, the cosmetics company said. “MAC executives reiterated their deep regret and reinforced that it was never MAC’s or Rodarte’s intent to minimize the suffering of the women and girls of Ciudad Juarez.”
The MAC and Rodarte companies said they would be renaming the products.
You know, that’s great and all, but I’m not sure it’s enough. There is such a thing as going too far, and issuing an apology merely because you got caught with your pants down is just not going to change the fact that you were insensitive enough to do it in the first place.
And maybe that’s the real problem here, that people actually thought it was okay to create fashion and cosmetics based around a place where women are oppressed and unsafe. Most frightening of all is that it must have gotten the okay from a fairly lengthy list of execs along the way. Did nobody raise any sort of concern that this was a very sick sort of exploitation?
Guess not.
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This is disgusting. Spain has always had very strong links with Mexico so most people here know about Ciudad Juárez and what is going on there. The fact that anyone would ever do anything to make money out of these women’s situation is disturbing. The murder and rape figures there are out of the scale. It is really worrying, and quite frankly, I would expect MAC to know better. Also, in a more heartless, capitalist note, why associate your brand with a place where people are dirt poor? There is a reason why brands always come from Paris or New York and not Ciudad Juárez.
As long as they’re donating the profits, I have no problem with it. I don’t think this form of exploitation is different from many of the other things the fashion/beauty industry does. Have you seen the names of Urban Decay’s makeup lately? Asphyxia, Stalker, Last Call, Minx, Jailbait, Perversion and Ecstacy are just a few. Ditto for Nars: names include Savage, Indian Summer, and even one named Trinidad. Trinidad, according the Nations Encyclopedia, contains “deprived inner-city ghettos such as Laventille, where the poorest members of society live. It is here, in areas of ramshackle shacks and self-built cinder-block houses, that the worst problems of poverty, unemployment, and crime grow unabated. Unemployment is worst among the 15-19 age group, of whom an estimated 43 percent are out of work. This has contributed to an alarming rise in violent crime, much of it connected with drugs and gang warfare.”
I’m not saying all of these names are the same level as this Juarez thing, just pointing out that they *are* exploiting more general concepts like violence against women, statutory rape, drugs, etc. And I would venture to guess that most cosmetics companies have colors named after places with exploited and impoverished people dealing with horrifying amounts of violence.
Estee Lauder and Rodarte are hardly the only companies to capitalize on the exoticism and edginess invoked by the names of impoverished places, so it seems really narrow-minded to pick out just those companies for a tongue-lashing. This is a far bigger problem than just a couple of companies. Every single cosmetics and fashion company in the US, with very few exceptions, is guilty of it. And they are guilty of far more direct exploitation by outsourcing work to sweatshops in less regulated countries and paying less than living wage to the workers who are making their products, as well as exposing them to hazardous working conditions. That seems like a much more valid reason to become outraged than being offended by the fact that the name of something invokes the dangers of that region. And I would suspect that some people are using this as a guise to hide the fact that they’re really just outraged that they have to be confronted with the reality of Juarez when they don’t want to be bothered by trivial matters like poverty and exploitation during their incredibly important binge of consumerism at the mall.
[...] rest is here: Fashion and Cosmetics Line Exploits Working Mexican Women in … Tags: actually-thought, and-cosmetics, and-unsafe-, are-oppressed, based-around, must-have, okay, [...]
Except for the Rodarte Fashion house, it sounds as if these people knew as much about this area as the rest of us (Miree excluded).
Rodarte is responsible more than anyone else, in my opinion. The sisters are part Mexican, they actually came u p with the advertising/design concept.
MAC has done the humane thing by donating the profits to help the women in Juarez.
Think about this. How many consumer goods are produced in Meico that were formerly made n the US? Eleventy billion or so? As an example – we now have washers and dryers being manufactured in Mexico. The workers there are making about $7 per day. SEVEN DOLLARS per DAY.
They not only cannot afford to purchase the goods that they are making, if they got them for free – they would still lack the electricity and running water necessary to use them! Yes, I am generalizing – I’m certain more than one has utilities that we take for granted.
There is so much more wrong here than just the beauty industry.
This whole thing is ridiculous. I’ve lived along the US-Mexico border my entire life. While our sister city is nowhere near as violent as Juarez (although things have taken a horrible turn of late thanks to the cartels), that Mac and these two so-called “part Mexican” designers would even consider naming a line of clothing or make-up after a city where hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of women have anonymously been raped, murdered, and disposed of is not tasteless — it’s downright disrespectful. It also shows they don’t know the real Mexico. Border cities are the least representative of the country, unless you only want to focus on the devastation and crime brought about by NAFTA and the American drug trade. These women are about as Mexican as a bag of M&M’s, and their ignorance makes that abundantly clear. Donating money (some reports said it was up to $100,000) is hardly the solution. Maybe before they design their next line, Kabul, they should do a little research. Idiots.
That was my thought as well. For Mexican women, they seem woefully out of touch. Although you phrased it far better. Hehe, M&Ms.
[...] on Fashion and Cosmetic Line Exploits Working Mexican Women in Ciudad Juarez “These women are about as Mexican as a bag of [...]
Naming stuff is hard, they’re trying to sell a product in a highly competitive industry. Here is a question, what if this publicity causes the product line to flop. Hurting the company’s bottom line, causing the layoff of workers. Will the same sob story slinging loudmouths that harp on the hard lives of these women (and I note that the loudmouths don’t actually live those lives) cough up any money for them? How about following some advice from a man? Ready? Here it is; If you have a problem with how life is for these chicks, DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT!!! Give money to/start a college fund so they (or their children) can get educations and better lives. If you have the means, build a factory in the town that pays a living wage. Give to Doctors Without Borders, join one of those bleeding-heart groups that goes to hellholes and digs wells or teaches kids to read. DO SOMETHING!!! Contrary to popular belief flapping your gums is not helping, helping is helping. I would help, but I don’t care.
I live in El Paso, Texas, across the border from Juarez. On most days I can see it from anywhere in town. There are roughly 2.5 million people in Juarez and 536,000-ish in El Paso. The best view of the poverty and ghettos are from Interstate 10. But you also see some houses that look American also. A big part of why there are human rights issues and women’s issues in Juarez is because of the drug cartels. For that reason, many residents come across the border every day and get a job in El Paso, go to one of the local hospitals for “free” care, and collect welfare or other state benefits. Mexico in general is just not a great place to live, and not just for women.
Frankly, Rodarte and MAC brought main stream attention to the situation in Juarez, whether willingly or not. As a lot of you just said, before the hubub you haven’t heard of the missing girls of Juarez. And now you know.
“missing girls of Juarez” Is crap, just more feminist propaganda. Sure “pretty girls trafficked for prostitution” makes good headlines and scared up money for feminist groups but files in the face of common sense. Just look at the U.K. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/oct/20/government-trafficking-enquiry-fails What these groups don’t say and should be obvious to all but the most foolish is that prostitution is a business. What is more cost effective to buy an product imported at great risk from half a world away (along with the associated costs and risks). Or to just hire independent contractors close to home for a fraction of the price and virtually no risk? Let me answer the two questions that common sense should have answered for you. Q: “were are the girls of Juarez” A: ether dead from drugs or cartels or riding the first man they found with a ticket out of Juarez. Q: “why do so many women who are arrested for prostitution claim to trafficked? A: what do you expect them to say “I am to lazy to find a real job and prefer to lie on my back and get high?” and it can’t be that the hookers are lying. Because everybody knows that no one is more honest than a prostitute.
[...] the need for border states to have immigration policies. I totally get that. If I lived near the Mexican border, it’s entirely possible that I would look at this differently, and I completely admit [...]