Abecedario de Juárez: Alice Leora Briggs

Abecedario de Juárez: Alice Leora Briggs A

becedario de Juárez: An Illustrated Lexicon and a Memento Mori

Inspired by Hans Holbein the Younger’s Alphabet of Death (circa 1520), Alice Leora Briggs drafted in 2010 another alphabet, this one for Ciudad Juárez. In that year, she and Charles Bowden published Dreamland: The Way Out of Juárez, and Julián Cardona, a friend and colleague of both, continued his relentless investigations of life and death in his hometown. Also in 2010, Juárez amassed at least 3,057 murders, defending its reputation as one of the most violent cities in the world.

Birth, then death—no exceptions— there is no deviation from this path. Some deny this reality, or camouflage it in otherworldly ideologies of an afterlife. From beginning to end, the path taken by each life is a mix of well-being, contentment, health, and happiness, all regularly frustrated by sickness, sadness, insecurity, failure, violence, and deterioration. Conflict sweetens these counterpoints and kindles their impact. Coming home from a battle is a bittersweet joy. We humans create conflict and its trimmings as means to endure. Warfare, bloodshed, arguments, torture, murders, massacres, and terrorism are daily fare, feeding an appetite unquenched, unfinished, and often unadorned. Abecedario de Juárez: An Illustrated Lexicon, the collaboration between Alice Leora Briggs and Julián

Cardona, is a visual and literal interrogation of a few years when the vast scale of an entire city’s orchestration of this rhythm drew a world audience. Abecedario de Juárez concentrates its images and narratives on a referendum for power and control in a city on the border between Mexico and the United States. Bullets rather than ballots decide the mandate. The contest is for money, a familiar catalyst. Mortal conflict floods the city’s streets, homes, businesses, hospitals, neighborhoods, churches, bars, restaurants, social-service agencies, every level of government, and that government’s enforcers: the police and military. The conflict is marketed as a dispute among drug traffickers. It is not. The conflict is about amassing wealth and multiplying it through power. In Juárez as in Washington, DC, and many other places, the two walk hand in hand.

Briggs, an artist and writer from Tucson, Arizona, and Cardona, a photojournalist from Juárez, have been friends for years. One evening, another friend and accomplice, Charles Bowden, invites them to dinner in Las Cruces, New Mexico. He suggests that they are working on the same project. Why not team up? With no clear end in sight, they begin an unfettered, decade-long exchange of images and texts, seeking coherence, a narrative, some shared collection of facts and impressions that will illuminate the organization and chaos that doggedly guide Juárez’s evolution of violence.

They write, review, edit, draw, and juggle the words and images of these stories of the city’s violence. They meet for coffee in Juárez at El Coyote Inválido, a few blocks down Avenida Benito Juárez from the Paso del Norte bridge, and next door to the Kentucky Club. They walk and drive the city’s streets, and the sites where innocent bystanders and the not-so-innocent were murdered or buried or tortured or kidnapped or extorted or held hostage—bridges from which corpses were dangled for public display; businesses that were torched as their owners were squeezed for payoffs; the Plaza de Periodista, where severed heads were displayed as a warning; anexos, or rehabilitation centers, where addicts sought redemption; Juárez’s General Hospital, where the dead were rekilled (rematado); and the city morgue. They discover how innocent or collateral damage—a tool of the police, the military, the gangs, and the cartels—parents awe, fear, and pandemonium: resources for maintaining power. Julián records the narratives of the guiltless, the corner drug dealers, the sicarios (hitmen). Alice invents a visual encyclopedia of events, people, places, situations, and allegories. Together, they write and rewrite the stories and slang of the city.

I am married to Alice Leora Briggs. As they work, I speak not, but fear for the lives of my wife and her dear friend. Do they know too much? Are they aggravating the beasts? Are they asking too many unwanted questions? Are they tunneling into passages from which they will not return?

Drawing by drawing, word by word, Alice and Julián press on. After many dozens of drafts, hundreds of drawings, an ever-expanding glossary of Juárez shoptalk, and endless adjustments

Opposite: Alice Leora Briggs, Abecedario de Juárez, 2010, sgraffito drawing on panel, 43” X 79”, courtesy Tia Collection, Santa Fe, NM. Above: Alice Leora Briggs and Juián Cardona, Abecedario de Juárez book cover.

between Spanish and English, they have a manuscript, a book. An editor, Casey Kittrell, studies their fusion and invents a format for it. Like staccato gunfire, the Abecedario explodes in a flurry of serrated sequences of drawing, narrative, and glossary that probe the agencies of power but probably do not weaken them. The book hurtles through publishing approvals. Then, on September 21, 2020, at the age of 60, Julián falls dead on a Juárez street near his favorite café. Grief-stricken, Alice alone bears the weight of revisions and edits—another year of grueling, exhausting, time-consuming steps toward publication. Alice and Julián’s invitation to look deeply at our penchant to inflict pain, absorb suffering, administer torture, and seek succor has deep roots. While violence is not limited to our species—I recall endless television documentaries of vipers or cheetahs or hyenas chasing and feasting on the weak or disoriented—human-on-human escalation of violence is a staple. Endless crucifixions, ritualized dismemberments, brutal warfare, enslaved children, rape, ethnic genocide, and piercing weapons that end life are regular and ongoing themes of, for example, the Christian-based art of Europe in the last millennium. The well-worn phrase that describes the current news media—“if it bleeds, it leads”—has for millennia guided many a literary or artistic exercise. Whether one has a secular or a religious disposition, conflict, violence, and death continue to merit attention. To overlook them is to neglect our humanity.

—Peter S. Briggs

Top to bottom: Alice Leora Briggs, Orejas, sgraffito on clayboard panels, 10” × 48”. Alice Leora Briggs, Orejas II, sgraffito on clayboard panels, 10” × 48”.

Opposite: Alice Leora Briggs, No Enrranflados, sgraffito and wood carving on panel, 43.75” X 25.5”.