Fuerza Feminista: Confronting Intersectional Data Violence by Archiving the Movement Against Antifeminicides in the Paso del Norte Region

ABSTRACT For over 30 years, the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua bordering Texas and New Mexico has experienced and witnessed multiple forms of violence across its rural and urban regions. Communities are besieged with cartel and gender‐based violence and the saturation of international corporations that pay less than livable wages for workers in Ciudad Juárez. An overwhelming amount of attention has focused on Ciudad Juárez for cases of feminicide pointing to the early 1990s as a period when families of disappeared and murdered women, activists, human rights defenders, journalists, academics, and national and international human rights regimes clamored over the hundreds of women and girls who disappeared and were never found or whose remains were located near or within Ciudad Juárez. Concentrated attention was given to the feminicides at that time, but over the years, less focus has been given to the galvanizing efforts of local people to demand responses from authorities to resolve these atrocities. This article focuses on our efforts since 2019, to digitally chronicle the now 30‐year movement and continued struggle to end feminicide and gender‐based violence in Chihuahua by families of disappeared and feminicide victims, activists, human rights defenders, journalists, and other key figures. Our transborder digital humanities project, Fuerza Feminista: Intimate Recovery of Memory Archive (FFIRMA) , collects analog and digital materials and oral history interviews from movement participants using a methodology we have termed “transborder digital archeology.” We have tasked ourselves, as a digital humanities scholar and as a feminist border scholar‐activist, both originally from the Paso del Norte region (Chihuahua, Texas, and New Mexico), to begin the process of moving across international geopolitical borders to work with families, activists, human rights defenders, and others to engage in what we call a transborder digital archeology. Through our work with Fuerza Feminista , we also discuss concepts that we have coined like “intersectional data violence” and “intimate archiving,” describe in detail later in this article, as additional tools and methodologies for feminist data and digital humanities scholars, activist‐scholars, and others to utilize when documenting and analyzing crimes against humanity. In this article, we will also discuss the proliferation beyond the local level of prominent feminist digital data projects on a global scale to end gender‐based violence. We provide a curated list and an analysis of certain projects that encapsulate the efforts of digital activism doing the work of counting feminicides (D'Ignazio 2024) and gender‐violence data, that generate counter data or the memory work of documenting feminist social movement in the Americas.