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The Norwegian explorer Carl Lumholtz once wrote that the summer heat in the Sonoran Desert felt like “walking between great fires.”1
survey. The fact of the matter is that although this is a crime scene, few people actually care or want to know what has happened here.
ago. Countless citizens today suffer historical amnesia and draw stark divisions between the “noble” European immigrants of the past and Latino border crossers of today.
Border zones become spaces of exception —physical and political locations where an individual’s rights and protections under law can be stripped away upon entrance. Having your body consumed by wild animals is but one of many “exceptional” things that happen in the Sonoran Desert as a result of federal immigration policies.
reduced to bare life—
At the same time, these policies expose noncitizens to a state-crafted geopolitical terrain designed to deter their movement through suffering and death.
The perception that the lives of border crossers are insignificant is reflected in both their treatment by federal immigration enforcement agencies and in the pervasive anti-immigrant discourse,
noncitizens. It is a location “where the controls and guarantees of judicial order can be suspended—the zone where the violence of the state of exception is deemed to operate in the service of ‘civilization.’”
Prior to this strategy, the standard operating procedure had been to try to apprehend border crossers after they had crossed the boundary line.
As one federal agent testified in 1926, the goal of border enforcement was to “at least make attempts to cross the border dangerous and hold illegal entry down to small proportions.”
“As long as the immigration numbers are declining . . . I can live with the border death numbers.”43 The
action. As Stanescu points out, we’ve been fooling ourselves for a long time about just how special we are: “To believe in human exceptionalism requires a certain level of transcendental faith; it requires one to believe that we were set apart from the rest of the world rather than being subjected to the same evolutionary forces as all other living beings.”
follows: First, the Prevention Through Deterrence strategy has created a setting in which the Border Patrol can draw on the agency of animals and other nonhumans to do its dirty work while simultaneously absolving itself of any blame connected to migrant injuries or loss of life.
Labeling migrant deaths an “act of nature” is a convenient way to ignore the hybrid collectif of deterrence that was intentionally set in motion by policy strategists twenty years ago and that continues to function today.
The desert, like the beef slaughterhouse studied by Timothy Pachirat, is a “zone of confinement,” a place no upstanding citizen is supposed to see.
This consolidation, he argues, does not adequately account for the specific ways that death and the right to kill (or let live) are exercised in contemporary forms of political power.
Each one of these endeavors “makes the murder of the enemy its primary and absolute objective.”21 Necropolitics, or killing in the name of sovereignty, is not about abstract notions of reason, truth, or freedom. It’s about the tangibles of life and death: a suspected terrorist disappears forever into the bowels of Guantanamo Bay;
wrote, “The ultimate expression of sovereignty resides, to a large degree, in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die.”
this policy also cleverly increases the degrees of separation between victim and perpetrator.
“If the exercise of sovereignty is tantamount to the prerogative of pursuing war on life, then it is equally pertinent to consider its war on the corpse.”35
necroviolence: violence performed and produced through the specific treatment of corpses that is perceived to be offensive, sacrilegious, or inhumane by the perpetrator, the victim (and her or his cultural group), or both.
necroviolence is specifically about corporeal mistreatment and its generative capacity for violence.
A manipulated dead body can also be a vector for violent messages directed at the living.
Not knowing where your loved one is, if she is dead or alive, is traumatizing and long lasting. This ambiguity “freezes the grief process” and renders closure impossible.54 It is the form of necroviolence that is seemingly without end.
the unique deaths that border crossers experience and the ways nature affects their bodies are a form of postmortem violence that developed out of the underlying logic of Prevention Through Deterrence.
I argue that the postmortem events that affect the bodies of migrants in the desert are a form of necroviolence largely outsourced to nature and the environment but intimately tied to Prevention Through Deterrence, territorial sovereignty, and the exceptional (i.e., killable and disposable) status the US government ascribes to undocumented border crossers.
sight. Like Agamben’s camp, the desert is a remote deathscape where American necropolitics are pecked onto the bones of those we deem excludable.
social and economic factors are the key determinants of trends in migration rates.
“In four . . . studies, we found that fewer than half of migrants who come to the border are apprehended, even once, by the Border Patrol. . . . [T]he apprehension rate found in these studies varied from 24% to 47%. And of those who are caught, all but a tiny minority eventually get through—between 92 and 98 percent, depending on the community of origin. If migrants do not succeed on the first try, they almost certainly will succeed on the second or third try.”
Operation Streamline, a southern-border program that, instead of allowing someone to voluntarily return to their country of origin, routes nonviolent immigration law breakers through the federal criminal justice system.
over. Although ATEP officially began only in 2008, the practice of shipping deportees to exotic towns to spatially and socially dislocate them dates back to at least the 1950s and has long been recognized as having violent consequences.
“You show me a 50-foot wall and I’ll show you a 51-foot ladder at the border. That’s the way the border works.”
Despite the evidence that the border wall is no match for catapults, car jacks, and other forms of human ingenuity, the United States can’t seem to shake the fixation that building more of it will somehow solve many of our country’s economic and social problems. Politicians
Playing on the fears that many conservative Americans hold regarding brown-skinned invaders ruining their economy, destroying their neighborhoods, and killing citizens is a tried-and-true political strategy.
only 351 miles (18%) of the 1,954 miles that make up the US-Mexico border have anything resembling a wall.
Ask any Border Patrol agent or migrant about the wall, and they will tell you the same thing: it doesn’t stop migration.
If the estimate that between 92 and 98 percent of all unauthorized border crossers eventually get through is even remotely accurate,28 it makes you wonder what the billions of dollars spent annually on boundary security actually does.
“Para los Mexicanos no hay fronteras [For Mexicans there are no borders]. We will keep trying until we cross. We have faith in la Virgen de Guadalupe to help us. Unfortunately, sometimes your body can’t keep up with your faith.”
backdrop, I have shown that an archaeology of undocumented migration can provide new insights into border crossings and can improve our understanding of both the different types of engagements people have with the desert hybrid collectif and the material traces of these interactions.
Immigrants are tolerated when they do the jobs that citizens won’t, but the American public has little interest in hearing their voices, preserving their history, or affording them any rights. This “exceptionalism” pervades all aspects of undocumented life and calls into question our country’s notion of democracy.
I will point out that the deaths that migrants experience in the Sonoran Desert are anything but dignified. That is the point. This is what “Prevention Through Deterrence” looks like. These photographs should disturb us, because the disturbing reality is that right now corpses lie rotting on the desert floor and there aren’t enough witnesses. This invisibility is a crucial part of both the suffering and the necroviolence that emerge from the hybrid collectif.
“power operates through the creation of distance and concealment and [where] our understandings of ‘progress’ and ‘civilization’ are inseparable from, and perhaps even synonymous with, the concealment (but not elimination) of what is increasingly rendered physically and morally repugnant.”
The mothers of missing Central American migrants who have spent years traversing the country looking for any sign of their children can attest that the Mexican hybrid collectif is capable of producing its own unique forms of necroviolence.21
I don’t want this life and I don’t know what to do. —Marisela Esqueda, “Sin El”
She entered the desert hybrid collectif as just another “body” to be deterred and apprehended by Border Patrol. Upon death and discovery she was reanimated as a person and a citizen to be repatriated swiftly.
On June 2, 2013, the Sonoran Desert did what Border Patrol strategists wanted it to do. It deterred José Tacuri from entering into the United States.
This erasure was not, however, an “accident” or act of nature. It was part of a clearly laid out federal security plan, whose efficacy is measured by how many people it “deters.”
Desert necroviolence for them is both ethereal and inescapable.
Rather than blaming or judging José’s family, perhaps we can attempt to put ourselves in their position and try to imagine what life must be like when these are the types of decisions one must make.
as long as there have been desperate people who can’t make a living wage in their home country and a need for cheap labor in the United States, migrants have been willing to cross the border regardless of the cost.
