The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail

by Jason De León

Death lay there like a casual summer breeze.

He was right. I would ask migrants the following day about the dead body in the field three hundred feet from the Grupo Beta Office, and no one would know what I was talking about.

This book is about the violence and death that border crossers face on a daily basis as they attempt to enter the United States without authorization by walking across the vast Sonoran Desert of Arizona.

The goal is to render invisible the innumerable consequences this sociopolitical phenomenon has for the lives and bodies of undocumented people.

In what follows, I bring into focus the logic and human cost of the US border enforcement monster known as “Prevention Through Deterrence,” a strategy that largely relies on rugged and desolate terrain to impede the flow of people from the south.

“Prevention Through Deterrence” (PTD) was first deployed in El Paso, Texas.

the American federal government has turned their sacred landscape into a killing field, a massive open grave.

The primary theme of this book is violence: how it is constructed in the desert, its productive nature from the perspective of those benefiting from it, and how its victims come to know its destructiveness.

can be generally characterized as a form of structural violence.

First is the proposition that nonhumans (e.g., the desert) play a major role in this process (see chapter 2) and should be considered crucial elements of the Border Patrol’s enforcement strategy. The second argument is that the types of death people experience in the desert reflect their precarious political position and that the postmortem biographies of their corpses provide insight into the production of trauma that has a hemispheric reach.

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.

It clearly and publicly states that one way for the government to measure the efficacy of PTD is via a migrant body count.

How can we begin to understand the structure

of a wall of deterrence that is equal parts human, animal, plant, object, geography, temperature, and unknown?

The

human tendency is to ascribe agency strictly to those entities able to make choices, attribute significance to their choices, and then evaluate those choices.

Rather than being viewed as a key partner in the border enforcement strategy, the desert is framed as a ruthless beast that law enforcement cannot be responsible for.

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 connect...

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:

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.

Unfortunately, sometimes your body can’t keep up with your faith.”

I put these archaeological data into direct conversation with the narratives of Lucho and Memo’s final border crossing. My intent is to superimpose an ethnographic scale of analysis,

I am appalled that you could even consider publishing an article like The Journey to El Norte. It casts a romantic light on illegal immigration. To compare these criminals to the millions of Europeans who immigrated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries is an insult to their memories and efforts to give their children better lives. My grandparents came to this country legally. They wanted no handouts, learned English, and eventually owned their own company. To document the trash heaps of these current illegal immigrants as artifacts, as if they are

sacred, is beyond credibility.

The less extreme manifestations of exceptionalism should not be dismissed as unimportant. They can and do have devastating effects on the individuals and communities subjected to them. They raise important questions about the depth and breadth of our professed democratic values and about how we attribute worth to human beings with or without documents and citizenship. . . . This exceptionalism works its way into people’s daily lives, affecting their most basic elements of existence and relationships. It creates a group of people set off from the rest of society, considered “others” and at least potential enemies of the rest of the population.28

These photos thus make visible the human impact of a United States border enforcement policy intended to kill people, and they provide compelling evidence that we don’t need to go to “exotic” places to get “full frontal views of the dead and dying.”10 The dead live in our backyard; they are the human grist for the sovereignty machine. You need only “luck” to catch a glimpse of the dead before they are erased by the hybrid collectif.

women typically make up less than 15 percent of the undocumented migration stream in any given year.