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

by Jason De León

Foucault’s concept of biopower to conflate politics, war, racism, and homicide to the point that they become difficult to disentangle and interrogate individually.

Necropolitics, or killing in the name of sovereignty, is not about abstract notions of reason, truth, or freedom.

The federal government doesn’t call the policy killing; they call it deterring, and justify it as the cost of guarding the homeland. The fact that this violence has been outsourced to mountains, extreme temperatures, and thousands of square miles of uninhabited terrain does not mean these fatalities should be characterized as “unintended consequences” or natural events.

where human and constitutional rights are suspended in the name of security.

justified by a person’s lack of citizenship (i.e., exceptional status), his or her commission of a civil offense, and the hypocritical desire to protect the United States from the very people we rely on to pick our strawberries, pluck our chickens, and valet-park our cars.

sovereign territory, undocumented people are killable in the...

this violence can be united in feeling morally superior while ridiculing them.41 In moments of war, the desecration of the enemy’s body is practically a cultural universal.42

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.

body mistreatment is a recurrent theme in the construction of state authority and sovereignty,

Eradicating flesh and bone is now part of the postmodern “politics of disappearance.”

ambiguous loss, a loss that remains unclear.53

This ambiguity “freezes the grief process” and renders closure impossible.

violence that can be easily outsourced to animals, nature, or technology. Feeding someone to the dogs, leaving a person to rot on the battlefield, incinerating bodies in an oven:

Differential treatment or deposition of remains reflects the beliefs and attitudes of the agents involved. —Komar 2008:123

inhibits the performance of culturally appropriate burial procedures and rites.85

destroyed or incomplete corpse is seen as a threat to the afterlife in that it may stop people from rising from the dead to be judged at the end of time.86

to be an inhumane handling of remains even for secular people or some enemies.

the current death tally for the desert undercounts the actual number of people who die out there.

2006 Government Accountability Office report titled Border Crossing Deaths Have Doubled Since 1995: “The fact that a number of bodies may remain undiscovered in the desert also raises doubts about the accuracy of counts of migrant deaths. . . . [T]he total number of bodies that have not been found is ultimately unknown.”91

adopted and repurposed the term desaparecidos to refer to those swallowed up by the desert and never heard from again.92

The federal government has knowingly created a border security infrastructure that puts people in harm’s way.

The vultures eating flesh and ripping clothes represent the final stage of “deterrence”

Like Agamben’s camp, the desert is a remote deathscape where American necropolitics are pecked onto the bones of those we deem excludable.

have amplified the visual messages sent to those both inside and outside the settlement while also reinforcing the symbolic exclusion of those whose body parts were treated in this manner.”

Many of the men I spoke to told their hard-luck tales through the lens of chingaderas because they knew that I would understand the nuances of this linguistic frame.11 This

Moreover, many of those who have written about chingaderas, at least in the classic literature on border culture, have tried to delegitimize its cultural importance and reduce it to simple linguistic manifestations of sexual anxiety, humiliation, and macho aggression.

In 1986, the US Congress passed the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), which provided approximately 2 million undocumented people with Permanent Resident Status (i.e., “green cards”).19

major misconceptions

if the government spends enough money on fences, drone planes, motion sensors, and Border Patrol agents and makes the crossing process treacherous enough, people will eventually stop coming. Close to two decades of research has shown that boundary enforcement efforts play only a minimal role in discouraging people from attempting to cross the border and that social and economic factors are the key determinants of trends in migration rates.24

slowing of migration to “putting more boots on the southern border,” President Obama would have been more correct had he connected the decrease in unauthorized crossing rates to the effects of the economic crisis that began in 2008,

In sum, seeing the fortified border as a formidable and dangerous obstacle course does not deter would-be migrants.26

These data suggest that people know that the geopolitical boundary is more dangerous than ever before, but that this knowledge has relatively little impact on their decision to undertake a crossing.

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.”27

the security in place between the United States and Mexico has always been relatively ineffective at keeping people out.28

federal agencies invested in using the fear of foreign invaders and the image of a porous border as both a political smokescreen to distract the American public from other economic and foreign policy issues

easy way to systematically generate funds for t...

become fully integrated into the undocumented labor force in the United States and sees returning penniless to his family in Mexico after years of being away a failure.

limited education and the lack of economic opportunities in his country of birth,

His desire to stay in the United States so that he could send money home to his children came at a high cost. He hasn’t seen his kids in more than ten years, and it is clear that his status as a serial border crosser is a source of shame and embarrassment for him.

For ten dollars you can eat for three days in the US. You can’t do that with 100 pesos in Mexico. That is like food for one day and very little food at that. Then if you have a family it doesn’t last for nothing. In the US there are more possiblities to do things. You can survive.

he has no identification card and thus can’t open a bank account.

fluctuating demand for undocumented labor. When work was plentiful, he could send some money home.

The experience of being caught between the pull of a semi–living wage working in the often exploitative US undocumented labor force and the shame of returning to Mexico penniless is common for many male Mexican migrants.29

Binational Migration Institute (BMI) in 2006 found that women were 2.67 times more likely to die of exposure than were men.

tendency of smugglers to perceive women as liabilities while en route, which may increase the likelihood of their being abandoned.3

women made up 18 percent of the 2,238 bodies examined by the Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner between 1990 and 2012.4

between 2000 and 2005, women accounted for as much as 23 percent of all ...

“violence will increase as effects of strategy are felt.”

The federal government perpetuates the myopic view that the US-Mexico border is a bounded ethereal space where the violence of immigration enforcement tactics can be contained, hidden, or erased.

those who feel the brutal effects of federal policy are “unreal”;