Like an abandoned crime scene, empty water bottles, torn clothing and backpacks lie motionless across the hot desert sand. Someone was here, and they clearly left suddenly. There is an eeriness to these abandoned artifacts: a lone shoe, a brightly colored blanket, an empty packet of crisps. This wide, cacti-filled space, so barren and yet so violent. The Sonoran Desert is a liminal weapon of invisible destruction. Homo Sacer passes through in Nike t-shirts with United Colors of Benetton backpacks. A lack of paperwork renders these humans bare life. Young men. Dead mothers. Broken lives.
This place is a state of exception. These are exceptional people.
On June 28 2012 three students walked into the desert on a field trip. They were there to learn about the ways of those who attempted to cross the border between Mexico and the United States. It was the brightly colored blanket hanging in a tree they noticed first. The corpse laying beside it. They weren’t meant to find a corpse. They had interrupted the desert in the midst of its assigned task: the erasure of all evidence of violence. Nothing was meant to be left behind.
The corpse was a mother of two. Her name was Maricela.
Violence is weaved into the very fabric of Jason de León’s The Land of Open Graves. In sharing the stories of undocumented migrants attempting to cross the border, De León affords what he calls a ‘pastiche of perspectives’. These perspectives are viewed through the lens of a specific political lever: the US policy of Prevention Through Deterrence (PTD). Introduced in 1994, PTD builds on the “deterrence-displacement” strategy of 1993.
This revised strategy increases the use of technologies, including those that funnel undocumented migrants into hostile territory. On closer examination, PTD is not just an apparatus of prevention, but an apparatus of political and economic gain. The movement of undocumented migrants is an industrial complex. The US spent $14.8 billion and recruited 30,000 agents in the 2012 US fiscal year alone. Whatever your views, this is big business.
The desert is an actor in a multi-species carnival of horrors. A non-human weapon of human politics. A place where our passion for drawing lines on maps, and around people, is played out in a political theatre. It affords a tragedy of absurd proportions wrapped in hypocrisies, contradictions and paradoxes so insidious that when sewn together you cannot see the seams.
Boundaries are a paradox. They simultaneously unite and divide. The past three years have clearly demonstrated how walls and checkpoints are politically, economically and socially charged. Boundaries change people. They change behaviour and they change relationships. They can create a strong sense of belonging while also hiding an underbelly of ‘otherness’ beneath a rhetoric of inclusion. While we are appalled by the chanting of ‘build that wall’ on one side of the world, we so easily chant ‘ring fence that suburb’ in our own locked down backyard. And in a similar vein, while we want that wall patrolled and secured, we also want exemptions granted for those who deliver our food, clean our streets or play Australian Rules Football.
Michel Foucault moved into my spare bedroom last year. Or he may as well have, given how often his name appears in my anthropology studies. For those who do not know of Foucault’s work, he is most often seen holding hands with the term ‘biopower’, which can be described as the traditional articulation of sovereignty and power in reverse. It governs on both biological and social terms (individuals and populations). De León posits that by intervening in South American economic policy the United States governs how undocumented migrants live, and by funnelling them into hostile terrain, it lets them die. The biological and social become mutually implicated and indistinguishable. Power no longer lets you live, and makes you die. Rather, it makes you live and lets you die.
De León’s multi-species ethnography demonstrates how violence is often structural. Born of deeply embedded chains of causation, it hides in places invisible to the naked eye, beneath political narratives of national sovereignty and plausible deniability.
All that is visible, is not all that is.
Ref: De León, J 2015 The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on The Migrant Trail, University of California Press, Oakland, California
Image: Ruedi Häberli via Unsplash