The Land of Open Graves: Understanding the Current Politics of Migrant Life and Death along the US/Mexico Border

press release: Since the mid-1990s, the U.S. federal government has relied on a border enforcement strategy known as “Prevention Through Deterrence.” Using various security infrastructure and techniques of surveillance, this strategy funnels undocumented migrants towards remote and rugged terrain such as the Sonoran Desert of Arizona with the hope that mountains ranges, extreme temperatures, and other “natural” obstacles will deter people from unauthorized entry. Hundreds of people perish annually while undertaking this dangerous activity. Since 2009, the Undocumented Migration Project has used a combination of forensic, archaeological, and ethnographic approaches to understand the various forms of violence that characterize the social process of clandestine migration. In this presentation I focus on what happens to the bodies of migrants who die in the desert. I argue that the way that bodies decompose in this environment is a form of hidden political violence that has deep ideological roots and demonstrate how the post-mortem destruction of migrant corpses creates devastating forms of long-lasting trauma.

Jason De Leon is Professor of Anthropology and Chicana, Chicano, and Central American Studies at UCLA. He is Executive Director of the Undocumented Migration Project, a research-arts-education collective that seeks to document and raise awareness about the experiences of clandestine migrants, and President of the Board of Directors for the Colibri Center for Human Rights, a non-profit that seeks to identify and repatriate the remains of people who have died while migrating through the Sonoran Desert of Arizona. De Leon is the author of the award winning book "The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail" and is a 2017 MacArthur Fellow. He is currently working on a book project called "Soldiers and Kings", an ethnography of the lives of Honduran smugglers crossing Mexico. 

All attendees will be required to wear masks for the duration of the event.