1. DHS is a cabinet department of the United States federal government created following the events of September 11, 2001. It absorbed twenty-two agencies including the Immigration and Naturalization Service, which had previously housed the Border Patrol. Three new agencies were created to deal with immigration issues: U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), which includes the Border Patrol; Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which typically handles things like deportations and trade regulations; and United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), which processes administrative issues related to citizenship.
2. Falcón 2001; Hsieh 2014; Ortiz et al. 2014.
3. La linea (the line) is the name that migrants often use to describe the 1.3-mile physical space between the two major ports of entry in Nogales, Mexico (see chapter 5 for detailed discussion).
4. Grupo Beta is a Mexican federal agency primarily responsible for protecting migrants who are en route to the United States or have been recently deported. This organization is discussed in more detail in chapter 5.
5. All names are pseudonyms unless otherwise noted.
6. Pinche may be loosely translated as “damn” in milder contexts and “fucking” in more spirited ones.
7. For example, see Reeves and Caldwell 2011.
8. Vicens 2014.
9. See the excellent historical analysis of this event in Dunn 2009.
10. Roughly translated as a “fucking pile.”
11. Durand and Massey 2004; Guerin-Gonzales 1994.
12. Campesino means “peasant” or “dirt farmer.” La migra is slang for Border Patrol.
13. U.S. Customs and Border Protection, “United States Border Patrol: Southwest Border Sectors; Total Illegal Alien Apprehensions by Fiscal Year (Oct. 1st through Sept. 30th),” www.cbp.gov/sites/default/files/documents/BP%20Southwest%20Border%20Sector%20Apps%20FY1960%20-%20FY2014_0.pdf.
14. Anti-Defamation League 2012.
15. Bazzell 2007.
16. Prior to 1986, the O’odham people were officially known as the Papago.
17. See Cadava 2011; Ettinger 2009.
18. It is beyond the scope of this book to address the impact of undocumented migration on the Tohono O’odham Nation, and none of the archaeological work I conducted occurred on the reservation. No community along the southern border, however, has been as negatively affected by border crossings, migrant fatalities, or Border Patrol presence as the Tohono O’odham.
19. Nabhan 1982:26.
20. Zepeda 1982:17.
21. Ettinger 2009; St. John 2011.
22. Hernández 2010; Nevins 2002; Andreas 2009.
23. Dunn 1996, 2009.
24. Coyote is a Spanish euphemism for a human smuggler.
25. Clark 2012.
26. Sullivan 2010.
27. De León 2008.
28. Urrea 2004.
29. Those looking for more sensitive popular accounts of border-crossing stories are encouraged to check out Luis Alberto Urrea’s novel The Devil’s Highway (2004) and Ferguson et al.’s book Crossing with the Virgin (2010). For an exceptional journalistic take on Central American migrants crossing Mexico, see The Beast by Oscar Martínez (2010).
30. L. Chavez does, however, offer some observational data from Tijuana’s soccer field (1998:45–52). Also see Sergio Chavez’s fascinating ethnography (2011) of undocumented workers crossing through official ports of entry.
31. Spener 2009:169.
32. Holmes 2013. The Triqui people are from the mountainous Mixteca region of Oaxaca, Mexico.
33. Holmes 2013:9.
34. A story that ran on Fox News about the Undocumented Migration Project in 2012 included a stock photo of two masked Border Patrol agents on ATVs with bales of marijuana strapped to the front of their vehicles. The caption to this image read, “Shoes, backpacks and other objects discarded in the desert by undocumented immigrants have been collected by a team of anthropologists to document the difficult journey they make to get into the United States” (see EFE 2012).
35. See Annerino 2009; Connover 1987.
36. Holmes 2013:14–17.
37. I use gringo here not in a racialized way, though race often seems to be the elephant in the room during these types of endeavors. Gringo is intended to mark Holmes as an American. Mexicans will commonly call all U.S. citizens, including Latinos, gringos.
38. Annerino 2009:54–58.
39. Holmes 2013:25.
40. Oscar Martinez’s (2013) excellent journalistic account of Central American migrants crossing Mexico is an exception.
41. Holmes 2013:19.
42. Singer and Massey 1998:562.
43. Anzaldúa 2007; Limón 1994; J. D. Saldívar 1997; R. Saldívar 1990, 2006; Paredes 1958.
44. J. D. Saldívar 1997:xiii, quoting Foucault.
45. Marcus 1998:3–132.
46. This jurisdiction includes 262 miles of border, encompasses approximately 90,500 square miles, and contains a wide range of environments (e.g., mountain ranges and valleys). Parts of the Tucson Sector include protected federal lands (e.g., Buenos Aires National Wild Life Refuge [BANWR] and the Coronado National Forest), as well as public state lands. Internally it is subdivided into eight “stations” (see the map on page 15), and our survey work focused primarily on two stations, Nogales and Tucson. The Nogales station, which the Border Patrol describes as “high desert terrain with rugged mountains to rolling hills with numerous deep canyons,” includes 30 miles of border and approximately 1,800 square miles. The Tucson station has “terrain that varies from open valleys to rugged mountains and . . . [is] covered with various desert shrubs” and includes 24 miles of border and 3,790 square miles (GAO 2012:54). Our survey area focused on the western part of the Tucson Sector, in the corridor between the Nogales and Sasabe ports of entry. The survey’s western edge extended to the foothills of the Baboquivari Mountains, which is the boundary line of the Tohono O’odham reservation, and extended north to the town of Three Points. The survey area’s eastern edge was demarcated by US Interstate 19 and extended north to the southern edge of the town of Green Valley. This corridor is approximately 1,081 square miles (2,800 sq. km). The area that we surveyed encompassed approximately 33.5 square miles (86.78 sq. km) and cut across the Santa Cruz and Pima County lines.
Because of the size of this corridor and the difficulty involved in accessing some of the terrain, we were unable to conduct a survey of any large area. Instead we opted to sample parts of this corridor systematically, based on differences in topography, distance from the border, and information obtained from interviews with migrants about where they had previously crossed. Although our survey area is relatively small in comparison to the corridor’s overall size, our sampling strategy enabled us to document the different stages of the crossing process and their associated sites and artifacts (see Gokee and De León 2014). Our base camp was the small unincorporated town of Arivaca, Arizona. We focused on this particular corridor because it was a primary crossing point for people leaving from Altar, Sasabe, and Nogales and therefore it was relatively easy to correlate the ethnographic data collected in those Mexican towns with the archaeological data collected on the Arizona side.
47. In subsequent chapters, I describe some of the geographic and environmental features of the UMP survey area that act as natural deterrents to the movement of people. However, much of what is described can be generalized for the entire Sonoran Desert region.
48. Forty-five interviews were conducted by other UMP researchers in the summer of 2013 in Nogales and Altar.
49. Forty-five interviews conducted in 2013 were semistructured.
50. See De León and Cohen (2005) for discussion of this method.
51. The archaeological work was conducted as part of a multiyear field school supported by the Institute for Field Research that involved dozens of students and postdoctoral researchers.
52. This editing sometimes included combining separate interviews with the same person into one narrative. Occasionally, missing words were added to complete sentence fragments and extraneous sections of interviews were deleted to preserve flow (see the comment on editing in Bourgois 1995:341n20).
53. In general, everyone (documented and undocumented) wanted his or her real name used. People were disappointed when I told them that I needed to change names to protect their identity. However, most of the main characters in the book chose their own pseudonyms.
54. Galtung 1969 and Farmer 2004. For specific discussions of structural violence and immigration enforcement, see Nevins 2005 and Spener 2009.
55. See De León, Gokee, and Schubert 2015.
56. Žižek 2008.
57. Ruiz Marrujo 2009.
58. Men do get sexually assaulted during the migration process, but none of my interlocutors described this happening to them. Given the stigma surrounding male rape, it is no surprise that the subject was taboo. On the few occasions that men described male rape, it was in the form of stories they had heard about bandits who assaulted men who tried to stop attacks on women.
59. Ruiz Marrujo 2009:31.
60. The sexual assault that border crossers experience continues to be poorly documented in the migration literature.
61. Mulvey 1975.
62. Simaski and Sapp 2013: table 10.
63. Snow 1989:31.
64. See, e.g., Biehl 2005; Wright 2013.
65. Bourgois and Schonberg 2009; Hoffman 2011.
66. For example, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Jose Antonio Vargas and various student activists have recently “outted themselves” by declaring their undocumented status publicly.
67. Schonberg and Bourgois 2002:389.
1. Lumholtz 1990:337.
2. Not a pseudonym.
3. Moreno 2012.
4. Moreno 2012.
5. Oscar329, 8/18/2012, in Moreno 2012.
6. Agamben 1998, 2005. For border studies drawing on Agamben, see, for example, Doty 2011; Jones 2009; and Salter 2008.
7. Jones 2009.
8. Also see De León, Gokee, and Schubert 2015.
9. Doty 2011.
10. Cornelius 2001; Nevins 2005.
11. Mbembe 2003:24.
12. Doty 2011:607.
13. Salter 2008:369.
14. Data from “Deaths on the Border and the Recovered Remains Project,” Coalición de Derechos Humanos, http://derechoshumanosaz.net/projects/arizona-recovered-bodies-project/.
15. Reineke 2013.
16. The flier also refers to the risk migrants face of “ending up victims of organized crime.” This phrasing is similar to many other instances mentioned in this book in which the federal government attempts to shift blame to others (e.g., the desert, smugglers, migrants themselves) for injuries sustained during the migration process.
17. See note 1 of the Introduction for a discussion of the relationship between the INS and the Department of Homeland Security.
18. Dunn 2009:21–22.
19. Dunn 2009:59–60.
20. Dunn 2009:61.
21. Dunn 2009:61.
22. Nevins 2002:90–92.
23. Dunn 2009:61.
24. This has also been referred to as the Southwest Border Strategy (GAO 1997). While the official title has changed over the past two decades, the general strategy that uses the natural environment (along with various deportation practices [De León 2013a] and legal proceedings) to impede undocumented migration is often simply known as Prevention Through Deterrence.
25. USBP 1994:6.
26. Ettinger 2009:156–157.
27. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, many undocumented Chinese and eastern European migrants who could not pass inspection at Ellis Island or who were banned based on ethnic exclusion laws attempted to cross the Sonoran Desert on foot and died as a result of dehydration, exposure, and murder by bandits. (Ettinger 2009: fig. 2; St. John 2011:106). Federal agent’s 1926 testimony quoted in Ettinger 2009:157.
28. USBP 1994:2.
29. GAO 1997, 2006, 2012.
30. USBP 1994:7.
31. Heyman 1995:266.
32. Heyman 1995; Singer and Massey 1998.
33. USBP 1994:1.
34. Dunn 1996.
35. García 2006.
36. GAO 2001:24 (“harsh”); Haddal 2010:19 (“inhospitable”).
37. See, e.g., GAO 2001.
38. USBP 1994:4.
39. GAO 1997:50.
40. Cornelius 2001; Nevins 2002; Doty 2011; Magaña 2012.
41. Haddal 2010:19.
42. GAO 1997: appendix V, table.
43. Comment by “TYRANNASAURUS, 8/19/2012” in Moreno 2012.
44. See Rubio-Goldsmith et al. 2006.
45. GAO 1997: appendix V.
46. Shifts in enforcement strategies have recently made South Texas the most common crossing corridor on the southern border. See appendix B and discussion in the conclusion.
47. GAO 2001:3.
48. Rubio Goldsmith et al. 2006; D. Martínez et al. 2013.
49. Haddal 2012:32.
50. See Haddal 2010: fig. 10.
51. Anderson 2013: table 1.
52. “Deaths on the Border and the Recovered Remains Project.”
53. Trevizo 2013b.
54. Nevins 2002:7.
1. Cohn 1987.
2. Cohn 1987:690.
3. Callon and Law 1995.
4. Latour 2005.
5. Bennett 2010:21.
6. For example, Harraway 2003; Latour 2004; Keane 2006.
7. See Gell 1988; Basso 1996; Fuentes 2006:129.
8. See Kirksey and Helmreich 2010.
9. Callon and Law 1995:485.
10. Stanescu 2013:143–144.
11. See, e.g., Nading’s discussion (2012) of the complex historical relationship between dengue-carrying mosquitoes and health care workers.
12. See, e.g., Smart 2014:4–5.
13. For discussion of beef-processing plants and the invisibility of workers and animals, see Pachirat 2013.
14. Callon and Law 1995:490.
15. Callon and Law 1995:503.
16. See the discussion of human exceptionalism and species hierarchy in Stanescu 2013.
17. Callon and Law 1997:168.
18. Latour (2005:10) refers to this type of agency attribution as reductionistic forms of “symbolic projection” or a “naturalist type of causality,” both of which underestimate the actual agency generated by nonhumans.
19. Callon and Law 1995:503.
20. Duarte 2013.
21. Doty 2011.
22. Whatmore 2002. On animals as political subjects, see Hobson 2007.
23. Callon and Law 1995:504.
24. Callon and Law 1995:504.
25. Much of what I describe here can be generalized for the entire Sonoran Desert region.
26. The Border Patrol data come from numerous official visits (including ride-alongs) and dozens of encounters with agents in the field.
27. Humphreys and Watson 2009: table 2.1. Also see discussion of ethnography and fiction in Clifford 1986, Narayan 1999, and Fassin 2014.
28. Although it has not been publicly acknowledged, there is a high likelihood that Customs and Border Protection has been using small hand-held drones, some of which look like birds, to monitor the border in a manner similar to that used in the Middle East. Government contractors have been shopping hand-held drones at the annual Border Security Expo in Phoenix (see Todd Miller, “Tomgram: Todd Miller, Surveillance Surge on the Border,” posted July 11, 2013, www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175723/ [accessed February 26, 2015]).
29. Migrants are often referred to as pollos, or “chickens.” Conversely, smugglers are often called coyotes or polleros (chicken wranglers).
30. McGuire 2013:475.
31. Trevizo 2013b.
32. See chapter 5 for more detailed discussion of Grupo Beta, the Mexican government’s immigration enforcement and search-and-rescue division.
33. For discussions of Sonoran Desert temperatures and rainfall, see Ffolliott and Gottfried 2008:72 and West 1993:9.
34. For discussion of migrant fatalities in the winter, see Trevizo 2013a.
35. West 1993:9; Hadley 1972; Ffolliott and Gottfried 2008:75.
36. See Sanchez 2010 and Lentz 2012.
37. Much of the dialogue is directly quoted from recorded interviews.
38. Magana 2008:x; see also chapter 6.
39. Bennett 2010:xiv.
40. Bennett 2010:xv.
41. Sundberg 2011.
42. Hobson (2007) makes this point when she pushes for the recognition of animals as nontraditional political actors: “I in no way argue for animals as possessing political agency in the rational, liberal sense—they cannot take part in institutional decision-making processes or verbally express a preference that we can interpret as such. Instead, the aim is to argue that animals are already part of the heterogeneous networks that constitute political life, which some have argued ultimately challenges how we conceive of politics in totality” (263).
43. Callon and Law 1997:172.
44. USBP 1994:4.
1. As Fuentes (2006) notes: “[The] stress response we call ‘fear’ is a common pattern in all mammals. . . . The same basic physiological reaction occurs in a zebra when being attacked by a lion, a baboon when surprised by a leopard, and a human when involved in a car accident” (126).
2. All university and federal protocols were followed during this event. See the University of Michigan Committee on Use and Care of Animals protocol number PRO00003934.
3. National Pork Board 2008.
4. Shean et al. 1993:939; Reeves 2009:523.
5. Udey et al. 2011; Schultz et al. 2006; Tonkin et al. 2013.
6. Beck et al. 2014.
7. Much of what is presented here is an ethnographic expansion of data presented in Beck et al. 2014. Readers interested in more detailed information (e.g., distances that specific skeletal elements traveled from original death sites) should refer to this work.
8. At the time of this writing, no forensic research lab or “body farm” in southern Arizona exists that could supervise an experiment on human decomposition.
9. Nevins 2005; Magaña 2011; Doty 2011; De León, Gokee, and Schubert 2015.
10. In this case I am using the concept of bare life to include animals, which is beyond Agamben’s definition (see Stanescu 2012:574).
11. Kirksey and Helmreich 2010:545. See also Malone, et al. 2014.
12. For example, Stanescu 2013; Nading 2012, 2014.
13. The number five includes the one control animal used in the 2012 experiment. See Beck et al. 2014.
14. Pachirat 2013.
15. On the importance of ethnography in multispecies anthropological work, see Smart 2014.
16. Stanescu 2012:568.
17. Haddal 2010:19 (emphasis added).
18. Trevizo 2013b.
19. Foucault (2007) defined biopower as “the set of mechanisms through which the basic biological features of the human species became the object of a political strategy, of a general strategy of power, or, in other words, how, starting from the 18th century, modern Western societies took on board the fundamental biological fact that human beings are a species” (1).
20. Mbembe 2003:12, 18.
21. Mbembe 2003:12, 13.
22. Londras 2008.
23. Human Rights Watch 2014.
24. Carcamo 2014.
25. Mbembe 2003:11.
26. “Deaths on the Border and the Recovered Remains Project,” http://derechoshumanosaz.net/projects/arizona-recovered-bodies-project/.
27. “Border Wars,” National Geographic, http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/channel/border-wars/.
28. Ortega and O’Dell 2013.
29. Other causes of death include car accidents, heart attacks, homicide, and suicide.
30. Martínez et al. 2013:12–17.
31. Doty 2011.
32. See, for example, Hernández 2010; Heyman 2009; ACLU 2014; De León, Gokee, and Schubert 2015.
33. See, for example, Scheper-Hughes 1992; Rév 1995; Verdery 1999; Klass and Goss 2003; Nudelman 2004; Williams 2004; Crossland 2009; O’Neil 2012.
34. See, for example, McFarland 2008; Krmpotich et al. 2010; Fontein 2010; C. Young and Light 2012.
35. Posel and Gupta 2009:306. See also O’Neil’s discussion (2012) of bare death in Guatemala.
36. Díaz del Castillo 1956:352.
37. Ford 1998:103–104.
38. Foucault 1995:34.
39. Foucault 1995. For examples of body desecration in U.S. combat, see, for example, Nudelman 2004; and S. Harrison 2006, 2010.
40. Transcribed from Nina Golgowski, “Marine Filmed Urinating on Bodies of Dead Taliban Has No Regrets and Would Do It Again,” New York Daily News, July 16, 2013, www.nydailynews.com/news/national/marine-no-regrets-urinating-taliban-article-1.1399764 (accessed February 28, 2015).
41. Coleman 1990:47.
42. Harrison 2006.
43. Quoted in Bassett 1933:48.
44. Johanasson 2012:78, 259; Lomnitz 2005:16.
45. I focus here exclusively on violent messages, but other scholars have highlighted more complex (and often ambiguous) forms of communication achieved through body manipulation (e.g., Verdery 1999; Guyer 2009; Fontein 2010).
46. Taussig 1984.
47. H. Young 2005:652–657.
48. Magaña 2011:164. Recent New World archaeological examples are offered in Townsend 1992:100; Nelson et al. 1992; Spencer and Redmond 2001:187; Sugiyama 2005; Valdez 2009.
49. For example, Holocaust deniers often point out that the corpses of millions of Jews are unaccounted for.
50. Robben 2005.
51. Crossland 2000:153; Robben 2005:131, 399–400.
52. Crossland 2000.
53. Boss 2007.
54. Boss 2007:105. For a discussion of this phenomenon in Argentina, see Robben 2005.
55. See the discussion of political bodies in Domanska 2005:403.
56. See, for example, Solecki 1975; O’Shea 1984; Nelson et al. 1992; Graeber 1995; Dennie 2009.
57. Stiner 2008:2113.
58. In his groundbreaking paper (1940), Efremov defined taphonomy as “the study of the transition (in all its details) of animal remains from the biosphere into the lithosphere” (85).
59. Sorg et al. 2012:477.
60. Nawrocki 2009:284.
61. Schiffer 1975:840–841.
62. Lyman 2010:3.
63. Shipman 1986.
64. Lyman 2010:12–13.
65. A. Darling 1998:735 (wooden mallet); “See the Silent Screams of 100 Mexican Mummies,” Atlas Obscura (blog), Slate, August 26, 2013, www.slate.com/blogs/atlas_obscura/2013/08/26/see_the_silent_screams_of_a_hundred_mexican_mummies_at_museo_de_las_momias.html (accessed March 2, 2015).
66. Dawdy 2006:719, 728.
67. Galloway et al. 1989; Galloway 1997.
68. Galloway 1997:142. Neither the cause of death nor the citizenship profile is explicitly listed in either publication. The implication is that these are primarily U.S. citizens who were murdered and dumped in the desert or who died of natural causes in this environment.
69. For example, between 1990 and 1999 the Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner handled an annual average of 12 border crosser deaths per year. Between 1999 and 2012, the average number of border crosser deaths was close to 163 per fiscal year (Martínez et al. 2013:12).
70. “Carnivores can also accelerate decomposition by disarticulating remains, consuming soft tissue, and gnawing skeletal material. . . . In the Southwest, carnivore activity, however, appears to occur during advanced decomposition, initial mummification, and skeletonization. Coyotes are the most abundant free-ranging scavengers in the Southwest, and both coyotes and dogs are known to transport desiccated body segments for consumption elsewhere. Bear and javelina also may be responsible for the consumption and transportation of bone” (Galloway 1997:146).
71. Kirk and Mossman 1998.
72. The focus here is largely on conditions in the summer, the season when these experiments were carried out. Keep in mind that people cross during all times of the year and may freeze to death in the winter, drown during the monsoon season, or die from other causes at any time of the year (e.g., snakebite). Although scavenging and decomposition are more rapid during hot months, carrion eaters likely consume migrants year-round.
73. For example, see the description in Urrea 2004:163–168.
74. Cattle were present on the property where this experiment was carried out, and they periodically sniffed the animal’s body and ran into our motion sensor cameras.
75. Galloway 1997: table 1.
76. Unless otherwise noted, this description of the turkey vulture is based on Kirk and Mossman’s thorough study (1998) of this bird.
77. Margalida et al. 2011.
78. Turkey vultures commonly feed on mammals ranging from rodents to large ungulates, as well as birds, reptiles, amphibians, and invertebrates (Kirk and Mossman 1998:8).
79. Quoted in Kohn 2007:7.
80. Kirk and Mossman 1998:14.
81. Some of the following information is from Beck et al. 2014.
82. Arizona OpenGIS Initiative for Deceased Migrants, www.humaneborders.info/app/map.asp (accessed February 28, 2015).
83. See De León 2013b.
84. See reviews of sky burial practices around the world in Martin 1996; see also Goss and Klass 1997. For an experiment with raptors, see Spradley et al. 2012.
85. Bloch and Parry 1996.
86. See, for example, Brandes 2001.
87. Posel and Gupta 2009:301.
88. Posel and Gupta (2009) note that even nonreligious people have a “strong resistance to the idea of a dead body as merely rotting flesh” (305).
In her study of political violence in South Africa in the 1980s, Rousseau (2009) describes how some murder victims were covered in explosives and blown up in an attempt to hide evidence. Although these victims were falsely labeled as “terrorists” by the state, what was left of their bodies was collected and buried by the police. The families of victims expressed shock that despite the extreme violence inflicted on their bodies by the police, they were not “thrown away,” suggesting that even the state had a limit on how far they would wage war on a body (363).
89. Singer and Massey 1998.
90. In 2013 we observed ants chipping off pieces of pig bone and carrying them into their subterranean dwellings (Hall et al. 2014).
91. GAO 2006.
92. Stephen 2007:xv.
93. Magaña 2011.
94. Maddrell and Sidaway 2010 (deathscape). For a discussion of perimortem and postmortem osteological patterns of violence, see Walker 2001.
95. O’Donnabhain 2011:132.
96. I acted as Spanish translator for parts of this conversation.
1. Habitus refers to the set of learned perspectives, tastes, and dispositions people use to orient themselves in their relations with people and objects (Bourdieu 1977).
2. Limón 1994:123–140; also see Peña 2006.
3. Spanish speakers often pronounce “Jason” with a y instead of a hard j.
4. Memo and Lucho were previously referred to as Victor and Miguel in De León (2012). “I don’t want to be called ‘Victor,’” Memo told me one night. “The only ‘Victor’ I know looks like a fucking penguin! ‘Memo’ sounds much better!”
5. All dialogue is translated from Spanish unless otherwise noted.
6. Limón 1994:133.
7. The verb chingar means “to fuck” or “to screw,” but it has a whole host of other meanings. Chingaderas are a form of language play that in this context amounts to “fucking around” with someone in a playful way (see Limón 1994).
8. Rosaldo 1989:150.
9. Scott 1985.
10. Peña 2006:160.
11. Although I interviewed dozens of women during the course of this research, I typically had more access to male migrants along la linea. This differential access was partly due to my gender, but women migrants also tended to have more social and economic capital and thus had funds to immediately try another crossing. This meant that they spent less time than men did “hanging out” on la linea. In addition, women make up less than 15 percent of all apprehended migrants (Simanski and Sapp 2013: table 10).
12. Limón 1994:135.
13. See the critique in Limón 1994:123–40.
14. Limón 1994:129; Paz 1961:73–82.
15. See Peña 2006:144.
16. To protect their identities, I have modified some of the details of Memo’s and Lucho’s lives.
17. Mexico experienced an oil boom between 1976 and 1982, the result of the 1973 Arab oil embargo and the discovery of new coastal petroleum sources. Following the end of the oil embargo and an increase in global supplies of petroleum, the Mexican economy crashed. This period of severe peso devaluation and hyperinflation is often referred to as the “lost decade” (Cerrutti and Massey 2004:21). When Memo left Mexico in 1988, undocumented migration flows were the highest they had been in three decades (Cerrutti and Massey 2004: figure 2.1).
18. He is referring to the American economic crisis that began in 2008.
19. Donato et al. 1992.
20. Colonia La Libertad is a neighborhood in Tijuana that sits on the Mexico-U.S. border. Prior to PTD, hundreds of people crossed the border there illegally every night in the 1980s (McDonnell 1986).
21. At one point while living in the United States, both Lucho and Memo were arrested for driving while intoxicated, which is a fairly common problem for working-class undocumented men (and many Americans). Both of them, along with dozens of male migrants I subsequently interviewed, often complained about missing certain cultural freedoms they had in Mexico, including being able to drink on the street and drive while drinking (also see Boehm 2012:77).
22. Keeping track of Memo’s crossing stories was challenging, and on numerous occasions during our interviews and conversations, new crossing details emerged ranging from comedic to horrific. I have simplified the narrative here to focus on the last few attempts leading up to his presence in Nogales.
23. See chapter 5 for discussion of lateral deportation.
24. See, for example, Parks et al. 2009.
25. Office of the Press Secretary, White House, “Remarks by the President in the State of the Union Address,” WhiteHouse.gov, February 12, 2013, http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/02/12/remarks-president-state-union-address (accessed March 4, 2015).
26. Cornelius et al. 2008:3.
27. Cornelius et al. 2008:3.
28. Andreas 2009.
29. Boehm 2012:71–80.
30. Methodologically, one of the biggest problems I faced during ethnographic fieldwork was the transitory nature of my study population. Some people may spend only one or two days in Nogales before attempting another crossing, which made getting to know migrants quite difficult. The length of my relationship with interviewees often ranged from just a few hours to a couple of days maximum. In general, throughout the five years of fieldwork I struggled to develop methods that would give me deeper insight into the border-crossing process, which is often rapid, chaotic, and (no pun intended) difficult to document. Although I draw on several excellent previous studies of border crossings in this book, I find that the bulk of them suffer from a series of methodological constraints that limit the amount of ethnographic knowledge that can be produced. First, the majority of research projects focused on border crossings rely almost exclusively on interviews with migrants conducted either in shelters or long after the crossing event is over (Slack and Whiteford 2011; O’Leary 2009). Admittedly, it is difficult to study a population that is constantly in motion, and researchers have had to develop different strategies to deal with this issue. In talking about her work with female migrants in the Juan Bosco shelter between September 2006 and June 2007, O’Leary (2009) comments on this issue and highlights the difficulty of working in this type of setting:
On account of this fast-paced population turnover, a Rapid Appraisal (RA) method was chosen for this research. . . . Consistent with RA methods, a topic guide was used to interview migrant women who arrived at the shelter and to get to the heart of the migrant woman’s experiences. . . . I began to visit the shelter every two weeks, with the goal of systematically collecting data. Each visit consisted of three consecutive nights from 7:00 PM to 10:00 PM in which I interviewed women who had been repatriated by U.S. immigration officials. In the ten months of the study . . . I interviewed one hundred women. The number of women who showed up at the shelter each night was unpredictable. (92)
While O’Leary’s work has produced important insights about the experiences of female migrants in the Sonoran Desert, the reliance on interviewing people in the shelter has several limitations. First, working inside the shelter often doesn’t allow the interviewees to speak freely for fear of saying something that might upset their hosts (e.g., bad-mouthing Grupo Beta or complaining about their treatment by shelter workers). On numerous occasions, I spoke to the same people inside and outside Juan Bosco, and the details and tone of their stories were often dramatically different. For some respondents, the shelter was a setting where they themselves thought they should tell the most “fucked-up story” possible in order to elicit sympathy or please the researcher. Second, working exclusively in the shelter often means privileging the narratives of respondents whom the researcher knows only for a few hours. This limited interaction means that it becomes difficult to paint a nuanced picture of who these individuals are or what happens to them after this particular research encounter. Third, an interview-centered approach provides little ethnographic insight into other parts of the crossing process, including how people prepare to enter the desert and how they navigate the city of Nogales while not in the shelter. Still, I did find on occasion that formally interviewing people (in a way similar to O’Leary’s strategy) could be useful for answering specific questions about the migration process and for producing information that complemented the other types of data that I was collecting. For this reason, Undocumented Migration Project researchers interviewed forty-five men and women using a semistructured survey instrument in the spring and summer of 2013. A few of these 2013 interviews (particularly those with women) were conducted inside Juan Bosco.
31. Cornelius et al. 2008:3.
32. Border Patrol apprehended 4,463,083 people in the Tucson Sector between 2000 and 2013 (see appendix A). This number does not include those who succeeded in crossing without ever being apprehended, which means that the total number of crossing attempts in the region is likely much higher. (For a discussion of the interpretation issues surrounding apprehension statistics, see Andreas 2009:85–112).
1. Dunn 1996; Lucht 2012; Andreas 2009; Andersson 2014.
2. Alvarez 1995:451.
3. That is, forcible removal of “aliens.”
4. Peutz and De Genova 2010:6.
5. Peutz and De Genova 2010:1.
6. For a recent exception, see Boehm 2012.
7. I focus here on the decades leading up to PTD. For more in-depth historical analyses of deportation, see Hernández 2010.
8. Heyman 1995:266.
9. Ettinger 2009:132.
10. Heyman 1995; Hernández 2010; Rosenblum 2012:8.
11. Singer and Massey 1998:574.
12. Heyman 1995:270.
13. For example, see the 1987 film Born in East LA.
14. Rosenblum 2012:8.
15. Lydgate 2010:481; ACLU 2009.
16. Lydgate 2010:500. See also Trevizo 2014.
17. All statistics for the Tucson Operation Streamline come from Lydgate 2010 unless otherwise noted.
18. All of these case numbers, dates, names, and personal details have been slightly modified to protect identities.
19. Many recent migrants are indigenous-language speakers from the southern Mexican states of Oaxaca and Chiapas.
20. Lydgate 2010:484.
21. Lydgate 2010:528.
22. Agamben 1998:174.
23. Lydgate 2010:515–516.
24. See, for example, Robertson et al. 2012
25. Lydgate 2010:528.
26. National Immigration Forum 2013.
27. No More Deaths 2011; Silva 2013.
28. No More Deaths 2011:29.
29. GAO 2010:11–12.
30. CBP 2008.
31. De León 2013a.
32. Spener 2009.
33. Hernández 2010:134–136.
34. A type of coyote, guías are the individuals who physically lead groups through the desert.
35. Officially they are known as Grupos Beta, but most refer to them as Grupo Beta.
36. These are their real names.
37. Simanski and Sapp 2012.
38. Urrea 1996:9.
39. Malkki 1997:99.
40. Arizona Daily Star 2014.
41. Joe Arpaio is the sheriff of Maricopa County well known for being an outspoken critic of undocumented migrants. His department has been investigated numerous times following accusations of racial profiling of Latinos, especially during traffic stops.
1. Parts of this event are described in De León 2012.
2. Calculations based on information found at Servicio de Administración Tributaria, Comisión Nacional de los Salarios Mínimos, http://www.sat.gob.mx/informacion_fiscal/tablas_indicadores/Paginas/salarios_minimos.aspx.
3. The Mojave green (Crotalus scutlatus) is one of the deadliest snakes in North America.
4. For a discussion of machismo, joking, and homosociality, see Peña 2006.
5. Behar 1996:177.
6. A pseudonym.
7. USBP 2012:15.
8. USBP 2012:15.
9. Malinowski 1984:115.
10. For discussion of these expenditures, see Rosenblum 2012:12–14.
11. Lacey 2011.
12. Associated Press 2011.
13. “Car Jack Used to Breach Border Fence,” YouTube, uploaded by NumbersUSA, February 17, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qdc-kv7nzaU&feature=youtu.be (accessed March 7, 2015).
14. CNN Wire Staff, “Jeep Gets Stuck Trying to Drive over U.S.-Mexico Border Fence,” CNN.com, updated November 1, 2012, http://www.cnn.com/2012/10/31/us/mexico-border-jeep/ (accessed March 7, 2015).
15. González 2014.
16. US Customs and Border Protection, http://www.cbp.gov/sites/default/files/documents/fence_breach_3.pdf (accessed March 7, 2015).
17. “Herman Cain’s Electric Fence ‘Joke,’” YouTube, uploaded October 17, 2011, by talkingpointsmemo.com (originally appeared on The Daily Rundown, MSNBC), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jO-q5lI7618&feature=youtu.be (accessed March 7, 2015).
18. Horsley 2006.
19. Nevins 2002; Andreas 2009.
20. Annual funding allotted to the fence has widely fluctuated over the past two decades. For example, $25 million was appropriated for fence construction in 1996, and the amount increased to $298 million in 2006. By 2007, $1.5 billion had been allotted for fencing. By 2012, these funds had dropped to $400 million (Rosenblum 2012:16–17).
21. McGuire 2013.
22. Rosenblum 2012:16.
23. Since 1998, billions of dollars have been spent on remote-sensing technology, and various military contractors have periodically offered new and improved systems for catching migrants, drug smugglers, and terrorists. This security project has gone through a series of names and iterations, including the Integrated Surveillance Intelligence System (ISIS), America’s Shield Initiative (ASI), and most recently the Secure Border Initiative (SBI or SBInet). Despite the large sums of money spent on these systems, all three have failed to “meet deployment timelines and to provide USBP with the promised level of ‘situational awareness’ with respect to illegal entries” (Rosenblum 2012:18). The success of the remote surveillance technology used by the Border Patrol has been spotty at best. In his ethnography of Border Patrol agents in South Texas, Maril (2004) notes that remote sensors were often made of outdated technology, were poorly maintained, and were often unable to distinguish between border crossers and cattle (x). Moreover, the delay between when a sensor is activated and when a dispatcher notifies agents on the ground can be five minutes or longer, making it difficult to predict which direction people have headed in (76). Once a sensor is activated, agents on the ground must then track people using other methods (e.g., sign cutting [i.e., tracking people based on footprints and other traces their movement leaves in the wilderness] or infrared cameras). Still, deploying agents in a timely fashion to an area where a sensor has been activated means that they must predict where people who have a head start have gone. As migrants and coyotes use trails over time and as the Border Patrol begins to place sensors in those areas, people change routes and look for areas with less surveillance. Given the vastness of the desert, it is impossible to place and maintain motion sensors everywhere at all times, suggesting that certain technologies have limited use.
24. Since 9/11, the US Border Patrol has had the distinction of being the fastest-growing federal law enforcement agency in the country. Over the past decade it has doubled its staff, and it has seen a ninefold increase in personnel since 1998 (Rosenblum 2012:14). When Lucho first attempted to cross the border in 1980, there were 1,975 agents assigned to the southern border. As of September 2012, the Border Patrol employed 21,444 agents, 18,506 of whom were stationed along the US-Mexico boundary (Rosenblum 2012:14). This steady increase in the number of agents on the ground in specific areas is linked to PTD, which, as discussed in chapters 1 and 2, uses strategically placed personnel to create funnels that direct migrant traffic toward specific parts of the border. As a 1997 government report notes:
Border Patrol needed to be flexible to respond to changing patterns in illegal alien traffic. According to INS officials, [following the implementation of PTD] the Border Patrol began to notice “almost immediately” an increase in apprehensions in other sectors, particularly Tucson and those in south Texas (Del Rio, McAllen, and Laredo). INS officials attributed this increase in apprehensions in other sectors to a “shift” in the flow of illegal alien traffic as it became more difficult to cross illegally in San Diego and El Paso. Consequently, in fiscal year 1995, the Border Patrol deployed some of the additional agents funded that year and originally planned for San Diego and El Paso to the Tucson and south Texas sectors, the sectors with the next highest priority after San Diego and El Paso. According to Border Patrol officials, deploying additional agents in a phased manner was a new approach. Prior to the strategy, as additional positions became available, the Border Patrol tried to allocate at least a few additional positions to as many of the 21 sectors as possible. However, under the strategy, 98 percent (or 2,792) of the 2,850 new Border Patrol agent positions nationwide authorized from fiscal year 1994 through fiscal year 1997 have gone to 6 of the 21 Border Patrol sectors. INS allocated 1,235 (about 43 percent) of these positions to the San Diego sector and 351 (about 12 percent) to the El Paso sector, sectors with the highest priority. Nearly all of the remaining 1,264 went to the Tucson and the south Texas sectors, the sectors with the next highest priority. (GAO 1997)
In essence, this show of force of agents in El Paso (and later San Diego) soon made it necessary to hire more personnel in sectors where migration flows were being directed. This included such places as Tucson that historically had low rates of undocumented migration. As traffic was pushed elsewhere, the need to create a “virtual wall” of people near other major ports of entry necessitated more spending on additional agents. PTD thus started a cycle of increased spending that has not slowed since the 1990s. For example, in 1993 there were 281 agents in the Tucson Sector (GAO 1997:16). As of May 2013, there were 4,200 agents in that sector (CBP, “Tucson Sector Arizona,” www.cbp.gov/border-security/along-us-borders/border-patrol-sectors/tucson-sector-arizona). In June 2013, an amendment was attached to a larger bipartisan “comprehensive” immigration bill (Senate Bill 744) that proposed to increase the number of Border Patrol agents on the southern border to 38,405 by 2021. Despite the increase in the number of agents in the Tucson Sector between 1993 and 2013, migrants still outnumber Border Patrol on the ground by several orders of magnitude. For example, in 2009, when Memo and Lucho walked into the desert, the number of apprehended migrants outnumbered agents fifty-eight to one. Still, the deployment of agents on the ground as a “virtual wall” happens only in and around ports of entry such as Nogales. Because of the high numbers of agents and the presence of substantial fencing infrastructure, it is virtually impossible to cross undetected within the city limits of Nogales, though people still try. However, migrants need only to walk east or west of town to enter unpopulated areas where agents are rarely present and fencing is minimal. In essence, agents stationed within sight of the border function more as omnipresent deterrents to would-be crossers and signal to people that they should try their luck in more remote parts of the desert.
25. Magaña 2008:37–38.
26. GAO 2012: figure 4.
27. These published data do not distinguish between people who were caught at a vehicle checkpoint as opposed to on foot in the desert. Some may have been smuggled across the border in a vehicle and then caught later at a checkpoint, effectively avoiding having to walk in the desert.
28. Cornelius et al. 2008:3.
29. See note 23 for this chapter.
30. See De León 2012.
31. Singer and Massey 1998:569.
32. Parks et al. 2009; De León 2012; Spener 2009.
33. Agua Linda is about 25 miles as the crow flies from Nogales.
1. Migrants refer to these trucks as perreras, or “dog catchers,” because they have built-in holding cells similar to what Animal Control uses for dogs.
2. See, for example, Sundberg 2008; Meirotto 2012.
3. Huffington Post online comment, January 17, 2012.
4. Those who cling to the term garbage as a way to avoid paying close attention to this material record should take heed of the words of Rathje and Murphy (2001): “Garbage is among humanity’s most prodigious physical legacies to those who have yet to be born; if we can come to understand our discards, . . . then we will better understand the world in which we live” (4).
5. Rathje and Murphy 2001. See also Schofield 2005:98.
6. Buchli and Lucas 2001; R. Harrison and Schofield 2010.
7. González-Ruibal 2008:247.
8. Schofield 2005:101. For an archaeological approach to studies of political violence, see Ludlow Collective 2001; on homelessness, see Zimmerman et al. 2010 and Zimmerman and Welch 2011; on warfare, see Schofield 2005 and González-Ruibal 2007.
9. González-Ruibal 2008:248–249.
10. Schofield 2005:104.
11. See De León 2013b.
12. This is a direct challenge to those who think that objects alone can (or should) speak for migrants. For a discussion of the problematic use of border crosser artifacts as “testimonial objects,” see De León and Gokee (under review).
13. Gokee and De León 2014.
14. See Gokee and De León 2014.
15. Here Lucho is referring to the flat and barren Altar Valley, which historically was the route taken from the border town of Sasabe. Increased surveillance over the past ten years has caused people to walk through the mountain ranges on both sides of the valley.
16. Slack and Whiteford 2011.
17. For legal and safety reasons, I have avoided both working in areas with high drug trafficking and asking migrants specific questions about their interactions with drug smugglers. Regardless of my aversion to this subject, it routinely came up in interviews with people, some of whom admitted to working as burreros. In addition, we would sometimes spot drug mule trains in the desert and give them a wide berth. On one occasion, a group of UMP researchers encountered burreros returning to Mexico after dropping off a load. These individuals were wearing full camouflage gear and asked for directions back to the border.
18. For a detailed discussion of use wear and migrant suffering, see De León 2013b.
19. Meirotto 2012; Hill 2006; Romo 2005.
20. Border Patrol, humanitarian groups, hunters, and hikers are also responsible for the accumulation of material culture in the Sonoran Desert (Meirotto 2012; Drummond and De León 2015; De León, Gokee, and Schubert 2015).
21. Some migrants refer to these sites as levantons, which in Spanish may also connote abduction by a smuggler.
22. Based on rough calculations, they probably walked more than seventy miles. This total does account for the impact of terrain and slope on the total distance traveled.
23. For quantitative data on migrant site inventories, see Gokee and De León 2014.
24. For example, Leo Banks (2009) has alleged that evidence of Islamic terrorist activity is visible in the objects that border crossers leave behind.
25. Archaeology 2011.
26. Smith 1869:208.
27. Agamben 2005.
28. Doty 2009:84.
29. See the Bureau of Land Management’s annual reports for the Southern Arizona Project to Mitigate Environmental Damages Resulting from Illegal Immigration at www.blm.gov/az/st/en/info/newsroom/undocumented_aliens.html.
30. ABLM 2011:1.
31. For a discussion of “micro-facts” and “Minimum Number of Individual” (MNI) analyses and attempts to extract data from “cleaned up” migrant sites, see De León, Gokee, and Forringer-Beal 2015.
32. Domanska 2005:395.
33. De León and Gokee (under review).
34. Farmer 2004:308.
1. A major component of the Undocumented Migration Project is a summer anthropological field school for undergraduate students that I have directed for numerous years with the generous support of the Institute for Field Research. See www.ifrglobal.org/ for additional information.
2. See Drummond and De León 2015.
3. All students mentioned in this chapter are referred to by their real names.
4. BK stands for “Bob Kee” and represents sites he showed me in the winter and summer of 2009.
5. See Forringer-Beal and De León 2012; De León, Gokee, and Forringer-Beal 2015.
6. Sontag 2003.
7. See discussion of the photos of corpses in Barthes 1981:78–79. The coordinates have been modified to protect a memorial shrine that currently marks this death site. Despite its remote location, the shrine has been vandalized numerous times, likely by hikers or hunters. This vandalism included smashing a picture frame that held a photo of Maricela and her family and then ripping the image to pieces.
8. Galloway 1997: table 1.
9. Pachirat 2013:14.
10. Sontag 2003:70.
11. Dougherty 2006:609.
12. Maril 2004:262.
13. Reineke 2013.
14. De León, Gokee, and Schubert 2015.
15. This date is off by four days. Carlos was actually encountered on June 28 and the body was found on July 2, 2012.
1. Jokisch and Pribilsky 2002:76.
2. Pribilsky 2012:327.
3. Jokisch and Pribilsky 2002:76.
4. Bertoli et al. 2011:59.
5. See, for example, Pribilsky 2001:255.
6. See Pribilsky 2007:161–171.
7. Pribilsky (2007) notes that the highest smuggling fee for Ecuadorans he recorded in 2001 was $13,500 (164). Anecdotal data from interviews with Ecuadoran migrants suggest that the average cost of travel in 2014 was around $12,000 per person. Mexican migrants on average were paying smugglers between $2,000 and $3,500 in the mid-2000s (Cornelius et al. 2008:6), and based on my informal survey of prices in 2014, people were paying anywhere between $3,000 and $5,000, depending on the route and method of crossing.
8. Trevizo 2014. The 31 percent statistic includes people caught crossing the border illegally, as well as repeat immigration violators and fugitives from the immigration courts (ICE 2013). Of the 357,422 people whom ICE removed from the United States in fiscal year 2013, 31 percent were from Central and South American countries. Ecuadorans made up about 0.05% (1,616) of these removals (ICE 2013).
9. Martínez 2013.
10. Jackson 2013:4–5.
11. All of Christian’s dialogue has been translated from Spanish.
12. Those without a guide find themselves in much greater danger because they lack the semiprotection that comes with having an escort, as evidenced in Christian’s story where periodically one of his smugglers prevents him from being robbed or assaulted.
13. Coutin 2005.
14. The Mexican freight train that migrants ride is referred to as la bestia (the beast). Although it helps people get across the country at a relatively quick pace, it is a treacherous form of transportation. People are often injured or killed when getting on or off the train or when it derails. In addition, the police and bandits frequently assault migrants, both while the train is running and when it periodically stops.
15. For a discussion of migrants robbed in Oaxaca and Chiapas by locals, see Martínez 2013.
16. “Cuernos de chivo” (goat’s horns) is Spanish slang for an AK-47 assault rifle. The nickname refers to the curved shape of the magazine clip, which resembles a goat’s horn.
17. Tele Sur 2014.
18. Slack and Whiteford 2011.
19. Tuckman 2010.
20. This phenomenon is similar to the many risks that Hans Lucht (2012) describes for Ghanaian migrants who risk life and limb crossing the Sahara before attempting to navigate the Mediterranean to reach Italy.
21. Wilkinson 2012.
22. This part of the story illustrates just how easy it is to get lost or separated from a group during the chaos of a crossing.
Epigraph: This song is by the Mexican American singer Marisela Esqueda. Maricela posted this track on her Facebook account a few weeks before she left Ecuador. She included the message “With much love for all of my family.”
1. Jokisch 2002:528.
2. Rubio-Goldsmith et al. 2006:44.
3. O’Leary 2009.
4. Martínez et al. 2013:23.
5. Butler 2004:33.
6. Coutin 2005:199; Magaña 2011.
7. Félix 2011.
8. See, for example, Brandes 2001; Félix 2011:169.
9. Sandell 2010:196.
10. Cannell 2000.
11. See Guyer 2009:159.
12. For a discussion of this technique, see Shaheed 2014.
13. Yarris 2014:286.
1. See, for example, Boehm 2012; Stephen 2007:xv. For Ecuador, see, for example, Miles 1997, 2004; Pribilsky 2007, 2012.
2. Pribilsky 2001:268.
3. Miles 1997:68.
4. See, for example, Reyes 2004.
5. Massey et al. 2002.
6. Felipe and Manny are pseudonyms.
7. These details come from multiple interviews with José’s cousins, his girlfriend, parents, and other family and friends who were in sporadic communication with him during the trip. Details of this journey have been condensed to focus on the last few moments in the desert.
8. For an overview of this theory, see Boss 1999, 2004.
9. Boss 2004:553.
10. GAO 1997: appendix V.
11. GAO 2006.
12. Das 2007:49.
13. For a discussion of the difficulty people have with “reengaging” with life following the death of loved one, see Das 2007:192–193.
14. Lucht 2012:220–221.
15. Here Gustavo implies that he would have some modicum of relief even if José’s body was returned in a fragmented state.
1. Ettinger 2009:60.
2. Butler 2004:34.
3. Butler 2004:22.
4. See appendix A.
5. Tuckman 2010; Hennessy-Fiske 2014.
6. Associated Press 2014.
7. Martínez 2013.