54 pages • 1-hour read
The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail
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Introduction and Part 1, Chapters 1-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: “This Hard Land”
Introduction Summary
Jason De León’s book examines “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” (3). Those who successfully cross the border perform the low-paid, strenuous essential jobs that United States citizens are reluctant to do, such as meat processing and fruit picking. Many of those crossing the desert have made several attempts to do so, as their lives fall into a pattern of undocumented border crossing and deportation. In 2013 alone, nearly 2 million undocumented migrants were removed from the country. A large proportion of deportees are now traversing Arizona’s desert landscape, seeking ways to return to their families and homes.
De León’s argument is that the death, disfigurement, and sexual abuse that migrating people experience en route are not accidental but rather the Border Patrol’s attempt to redirect blame onto the natural landscape and “render invisible” the innumerable consequences that migration and deportation have for the migrants involved. In writing his book, De León seeks to give voice to these underrepresented people and keep track of their different trajectories.
From a historical perspective, the book’s subject begins in 1993, when the policy of Prevention Through Deterrence (PTD) was utilized for the first time in El Paso, Texas. The policy’s popularity increased and between 2000 and 2013, 4,584,022 of the 11.7 million people arrested for crossing the border without documents were apprehended in the Tucson Sector, “a craggy, depopulated and mountainous patch of land” (6) between New Mexico and Arizona.
The deaths described in De León’s book take place in a part of the desert that lies south of Tucson, Arizona, between the Baboquivari and Tumacácori mountains, which have been home to the indigenous Tohono O’odham (desert people) for thousands of years. “What’s agonizing for the O’odham” De León writes, “is that the American federal government has turned their sacred landscape into a killing field, a massive open grave” (8).
De León’s study of desert migration began as a dinner conversation with an archeologist friend in the fall of 2008, when De León was fresh out of graduate school. His friend told him how he stumbled on objects that migrants had left behind as he undertook archeological surveys in the Arizona desert. One such object was a love letter, written in Spanish, which suggested someone do an archeological study on the fate of migrants in the desert. A month later, De León found himself standing in the wilderness south of Tucson, staring at the discarded artifacts.
He began the Undocumented Migration Project (UMP) in 2009, intending to test the idea that archeology could enhance understanding of how border-crossing technology had evolved over the years, along with the economic system that underpins undocumented migration.
De León considers that to date, the covert nature of undocumented migration has meant that academics have generally studied the phenomenon from a distance. The problem with Leo Chavez’s Shadowed Lives and David Spener’s Clandestine Crossings, De León contends, is that they were written after the crossing happened and were exclusively based on interviews. Medical anthropologist Seth Holmes, who wrote Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies, accompanied migrants who were crossing the border in the Sonora Desert. De León considers that Holmes’s efforts focus too much on his own experiences as a white researcher and thus diminish the real trauma faced by his companions. Rather, in his own approach to the topic, De León has sought to portray the migrants as real people whose voices need to be heard. A Latino, De León conducts his interviews with his subjects in Spanish and while he edits the interviews for publication, he tries to remain faithful to his interviewees’ tone of voice.
Chapter 1 Summary: “Prevention Through Deterrence”
De León, along with his photographer, Mike Wells, and their guide, Bob Kee, are searching for skeletal remains of border crossers in the Sonora Desert. When Kee had contacted the police about finding a skeleton in the desert a few weeks earlier, the police responded that looking for the remains of an undocumented migrant was not a priority for them.
De León considers that the label “illegal” is convenient for US citizens, who wish to discredit the legitimacy of migrants to “avoid speaking their names or imagining their faces” (26). These citizens forget that the US is a country of immigrants, where groups such as the Irish and Chinese were once unwelcome. De León argues that reinforcing disregard for the deaths of undocumented migrants is part of the federal government’s border security plan.
De León considers that the border fits into Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s theory of the “state of exception, […] the process whereby sovereign authorities declare emergencies in order to suspend the legal protections afforded to individuals” (27). The Sonora Desert border is one such zone, as officials do not recognize unauthorized migrants’ human or civil rights in that area.
The corpses of 2,721 unauthorized migrants were recovered between October 2000 and September 2014 in southern Arizona. About 800 of these bodies remain unidentified. In 2012, De León noticed the American Department of Homeland Security’s sign in the men’s bathroom, which was written in Spanish, warned migrants of ending up as a “victim of the desert” (29). De León found it interesting that the desert was personified as an entity capable of inflicting violence and how the sign ignored the strategic relationship between federal border enforcement policy and the Sonora Desert’s natural setting: “Rather than shooting people as they jumped the fence, Prevention Through Deterrence set the stage for the desert to become the new ‘victimizer of border transgressors’” (35).
According to Department of Homeland Security figures, the numbers of known migrant deaths rose from 250 in 1999 to 492 in 2005; however, De León suspects that the Federal Government underestimates these numbers and hypothesizes that between 2000 and 2014, there were “enough corpses to fill the seats on fifty-four Greyhound buses” (36) though the actual number of victims will be forever unknown.
Chapter 2 Summary: “Dangerous Ground”
It has been 20 years since Border Patrol Sector Chief Silvestre Reyes lined up agents along the banks of the Rio Grande to stop border crossers from scaling the fence and running into downtown El Paso. This set off the chain reaction that gave rise to Prevention Through Deterrence. De León contends that the violence set in motion by Prevention Through Deterrence is extensive and unpredictable but ultimately preventable.
The desert’s agency is constructed by making it seem as if its harsh conditions and dangerous wildlife are unavoidable aspects of unauthorized migration. In this model, migrants’ deaths are the natural consequences of an action they could have chosen to avoid. De León seeks to redress this idea by focusing his ethnographic lens on migrant experience, adding a graphic reality to the sanitized federal policy discourse. De León stages a semifictionalized ethnography, which according to Humphreys and Watson’s definition is “a restructuring of events occurring within one or more ethnographic investigations into a single narrative” (43), with the aim of bringing readers closer to the reality of migrant experiences.
De León’s ethnography begins with nine strangers in a hotel in Nogales, Mexico, where five border crossers have gone to rest before their passage into the desert. One of the nine, Javier, has given $400 to a padador, or people-smuggler, as a down payment. Another, Lupe, fantasizes about being reunited with her children when she makes the crossing. A woman called La Güera drives the nine up to the Sonora Desert. On their trek through the desert, the nine face trials such as extreme dehydration—they resort to drinking their own urine—and an encounter with bajadores, desert bandits, who demand the crossers’ IDs and money and strip the group naked. The bajadores also sexually abuse Lupe. After this, Javier, Marcos, Lupe and Carlos keep moving, while the rest of the group decides to return and report themselves to border control.
De León concludes that considering migrants’ deaths as a natural consequence of unauthorized crossing is a 20-year strategy that allows violations and humiliating acts, like those that Lupe and her group face, disappear into the narrative of Prevention and Deterrence.
Chapter 3 Summary: “Necroviolence”
In 2012, De León staged an experiment in which three juvenile female pigs were killed and dressed in clothes like those worn by migrants. The animals’ decomposition process was then monitored. The pigs were used to represent the migrants to show what happens to bodies left in the Sonora Desert. A similar experiment was performed in 2013 with two adult male pigs, in which one was covered with a pile of rocks and brush, mimicking an ad hoc burial, and the other placed near a large tree. In this instance, the speed of decomposition and the manner in which carrion-eaters fed off the bodies was measured. De León aims to show how the Border Patrol intentionally leaves migrants vulnerable to the desert’s dangerous conditions so that desert wildlife will do the work of disposing of their bodies.
De León’s pig experiment is a study of necropolitics, or killing in the name of sovereignty, whereby a nation decides which lives are valuable, who may live, and who must die. Necroviolence is the name De León gives to the “specific treatment of corpses that is perceived to be offensive, sacrilegious, or inhumane” (69) by perpetrators, victims, and their cultural group. He also argues that the lack of a body, which has been eaten or has disappeared, allows the perpetrators, Border Patrol, and the government “plausible deniability” (71) while creating trauma among mourners, who cannot go through a natural process of grieving.
De León’s placement of a dead pig near a tree in the 2013 experiment mimics the practice of border crossers who feel that they are approaching death and have the impulse to get away from the light. These migrants are often found dead after being “rotisserie-cooked by the rotating sun” (74). The pigs by the tree went through the early stages of body decomposition during De León’s study, becoming discolored, swelling, and being attacked by maggots before carrion-eaters could get to them.
In five days, the turkey vultures arrive. They devour the flesh in stages and continue feeding even after the viscera and muscle have been consumed. By the end, the pig’s body is reduced to “a mummified skin suit with the red bra still attached” (79). Skeletal remains are collected 50 meters from their original location.
At a bunk in the Juan Bosco shelter, an old man is traumatized by the loss of his wife, who died in the desert: The group that the couple was traveling with had to leave her body behind. A man called Patricio tells De León that migrants who die on the trail are often covered with rocks so that vultures cannot reach them. However, on the migrant trail, there is no proper burial that fits in with the majority of migrants’ Roman Catholic faith. When the body is absent, it is impossible to hold a wake and pray for the deceased’s soul. A destroyed or incomplete corpse may negatively affect the afterlife for the deceased, according to Roman Catholic theology, as it may stop the deceased from rising from the dead to be judged at the appointed time.
From a political standpoint, the absent body destroys evidence that the person was there in the first place and means that the total number of migrant deaths is ultimately unknown. De León considers that the disappeared bodies “are logical extensions of a political process” (84), which allows the government to distance itself from the humanitarian issues surrounding undocumented migration.
Introduction and Part 1, Chapters 1-3 Analysis
In the opening chapters, De León shows how Border Patrol and the government use The Sonora Desert as a Migration Deterrent on the US-Mexico border. While the government argues that the harsh natural conditions of the desert act as a deterrent for unauthorized crossings, De León focuses on the coercive practice of making the desert the only means of unauthorized entry. Undocumented immigrants who are successful in crossing this border are those who do essential work that Americans will not do. Moreover, following the North American Free Trade Act of 1994, “the United States promised economic prosperity for its southern neighbor if it would only open up its ports of entry and take shipment of cheap goodies” (6). The influx of “gringo corn” into Mexico decimated the country’s agriculture and put millions of peasant farmers out of work, meaning that their only chance for prosperity was to scale the border.
The US government justifies the harrowing occurrences in the Sonora Desert—which include death by dehydration and predation by bandits and carrion-eaters—by emphasizing that the crossers are undocumented and so should not be there in the first place. De León shows how the American media’s focus on the immigrants’ lack of documentation is a way of stripping them of their humanity and ignoring the complexities of their situation.
Seeking to rehumanize these migrants, De León uses several ethnographic techniques. First, looking for the remains of migrants who have died on the trail, De León experiences the harsh conditions of the desert for himself, finding himself “periodically shivering and getting dizzy; [his] body is working hard to make sense of this inferno” (24). By subjecting himself to the desert and the resulting bodily trauma, De León shows that his own privileged researcher’s body has the same response as anyone’s who is attempting to cross the border. Using visceral, corporeal imagery to describe his experience, De León diminishes the distance between himself, the reader, and the migrants.
In Chapter 2’s semifictionalized ethnography, an overall impression inspired by a collation of interviews, De León tries to “match the frankness, sarcasm, and humor of [his] interlocutors, as well as the grittiness of the difficult worlds they inhabit” (14). This is evident when the nine fictionalized migrants swear and tease each other, using Spanish colloquialisms. In addition to humor, De León evokes pathos in the case of Lupe, a woman who wishes to be reunited with her children and undergoes sexual abuse at the hands of the bajadores. De León’s description of how a bajador “squeezes one of her brown breasts like he is testing the ripeness of some fruit” (53) both exoticizes and objectifies Lupe, in addition to illustrating her extreme vulnerability as a young woman on the migrant trail.
Finally, in staging the multispecies ethnography, where the clothed bodies of pigs stand in for migrant corpses, De León monitors the rate and stages of decomposition of bodies on the trail to demonstrate what it means for a person to die in the desert. Alluding to the habit of dying migrants to choose the shade of a tree, he describes how the shade cannot last due to the sun’s constant rotation. Both the migrant and pig corpses are later carried off by carrion-eaters, their bodies dispersed up to 50 meters from the site of their death. De León juxtaposes his multispecies ethnography with a real-life tale of an old man grieving his wife. The woman died under a tree beside the trail, without a proper Roman Catholic burial, as would have been desired. The migrants’ “bad death” in the desert, which De León defines as a death that occurs anonymously and far from home, further underscores his point that the government and Border Control are shifting the blame for migrants’ deaths onto the desert not only a deterrent for undocumented immigration, but as a means of ending lives that they consider less important than American ones.
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