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

The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail is a 2015 work of nonfiction and the winner of four awards, including the J.J. Staley Book Prize in 2018. Drawing on his expertise in anthropology, ethnography and archeology, author Jason De León, Executive Director of the Undocumented Migration Project and current Professor of Anthropology and Chicano/a Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, critiques the federal border enforcement policy known as Prevention Through Deterrence.

From the outset of his book, De León argues that Prevention Through Deterrence, the policy that claims to use the “‘inhospitable”’ conditions of the Sonora Desert, between Arizona and Mexico, as a means of preventing illegal immigration, has in actuality “set the stage for the desert to become the new ‘victimizer’ of border transgressors” (34; 35). De León states that the policy, which has been in effect since the mid-1990s, uses nature as a foil to disguise the “hybrid collectif of deterrence” that incorporates the federal government’s own responsibility for migrant deaths (60).

De León opens his book with his first day of ethnographic research in Nogales, Mexico, during which he sees the body of a migrant who has perished in the desert. This visceral image of a corpse being left to the flies leads into De León’s manifesto, which seeks to expose the “innumerable consequences” the sociopolitical phenomenon of Prevention Through Deterrence has for “the lives and bodies of undocumented people” (4).

The primary section of De León’s book, “Dangerous Ground,” discusses the policy of Prevention Through Deterrence and the role of human and non-human actors in relation to the policy. Through expeditions that include a journey looking for migrant remains in the desert, and using the bodies of freshly-killed pigs to assess the rate of decomposition, De León brings the reader into close contact with the violence that migrants experience and the way federal border policy uses the desert to do its “dirty work” (68).

Part 2, “El Camino,” introduces the reader to Memo and Lucho, two repeat border-crossers De León meets at the migrant shelter Albergue Juan Bosco in Nogales, Mexico. The ensuing chapters follow the two men’s experiences of the cycle of attempted crossing, deportation, and preparing to cross again. De León accompanies Memo and Lucho to the grocery store, where they buy $26 worth of provisions for their journey through the Sonora Desert. He then visits the US Border Patrol’s billion-dollar collection of detection “gadgets” and notes the disparity in cost and technical sophistication between the migrants’ preparation and that of Border Patrol (155). Nevertheless, De León shows that between 92 and 98% of those attempting to cross into the US eventually do make it across the border, as with each failed attempt they gain greater knowledge of the desert and develop new technologies of their own.

In the final part of the book, “Perilous Terrain,” De León recounts the journey taken from finding a woman’s rotting corpse in the desert to tracing her identity and learning how her family responded to her loss. He presents a shocking sense of the disparity between Border Patrol and the family’s perceptions of the victim, Ecuadorian Carmita Maricela Zhagüi Puyas, who goes by Maricela. Whereas Border Patrol viewed Maricela as part of the illegal migrant body count, her family, both near and extended, continue to feel her loss, which their lives have been irrevocably changed by it.

De León then goes to show, through the case of José Tacuri, the trauma faced by families who were not able to recover the body of a loved one who disappeared in the desert. He thus exposes how the policy of Prevention Through Deterrence, which allows migrants to try their luck at crossing a deadly landscape, has consequences not only for the individual, but for their entire family and community.

De León concludes by asking the reader to empathize with the migrants whose stories animate his book and to fully recognize their humanity, rather than dismissing them as illegals whose lives do not matter because they have transgressed border law. He admits that there is no easy solution for the problem of undocumented migration but suggests fairer economic policies between the United States and its neighbors, so that fewer migrants feel that their home countries are devoid of opportunity and that they have no choice but to make the perilous journey of entering the United States illegally.