Event Details

Finding the Human in the Borderlands: The Cultural Politics of Life, Death, and Grief in the Sonoran Desert
Tuesday, February 25, 5:00-6:00 pm, Humanities 412 (Interdisciplinary Media Lab)
The Sonoran Desert, in the border region of Southern Arizona, has witnessed the deaths of thousands of Central American migrants in the past two decades. These deaths evidence the human cost of increasing border militarization, which has rerouted migrants into increasingly remote corridors through hazardous desert terrain. Although a large amount of political and media attention on the U.S.-Mexico border focuses on the efficacy of walls and the porosity of barriers, the daily loss of migrant lives resulting from security measures has received relatively small levels of national attention. At the same time, human rights groups and grassroots organizations in Southern Arizona have worked to intervene in these deaths, through practical life-saving strategies (such as maintaining water stations in highly trafficked areas) and awareness-raising practices (such as mapping projects). Alongside these activities, workers and volunteers create visual and performative forms of activism through handmade memorials, vigils, and protests. The vigils, marches, memorials, maps, and other art and media projects mark deaths that have been rendered invisible both by the conditions of the Sonoran Desert and dominant media narratives. Through a combination of ethnography and critical discursive analysis, this research explores questions about racialized and gendered national identities, and the practices of marking and memorializing migrant deaths. The goal of this research is to aid advocacy for humane borders by deconstructing the ways in which media frameworks enable the invisibility of these deaths, and by highlighting strategies for recognizing the lives of Central American migrants as fully human and grievable.