Scales of Suffering in the US-Mexico Borderlands
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Scales of Suffering in the US-Mexico Borderlands Cameron Gokee 1 & Haeden Stewart 2 & Jason De León 3 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Since the 1990s, US border policies have worked to funnel undocumented migration into remote stretches of the Sonoran Desert, where deadly terrain and temperatures make border crossing most dangerous. This weaponization of the desert finds some cover, we argue, behind the scalar projects of state-centered maps emphasizing vast geography and gross statistics over personal pain and trauma. Counter-mapping against these projects, we draw on archaeological and ethnographic data from the Undocumented Migration Project (UMP), and geospatial data for thousands of deceased migrants across southern Arizona, to witness how migration, as both socio-historical process and humanitarian crisis, emerges from human-scale strategies and experiences of suffering. Keywords Undocumentedmigration . US-Mexico borderlands . Counter-mapping . Scalar
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A thousand footprints in the sand / Reveal a secret no one can define –Bruce Springsteen
Introduction As we write in mid-2019, the United States, led by the Trump administration, continues to push a “zero tolerance” policy toward the unauthorized entry of migrants and * Cameron Gokee [email protected]
1
Department of Anthropology, Appalachian State University, Boone, NC 28608-2016, USA
2
Department of Anthropology, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA 01003, USA
3
Departments of Anthropology and Chicana, Chicano, and Central American Studies, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA
International Journal of Historical Archaeology
refugees from Latin America—leading first to the separation of children from their parents, and now to the detention of entire families in privately-run prisons scattered across the southwestern US (Jordan and Nixon 2018). Although this policy violates international human rights law, including the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, signed by the US in 1968, there is no indication that the US federal government plans to relent from tactics designed to terrorize and ostensibly dissuade people from crossing the US-Mexico border. The political rationale for this policy is the false perception, promulgated by conservative news media and the Trump administration, that lax immigration enforcement allows gang members and terrorists to pour into the US from Mexico (USDHS 2018). Often describing immigrants and refugees as a “flood” (Strom and Alcock 2017), this discourse works to equate them with natural catastrophes that destroy lives and property on a tremendous scale. At the same time, this discourse is a scalar project: a few immigrants, like drops of rain, might be welcomed, but a seemingly innumerable mass of people, like rising flood waters, would need to be held back by whatever means necessary. The exaggerated scale of undocumented migration then gives (flimsy) cover to border policies that are both unlawful and inhumane. The c
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