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

“This dude had been dead for less than an hour and yet the flies were already there in full force. They were landing on his milky eyeballs and crawling in and out of his open mouth […] We watched flies lay eggs on this man’s face for what seemed an eternity.”

In this gruesome portrait of death, De León details what the desert does to the bodies left in it, and his own feelings of powerlessness and horror, as he watches flies make their home in a man’s face. Through his use of the colloquialism “dude,” De León departs from a formal academic style to convey his very human reaction to the grotesque spectacle he has encountered.

“My argument is quite simple. The terrible things that this mass of migrating people experience en route are neither random nor senseless, but rather part of a strategic federal plan that […] is […] a killing machine that simultaneously uses and hides behind the viciousness of the Sonoran Desert.”

De León lays out the book’s thesis: that the federal government is using the harsh conditions of the Sonoran Desert as a means of controlling and deterring immigration. Using nature as a foil, the government washes its hands of responsibility to the people killed, as they try to enter the United States.

“In my approach to clandestine migration, I have sought to paint crossers not as anonymous shadows scrambling through the desert, but as real people who routinely live and die in this environment and whose voices and experiences we should be privileging.”

De León sets out his intention to look at the migrants’ experiences of the crossing through a lens of humanism. Rather than treating these crossers as anonymous statistics, De León makes a case for respecting their humanity and their own personal narratives of the journey.

“For many Americans, this person—whose remains are so ravaged that his or her sex is unknown—is (was) an ‘illegal,’ a noncitizen who broke US law and faced the consequences. Many of these same people tell themselves that if they can keep calling them ‘illegals,’ they can avoid speaking their names or imagining their faces.”

De León shows how many Americans use the border crossers’ assumed illegality as an excuse to avoid facing the horror that real human beings are dying on the frontiers of their own country. The term “illegals” depersonalizes the border crossers, making them synonymous with their undesirable political status.

“Many people die in remote areas and their bodies are never recovered. The actual number of people who lose their lives while migrating will forever remain unknown.”

De León describes the spectral quality of the people who disappear in the desert, never to be seen again. This assists the system that would render their experiences invisible and let the federal government and Border Patrol off the hook.

“Prevention Through Deterrence. It has a nice ring to it. It looks good in big bold letters splashed on the front of federal documents. […] It sounds powerful, but not vicious. It wants to convince you that it’s a humane policy designed simply to prevent crime, to discourage it before it happens.”

De León adopts a mocking, propagandistic tone when introducing the reader to Prevention Through Deterrence, the policy that causes the federal government to use the desert as a means of dealing with undocumented immigration. He shows how the name makes the government look like a benign agency that is using its country’s natural resources to control its borders without much violent interference.

“As the desert and all the actants it contains have become incorporated into the Prevention Through Deterrence hybrid collectif, Border Patrol has attempted to separate its policy from the subsequent trauma that migrants experience as a result of being funneled toward this ‘hostile’ environment. Rather than being viewed as a key partner in border enforcement strategy, the desert is framed as a ruthless beast that law enforcement cannot be responsible for.”

De León exposes Prevention Through Deterrence for the cover-up it is. He shows how the government uses the excuse of a wilderness it cannot control to wash its hands of responsibility for the lives lost on American terrain. The desert’s wilderness fits in with Border Patrol’s plan for managing unauthorized border crossings.

“I have read that this is the most humane way to kill a pig in the field. It sure as hell doesn’t feel humane. It’s also not instantaneous. The animal keeps falling down and getting back up. He walks in half-circles and defiantly refuses to die. ‘I gotta do it again,’ the gunman tells us. ‘His skull is too thick.’”

The killing of a pig in preparation for De León’s experiment to assess the stages of a body’s decomposition in the desert is brutal and far from instantaneous. While De León uses a pig because the animal is scientists’ preferred proxy for a human body, the violence needed to kill the pig is a foreshadowing of the violence experienced by the humans killed in the desert. It is slow, confusing, agonizing, and gruesome.

“Just like the previous two days of feeding, the third starts at daybreak. The difference is that by now the body is a pathetic shell of what it used to be. Even though the bulk of the viscera and muscle were consumed within the first forty-eight hours, the birds keep working.”

De León uses vivid, emotionally charged language to describe vultures feeding on the experimental pigs’ remains to show the extent of necroviolence that bodies left in the desert is subjected to. He implicitly draws a parallel with Border Patrol’s ability to dehumanize undocumented border crossers, whom they leave to the predation of nature.

“I realized early on that being a male researcher from a working-class Latino background often influenced the ways people interacted with me and how they recounted their crossing stories. Many of the men I spoke to told their hard-luck tales through the lens of chingaderas because they knew that I would understand the nuances of this linguistic frame.”

Rather than viewing himself as an impersonal objective researcher, De León is conscious of the figure he cuts among his interviewees. The fact that he is a Spanish-speaking, Latinx male diminishes the distance between him and his subjects, who feel free to express themselves to him, as they do to each other, through play-routines, or chingaderas.

“One of the major misconceptions about immigration control is that if the government spends enough money on fences, drone planes, motion sensors, and Border Patrol agents and makes the crossing process treacherous enough, people will eventually stop coming.”

De León highlights the American government’s misguided ideas that technology can prevent immigrants from making the journey across the border. However, even this catalogue of deterrents is no match for immigrants’ determination.

“They are male, lack formal education, have crossed the border multiple times, and have been incorporated into the US undocumented labor force for years. Both have spent most of their lives living in the United States, and neither sees returning to Mexico as an option.”

Memo and Lucho’s predicament, described here, is “fairly typical” (106) of undocumented border crossers. The reader may be surprised to learn that these men have spent decades in the country that refuses to grant them legal status yet profits from the labor they provide.

“Like the random events that migrants encounter in the desert that may impede their journey or assist in their success, the criteria Border Patrol used to select the seventy people I am watching being federally prosecuted on this day in Tucson in 2013 are arbitrary. Having your day in court is often just a matter of sheer dumb luck.”

By likening the randomness of the events that migrants could possibly encounter in the desert with that of having an immigration trial, De León disrupts the illusion that the federal government has control over immigration. The colloquialism “sheer dumb luck” uses ironic humor to demonstrate the lottery-like aspect of border crossers’ fates, not just in the desert, but in the process of deportation.

“Like a never-ending scene from Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flat, every day on la linea a drama starring a revolving cast of heroines, hustlers, ne’er-do-wells, and saints plays out on the streets […] In the same conversation or interaction you can find people weeping and laughing uncontrollably, swearing off the human race and simultaneously being surprised by the kindness of strangers.”

De León portrays la linea, the narrow strip of land across the border where deportees usually end up, as a place of massive contradictions. This liminal space is a showcase for the best and worst of humanity, where people take advantage of each other and assist each other in close proximity.

“While other customers are buying meat for a Sunday carne asada, these guys are shopping for a trip through Hades.”

When De León accompanies Memo and Lucho to the supermarket so they can buy provisions for their trip through the desert, he notes that the grocery store is a regular one and not equipped for epic trips through the Sonora Desert. The juxtaposition of the Mexican Sunday favorite, carne asada, with the Greek word for the underworld, Hades, highlights the ludicrousness of the men’s mission: they are using everyday supplies to attempt the nearly impossible.

“Ex-governor of Arizona and former head of the Department of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano once told a reporter, ‘You show me a 50-foot wall and I’ll show you a 51-foot ladder at the border.’”

Napolitano’s metaphor of the 50-foot wall and the 51-foot ladder exemplifies the ingenuity and determination of undocumented immigrants, who will always find ways to scale a barrier.

“Even when their crossing is successful, the event can be traumatic and have lasting emotional, psychological, and physical effects. The act of remembering can conjure pain, fear, and despair. Among American families with undocumented members, it is not uncommon for the topic of their crossing to be a forbidden subject.”

De León feels privileged to hear the tales of migrant crossings of the Sonora Desert because he understands how merely remembering that time can be traumatic for those who have made the journey. Successful border crossers feel that they must repress their memories of crossing, to move on from them and legitimately begin their new lives in America.

“An archeological approach can foster engagements with the recent past and its material remains in novel and meaningful ways and produce new information that may be lost in narrative translations of history, collective memories, or accounts of personal experiences.”

De León makes a case for using objects to study migration because they can provide a different type of information than subjective oral histories do. An archeological approach can tell us a lot about how the desert impacts the material aspects of migrants’ journey across the desert and can give an empirical indication of how much they have physically endured.

“She is wearing generic brown and white running shoes, black stretch pants, and a long-sleeve camouflage shirt. The shirt is something you expect a deer hunter to wear, but over the last several years migrants and drug mules have adopted the fashion. The brown and green design blends perfectly with the Sonoran backdrop this time of year.”

When De León finds Maricela’s corpse, it is expertly outfitted in clothing that is suitable for being camouflaged in the desert. The tragic irony is that while Maricela was able to hide from Border Patrol, her abandonment and death in the desert threatened to camouflage, if not eradicate, her story. It is also poignant that given her scrupulous preparations for the crossing, she did not make it.

“The deaths that migrants experience in the Sonoran Desert are anything but dignified. That is the point. This is what ‘Prevention Through Deterrence’ looks like. These photographs should disturb us, because the disturbing reality is that right now corpses lie rotting on the desert floor and there aren’t enough witnesses.”

When De León is told that his photographs of Maricela’s corpse robbed her of her dignity, he retorts by saying that exposition of the indignity of dying in the desert is his point. De León urges the reader to witness the horror in the photographs and experience all the natural human reactions of witnessing a corpse in the desert.

“Central and South American migrants, who accounted for 31 percent of all people deported by the US federal government in 2013 […] pass through multiple borders using a variety of transportation methods. This includes walking or running for their lives, crossing rivers on rafts, and riding on the tops of freight trains, all before arriving at the US-Mexico boundary for the chance to try their luck in the desert.”

De León shows that the journey taken by Central and South Americans is especially epic, as they must face many dangers even before encountering the Sonora Desert. It makes the success of those like Christian seem especially miraculous and paints a picture of these migrants’ determination to enter the United States and make a better life for themselves.

“She always said she had to get there. […] Her dream was to arrive in the United States. She realized her dream, but she died doing it.”

Deceased Maricela’s sister-in-law, Vanessa, says how Maricela had her own version of the American Dream: to arrive in America and provide for her family, so they could enjoy a better standard of living. However, the tragedy was that because of Prevention Through Deterrence, she paid for that dream with her life.

“José’s room looks like a lot of other teenagers’ rooms. The only difference is that this place is frozen in time. Nothing here has moved since he left for the United States and disappeared in the Arizona desert just south of Arivaca.”

After a detailed description of missing José’s room, De León concludes that it is the space of a regular teenager. However, its eerie time-capsule-like quality, which De León later likens to a cenotaph, indicates his family’s inability to accept his loss. They keep his room as he left it, in case he somehow returns.