Hundreds of undocumented immigrants die each year crossing the US-Mexico border. Most of the bodies of those who die are never discovered or identified. They remain anonymous. However, in recent years, an effort has been made to memorialise those who have died crossing the border. Small border monuments have sprung up in the desert, and larger monuments have been established in border cities. Cemeteries in border towns have created sections to house remains found in the desert, referred to as Juan Doe cemeteries. The memorialisation of undocumented immigrants has been controversial due to their legal status, and counter-memorialisation discourses have arisen.
This article explores monumentalisation along the border as a means of exploring the bordering mechanisms of statecraft. It first addresses bordering as a form of statecraft, then explores the memorialisation of undocumented immigrants who died crossing the border. It embarks on a journey through anonymous desert gravesites and small desert cemeteries haunted by the spectres of immigration. It explores the contestation surrounding memorialisation, the narratives of anonymity surrounding the memorialisation of undocumented immigrants, and the counter-memory discourses that emerge in an effort to rewrite the meaning of these migrant deaths. These counter-memorial discourses, I argue, posit desert border monuments as a threat to statecraft because they cannot be situated within the (b)ordering mechanisms of the state and indeed posit a rupture to the active forgetting associated with practices of statecraft.
Conceptualising statecraft: ordering and bordering
I conceive of statecraft here following Roxanne Doty as ‘the never finally completed project of working to fix meaning, authority, and control’.Footnote 1 This project, then, takes statecraft as its starting point, and seeks to explore the role of practices and performances of statecraft in constructing what it means to be a politically qualified subject of the state in one specific context: the US-Mexico border. This article focuses primarily on bordering as one aspect of contemporary American statecraft. As Rick Ashley delineates, the state ‘is nothing more and nothing less than an arbitrary political representation always in the process of being inscribed within history, through practice, and in the face of all manner of resistant interpretations that must be excluded if the representation is to be counted as self-evident reality’.Footnote 2 Ashley here emphasises the contingent nature of statecraft, which translates in the context of this case to the point that statecraft along the border involves a variety of legal, institutional, and everyday practices that serve to distinguish citizen from non-citizen, and render the lives (and deaths) of non-citizens ungrievable. These practices are very much specific to this particular context, and serve to achieve specific political ends. Understanding statecraft in this sense allows for an exploration of not simply the institutions of the state, but the processes at work in the construction of the modern American state, and more importantly, of the modern subject of this statecraft and how he/she lives, dies, and is politically constituted.
Statecraft is, then, nothing less than the construction of what it means to be a subject of politics through a variety of practices that sustain certain conceptualisations of the state. The specific conceptualisation of the state and the content of what it means to be a subject of the state is context-dependent, but the broad functioning remains the same. The practice of statecraft need not be limited to processes carried out at the institutional level. As Stefan Borg delineates,
one of Foucault's great contributions … lies in his meticulous demonstration that those officially authorized to speak in the name of the state are not the major doers of statecraft. Since the state representatives are themselves not major doers of statecraft, in order to succeed, statecraft must have a self-erasing quality to it, where the most important enactments of the state take place at the myriad of social practices ‘at the bottom’ of society in everyday practice, at the same time as the constitutive function of those practices are forgotten and repressed as such.Footnote 3
What this gestures to is the way in which statecraft can be seen at every level, and is implicated in everyday practices. Furthermore, questions of life and death can sustain the project of statecraft by constructing the politically qualified subjects of the state: those defined as citizens, those in need of ordering and bordering, and those beyond the limits of qualified politics, those that Judith Butler might define as ‘ungrievable lives’,Footnote 4 or Anna Agathangelou might refer to as the already ‘ontologically dead’,Footnote 5 in this case the dead undocumented migrant.
However, since statecraft is never a finished process, it is possible to ask after its construction by looking at a multiplicity of instances of resistance. This article argues that resistances to statecraft can be found in the way the deaths of undocumented immigrants are memorialised, both in the case of formal memorials and informal sites of memory. These immigrants are situated within a narrative that posits them as a threat to American security, both physical and economic, while they are alive. But what happens when they are dead? What threat do these corporeal remains or the monuments commemorating those who were killed pose to the specific crafting of the state? How are they situated within a logic of border security, or further, of statecraft itself? And what resistances can the bodies of undocumented migrants pose?
Building the border wall: border regions as zones of statecraft
International border regions have generally been dismissed as marginal places. But in recent years border regions in certain contexts have become highly politicised by virtue of their status as zones of indistinction, in need of sovereign intervention to be reordered. The border wall along the US-Mexico border is one attempt at such a reordering. It comes to acquire unique significance in a landscape largely without monuments, the barren desert that characterises the border between the US and Mexico. The border wall takes many forms as it winds across the desert. At times it is barbed wire, at times a large fence and physical wall, at times a border checkpoint along a road that is heavily trafficked. Exploring the border wall allows us to examine the contemporary situation at the border. Statecraft is not a generalisable phenomenon; that is, it is highly contextual and is a crafting, a process with a multiplicity of instantiations. Therefore to look at contemporary statecraft at border sites involves exploring processes (bordering) rather than essential characteristics of the state (border). As Mark Salter says, ‘sovereignty and boundary maintenance are inextricable’.Footnote 6 This is why studying the crafting of the state relies on an exploration of the variety of boundary-maintaining practices.Footnote 7 The border is thus the site of a multiplicity of replicable practices that are repeated throughout society to ‘state’ the state. Bordering is not solely geographical, but is oriented towards subject production.Footnote 8
The border wall appeals to this notion of subject production, to a sense of nationhood derived from attachment to territory, one of the primary characteristics typically associated with a nation-state in world politics. By fixing this territory, the border wall beckons to a shared past tied to this territory which belongs to ‘us’ and not ‘them’. As Doty puts it, ‘regaining control of our borders conjures up a mythic past, an age of purity, when the inside was clearly and unambiguously differentiated from the outside’.Footnote 9 The border wall has not always existed to define the boundary between two states. As William Langiewiesche remarked in 1992, ‘the boundary between the United States and Mexico is in places merely a trace in the dirt’.Footnote 10 Historically, the US-Mexico border has been quite porous, with Native American groups living in swathes of territory that spanned both sides of the border, migrant workers crossing north to work for a specific growing season, and little if any identification required to cross in either direction. The border has always been a social construct rather than simply a physical one. As Joel Levanetz states, ‘because humans created boundaries, they are inevitably political’.Footnote 11 Peter Andreas refers to the border as a political stage, in that the border area is the locus for both the coercive hand of the state and the symbolic performance of state identity.Footnote 12 The policing apparatus has also increased border deaths. Before construction of the border wall for Operation Gatekeeper in 1994, one or two people died each month crossing the border. After its construction, Enrique Morones, founder of the non-profit group Border Angels, which tries to prevent migrant deaths, estimates that now two immigrants die every day attempting to cross the border, from a combination of violence (by Border Patrol or vigilantes), dehydration and exposure, and other accidents.Footnote 13
Dot Tuer compares the fence between San Diego and Tijuana specifically to the Great Wall of China; it divides the civilised from the uncivilised, yet by its very presence warns of imminent barbarian incursions. What is visible, the fence itself in its imperial authority, tells only a partial story, because much of the action takes place not at the fence itself, but over it, around it, and through it, where people slip through. It is a barrier that arrests the viewer's gaze. The singular fixation on the fence heightens tensions between nomad and imperial space, and it is the haunting emptiness of the landscape, juxtaposed with the omnipresent fence which divides the landscape into horizontal grids, that becomes ‘a repository for the fissures of history’.Footnote 14 The fence takes attention away from the topographical features of the landscape, and focuses our attention on the role of the sovereign complex in territorialising the landscape.
Tuer also argues that the border fence slices through space and time.Footnote 15 It is itself a symbol of the will to contain migration, to construct the identity of those situated on both sides, and to impose a will upon the landscape itself. The fence imposes upon the landscape the concept of sovereign territoriality. Before the fence, there is just desert, brush, and land. After the fence, there are citizens, ownership, geography, territory, governance, and enforcement. This is the construction of space. But at the border wall, temporality blurs, representing the history defining the relations at the site, the current relationship, and also gestures towards a future, a future without immigration, a future decided once and for all, fully ordered and (b)ordered. The imposition of both space and time, Tuer concludes, works to create discordance in the landscape and ultimately a contested territory which holds the secrets of undocumented histories, ancient cosmologies, and finally and perhaps most importantly, the secrets of life and death itself.Footnote 16 The fence is itself an attempt to impose upon the disorder of the landscape a certain order, yet this order can never fully be formed. Because territoriality is at its heart mythological, dependent upon statecraft that is constantly performed and reformed, there can never be this final or ultimate ordering and bordering.Footnote 17
Sebastian Rotella argues that the fence has not stopped illegal border crossing, but did anybody really think it would? It has rather ‘created a demarcation, a semblance of order’.Footnote 18 But it is only ever the semblance of order which is created, not order in its finalised concrete form. The border fence is not the demarcation of an already-existing territorial border, but rather the very production of a border, the exercise of a sovereign power which presumes to have the right to make that boundary. As Prem Kumar Rajaram states, ‘sovereign territoriality is always being constituted and challenged, exclusions are ongoing. Each advent of the stranger at the threshold of the norm must be dealt with; and each response to the stranger reinforces the sense of what it is to be part of the normal community.’Footnote 19 This critique of territoriality emphasises that borders are constantly being produced and reproduced. However, integral to statecraft is the forgetting of this constitutive process: the fixity of the state must be assumed in order to maintain its authority. Because it is assumed, it is not questioned, not even up for question. The unattached, non-territorial condition of the stranger, as Rajaram puts it, or the immigrant without documents, as I would put it, reminds us that our identity need not be bound up with sovereign territoriality: that this sovereign territoriality is a myth, and that the state operates through biopolitical power and the production of bare life at the border. Rajaram emphasises that life is only coherent before its exception: bare life. And indeed our political selves only exist through the sovereign production of bare life at the imagined border. The relationship between the state and the immigrant is constantly being resituated as the state attempts to maintain its norms, its perpetual normalisation techniques for the very maintenance of an identity of the state. It is this revelation of the hidden abject who has been portrayed as the other at the door of the state, and in the interstitial (or interstateal) spaces, both outside of, between, within the state, which puts into question the myth of the originary moment of the state.
Here it is worth returning back to the idea of abjection and exploring it further. The ‘illegal immigrant’ is one instantiation of the abject in contemporary American statecraft. Julia Kristeva describes the status of abjection as that of marginalised groups.Footnote 20 Abjection literally means that which has been cast off or thrown away.Footnote 21 This etymology indicates several things. ‘Thrown’ or ‘cast’ implies a forceful ejection, while ‘away’ indicates a distancing between that which did the throwing and that which was thrown. It also implies a denial of agency to that which was thrown, that this object had no say in the matter. Kristeva depicts the abject as that which was once part of the self but is no longer because the self has forcefully expelled it due to its disgust with the abject. The abject is necessary to the self, but it is also necessary to the self that the abject be expelled from it. However, at some point, the self comes into contact with the abject, and is forced to confront that which was once part of the self but no longer is, to confront the very process of expulsion which the self has tried so hard to hide. The reason this process is hidden is because the very thought that the abject was once part of the self, necessary to the self, is a disgusting one. The encounter therefore is a reminder of this need, this dependence and vulnerability.
The immigrant is that which is outside of the state, that which is other to the state. The state is defined by its citizenry and by those who do not fit into the requirements for citizenship. The immigrant, documented or not, is that which is different from the citizen, the constitutive outside to the citizen, the other to the state. However, prior to the founding of the state, that very immigrant may have once inhabited the land which defines the state. California, Texas, and New Mexico: each was once part of Mexico. Those Mexicans who left California when it was lost in war to the United States once inhabited this American territory. That very person, that very figure who immigrates to the United States from Mexico, is precisely the one which was ejected from California forcefully, precisely the one who was once part of the state but was expelled from it for non-compliance. The immigrant thus poses a fear, a threat, because it shows what has previously been hidden, namely the violence of the act of abjection and the need to repeat that violence in the process of repeated statecraft. The immigrant is that which has been expelled from the state and returns to highlight this very expulsion, and to demonstrate the need which the state had and has for the immigrant. The immigrant is also the citizen. The United States was founded by immigrants; the immigrant myth is essentially the founding myth of the state. The state needs to both embrace and expel the figure of the immigrant.Footnote 22 As Roxanne Doty argues, ‘successful practices of statecraft are practices that produce the state's powerful image and simultaneously conceal this production’.Footnote 23
Sebastian Rotella describes the border fence as both symbol and reality. It assumes multiple personalities, ‘juxtaposed against children playing soccer, shacks, satellite dishes, mansions, jets descending into the Tijuana airport’.Footnote 24 It is the site of decorations with murals and political graffiti. Those who live in the interstate-al spaces which compose the border are characterised by Rotella as ‘border denizens’ whose lives are a continuous series of leaps back and forth. He describes their world as a shadow world that defies notions of law and order, culture, and nationhood. The fantastic becomes routine. It is in this world of spectres that statecraft is truly exposed in its dependence upon construction and sovereignty over the state of exception.
The state of exception is described by Giorgio Agamben as a biopolitical state, in which ‘law encompasses living beings by means of its own suspension’.Footnote 25 The state of exception is a technique of government in that it suspends law in order to engage in statecraft itself: in order to declare itself as the ultimate power. Mark Salter theorises that this state of exception is in fact present at the modern day border. The sovereign is no longer he who has a monopoly on legitimate use of force within a territory, but rather he who has the power to decide, to exclude, or include at the border. Entry at the border is a moment of crisis, where we must confess our deviances to the sovereign and try to situate ourselves within the sovereign apparatus. At the border, we are all fully submitted to the sovereign's power, and our biopolitical existence is determined and controlled and limited by the state. Salter argues that at the border, we are fully imbued in the state of exception, fully subject to the sovereign, in complete submission to the sovereign apparatus.Footnote 26 I will return later to the argument that memorialisation of the dead undocumented immigrant can perhaps pose a challenge to this notion.
Even the signs along the border reinforce a message of danger and conflict and the theme that only the state can decide who enters and who crosses.Footnote 27 The contemporary US-Mexico border can be considered one expression of the state of exception because it has become the ultimate zone of the unclassifiable or unrepresentable being. As Walter Benjamin states, ‘the state of emergency in which we live is not the exception but the rule’.Footnote 28 By this, Benjamin indicates that the rule has become the creation of a state of emergency, an appeal to a state of crisis, a state of exception, as a tool of statecraft. It is by appealing to exceptionality that it becomes easier to forget about the active ordering and bordering the state is engaged in. The state of exception is an idea to which this article shall return, as it is integral to understanding border monuments in multiple contexts. But for now it bears returning to the border wall and its associated monuments.
Memorialising border deaths: crosses, spectres, and El Tiradito
Along the border fence, there are often monuments which memorialise those who have died crossing the boundary.Footnote 29 In 1998, migrant activists in Tijuana erected crosses to all of the migrants who perished in California as a result of Operation Gatekeeper, which had the effect of forcing migrants to cross in harsher and more dangerous areas to avoid border patrol enforcement. The crosses were arranged chronologically from west to east in order of death. They were erected along a section of the border wall that had previously been a gathering point for migrants crossing the border. Nearby, a shrine has been created along the road that follows the border.Footnote 30 More recently, in October 2009, the pro-migrant Defense Coalition hung 5,100 white crosses on the border wall on the Tijuana side to commemorate those who have died trying to cross. The number represents those who have died in the 15 years since the US strengthened border control.Footnote 31 Along Boulevard Aeropuerto in Tijuana, there is a permanent memorial with white crosses and decorated painted coffins along the border fence. It has crosses with names, ages, hometowns, and dates of death. For those anonymous victims, the crosses and coffins read ‘no identificado’. SueAnne Ware describes this monument as seen from a moving car: ‘the names seem to flick through the air one by one, like ghosts’.Footnote 32 It is worth pointing out that monuments along the border fence itself are largely on the Mexican side, as if to mark the fence in some way, to alter its stark meaning from a certain perspective.
Border crossings at the US-Mexico border violate the immigration laws of the United States of America. But beyond the legal aspects of these crossings, there are moral, ethical, and political questions which arise that question the very originary myths of statecraft and the conceptions of citizenship, humanity, and memory. Following Judith Butler's model of grievable life, in this section I assess the way in which undocumented immigrant deaths in this particular context are framed as ungrievable and thus unmemorialisable lives. They are framed as such because to memorialise them would be to bring into question not simply the fixity of the border, but the founding myth of the state which relies upon the differentiation between the self and the other. The state posits the life of the other as ungrievable and unmemorialisable as a prerequisite of statecraft itself.Footnote 33
As Butler delineates, no subject can emerge without being differentiated. A subject emerges through excluding other possible subject positions. A subject thus emerges through a process of abjection, jettisoning those dimensions of oneself that fail to conform to the norm of the human subject, in this case the citizen. The criteria for the citizen are not simply legal criteria, but ‘citizen’ emerges as a moral and social status which is linked not only with a political identity but with a level of value associated with that particular life. Butler goes on in regard to the process of abjection: ‘The refuse of such a process includes various forms of spectrality and monstrosity, usually figured in relation to non-human animal life’.Footnote 34 Spectrality is an apt framing for this discussion.
Spectrality describes those ghosts, those beings which straddle the boundaries between life and death. Derrida describes the spectre in Specters of Marx as a paradoxical incorporation.Footnote 35 It is some ‘thing’ which is difficult to name, neither soul nor body, but at the same time both one and the other. We cannot see the spectre, while it looks at us and sees us not see it even while it is there. This spectral asymmetry disrupts all specularity, because we do not see who looks at us. Because it disrupts the traditional framework of specularity and because it is unintelligible, invisible, and uncontrollable, the spectre can be portrayed as a deathly threat which is subject to interventions or mediations. What the spectre demonstrates to us is that this ultimate distinction between living and dead is not ultimate after all. What counts as worthy of life, as grievable life in Butler's terms, is a socially constructed decision. The ungrievable lives continue to haunt as spectres, to disrupt frameworks of spectrality, that which distinguishes a life of value from one without, one which may as well be dead, and as a result to disrupt frameworks of statecraft.
It is thus my argument that ghosts haunt the US-Mexico border. These spectres are not ghostly apparitions simply because they have died, but because of the way in which they contest the notions of the bounded citizen-subject which the state attempts to produce as final and once-and-for-all. The state both produces and presupposes certain operations of power that work through establishing a set of ontological givens, which remain uncontested and uncontestable within the particular modes of intelligibility that the state asserts.Footnote 36 The ghosts that haunt the border are undocumented immigrants who have died crossing the border. They continue to haunt in the interstices of political space: the memorial spaces of society, the ‘Juan Doe’ graveyards, and the bleached bones scattered in the desert, disrupting the ontological givens and assumptions of subjectivity which the state (re)produces.
I now turn to a discussion of several specific border monuments to explore the narratives behind their construction and functioning, as well as the counter-memorial narratives which challenge the memorialisation of the deaths of undocumented immigrants. I first explore monuments on both sides of the border, including El Tiradito Shrine in Tucson, Arizona, a wishing shrine which has become the centre for immigrants' rights groups and vigils, and the role of artists in border memorialisation. I then turn to an analysis of the Juan Doe graveyards scattered around the south-east, followed by a discussion of anonymous remains discovered and undiscovered in the desert which act as poignant memorials. These memorials need not be taken up in explicitly political projects in order to posit a potential resistance to statecraft; they are already mediated within discourses of the everyday social and political practices of life and death that sustain the contemporary biopolitical order.
El Tiradito, a Catholic shrine in Tucson, was not established in the context of immigrant memorialisation. Rather, it has evolved as a locus of such sentiment over time, as immigrants' rights groups use the site for protests or simply as a meeting area. El Tiradito is in fact a gravesite, though there is some dispute as to the story behind it. The most popular story, according to the Tucson-Pima historical commission, is of a gambler who fell in love with another man's wife, and was murdered by that man, shot and killed at the site.Footnote 37 Another story is of a man who fell in love with a beautiful woman from afar. He went to ask her family to marry her, but found out she was promised to someone else, so he committed suicide. Because the Catholic Church is opposed to suicide, the man could not be buried in the church cemetery, so he was buried where he fell, and his friends and family brought flowers and candles. These stories are all based around the central themes of love, loss, and rejection. It is also called the Wishing Shrine, because it is said that if you light a candle and return the next day and it still lit, your wish will come true. Many people leave love letters there hoping for their heartbreak to be healed.Footnote 38 This wishing is perhaps why migrants' rights groups have adopted the site, in addition to the shrine's central role as a community site.
El Tiradito means the discarded one, after the man who was killed there, discarded by love and by the church, since he was not buried in the church cemetery. Immigrants' rights groups meet at the shrine to memorialise the migrants who died crossing the border from the US to Mexico. They meet ‘to remember the new tiraditos – migrants who have died in the desert on their way to find work in the US’.Footnote 39 There has been a weekly prayer vigil there, sponsored by Derechos Humanos, No More Deaths, and Interfaith Immigrant Coalition, every Thursday night at 7 pm since 2000. Each prayer vigil opens with a prayer: ‘O God we pray for all the migrants who have died in the desert. Bless them with eternal life and comfort their families who mourn. Turn hearts from violence and xenophobia, so that reconciliation and peace may reign on the border. Amen.’Footnote 40 This conception of the new tiraditos, the new discarded ones, are perhaps not so new after all, but simply a current instantiation of the abject of the state. The term discarded literally implies something that used to belong but was thrown away, rather than something that was simply rejected, or not allowed in. In this sense, it fits with the conception of the abject as that which was cast out. Tiradito is derived from the Spanish ‘tirar’, meaning to throw, to throw away, to discard, to cast out, or to dispose of.
Aesthetic resistances: border artists and monumentalisation
There have been various artists who work with themes of immigration and who work with memorialisation. Their installations and projects remind us of the important intersection between aesthetics and politics, not simply in making a political statement, but in reinforcing or resisting traditional notions of politics. As Louise Amoore and Alexandra Hall argue, artists are especially well-placed to consider the deployment of signs interwoven with bordering practices, and they can intervene in a way that reconfigures the space constructed through sovereign bordering practices.Footnote 41 Here I focus on three artists and their installations: first, Valarie James and her memorials to border crossers, second, Neil Bernstein's sculpture, Golden Gates/Bridge over Troubled Borders, and third, Oaxacan artist Alejandro Santiago and his 2,501 migrants sculptures. I choose these three artists for several reasons. First, there are not very many artists whose work memorialises undocumented immigrants. Second, these three artists represent work that comes from opposite ends of the spectrum. James's work is emotional in nature and has not met with vandalism. Bernstein's sculpture is structural and has existed as a site of contestation since it was built: it has been repeatedly vandalised by vigilante groups, and thus offers an interesting site to explore counter-memorialisation discourses. Santiago's piece is in Mexico, and represents memorialisation of undocumented migrants from the places they left rather than in the US, an alternative perspective. They thus represent different aesthetic and memorialisation discourses.
Valarie James lives south of Tucson in a desert town called Amado. Amado is along the traditional route of border crossers through the Arizona desert. In her area, she often finds articles of clothing and other artefactsFootnote 42 left by migrants. In 2004, while walking, she found a diaper bag containing baby clothes, a birth certificate, and other documents. She started collecting the artefacts she found, including ‘kids' backpacks and school notebooks, women's bras, blue jeans, shirts, and shoes. She regularly finds bordados, white cotton cloths embroidered by wives and mothers and sweethearts with flowers and words of love.’Footnote 43 She finds the clothing draped on trees and rotted into the ground. She finds a pair of desiccated jeans: ‘In these humble, busted-up jeans is the story. It's like an ache for me, a kind of poetry: snagged, torn, ripped asunder, forgotten.’Footnote 44 Her art collects these artefacts together in various forms, including mixing cloth she finds into papier-mâché, or simply arranging the objects she finds in a specific installation. She tells me that she did not go out looking for these objects or for work related to memorialisation. Rather, she says,
like so many border residents, we had to do something to express the powerlessness we felt. Seriously, it was and still is so intense here. I literally stumbled into things, never went out looking for it, not once. Things, people, uniforms were everywhere all over the ground I walk with my dogs everyday. The art is about a ‘sense of place’ more than anything else. As an artist, even as a kid, I always worked with natural substances and found objects, what changed was what I was beginning to find.Footnote 45
Her work can thus be considered a response to changes around her, and, I would argue, the changing nature and results of specific bordering practices of statecraft. Specifically, it is as a result of securing practices that migrants are forced into desert areas with more and more harsh conditions.
One of her main projects is the Las Madres/No Mas Lagrimas installation, a memorial made from fabric she has collected, the first memorial to undocumented migrants who died crossing the desert by focusing on the mothers they have left behind.Footnote 46 The sculptures are made by mixing these found clothing and other objects with desert plant materials. There are three life-size sculptures of women, each representing more than 1,000 dead migrants. Because the sculptures are organic, the elements take their toll on the figures, melting the resin coating and making the figures appear to be crying, something intended by the artist to evoke an emotional response in the viewer. The figures are affected by the elements, exhibiting the same deteriorating changes as ‘our own fragile bodies when exposed to the sun, the wind and the rain’.Footnote 47
One of the most powerful ways in which James's work takes effect is by situating resistance in the body: of the migrant and of the viewer of her artwork. Rosemary Shinko has discussed the way in which the body is not simply a locus of political inscription, rather it can act as a site for conceptualising and enacting political resistances as well. She cites the example of Leymah Gbowee, who threatened to strip naked outside the room where peace talks in Ghana were occurring when she realised that the parties were planning on leaving without hammering out a peace agreement. Her act was framed as an act of desperation because it was situated in the body of the mother, and relied on bodily resistance to the norms about what the mothers' body should and shouldn't do, shattering the distinction between the public and private realm. Shinko reads this act to understand the body as performative, as a site of cultural norms but also as a way to resist the imposition of these norms: ‘the task would be to locate within Gbowee's whole sequence of bodily enactments those instances which reflect stylised repetitions of gender conformity, but more significantly to be attentive to those instances where the repeatable patterns were altered, cast in slightly divergent, unfamiliar ways’.Footnote 48
Valarie James's work expresses a similar focus on embodied practices. Her art involves exhibition of objects that recall bodies, including articles of clothing and evidence of the existence of bodies including documents such as birth certificates. Her Las Madres project invokes the body of the mother in the same way Leymah Gbowee does. The sculptures in the installation are themselves made from articles of clothing and found objects, so the bodies of the mothers are literally constituted by the attributes of the children.Footnote 49 In addition to the bodily nature of the sculptures themselves, her work evokes a physical and bodily response from the viewer. As she states, ‘There's something that happens when a viewer touches a piece of found embroidery or a child's dress or is confronted by mounds of shoes that doesn't happen otherwise. Border “issues” become contextualized-what is so often a political and contentious debate seats itself in the viewer's body, in the heart. Seeing people moved to tears is a powerful thing to witness.’Footnote 50 Her work represents the point at which political responses become situated within bodily ones, and reminds us that political practices are themselves already situated within bodily ones. If enactment of border policies is enactment on the bodies and bodily functions of undocumented migrants, even to the point of their deaths in harsh desert conditions, then it only makes sense that resistance to bordering takes place on an embodied plane as well.
Her work aims to invoke the abject by deconstructing the boundary between citizen and foreigner. Her work recalls the everyday and thus offers a resistance precisely by showing us that the everyday can be political, that there is a way in which present performances of statecraft are imbued with governance over biopolitical and biological processes of everyday living (and dying), including deaths at the border. These practices sustain a specific conceptualisation of self and other which James disrupts with her work. As she states,
I hope that the viewer has the opportunity to have a contemplative experience in front of a memorial or an installation, to ‘feel’ their feelings; the unease of displacement, the ache of separation from one's family, from culture. I hope the viewer is able to identify on a personal level with the ‘other’ through common and often vernacular objects.Footnote 51
James gets at the way in which memorialisation can draw attention to issues of displacement, and by doing so, render our own placement(s) uneasy, lead us to ask after the process by which our placements might lead to others' displacements. Her work plays with ideas of visibility that get at the earlier discussion of spectrality. If dead migrants are abjectified, rendered invisible by the same practices of statecraft that also allow for their deaths at the border, her work seeks to make them visible through an artistic practice of memorialisation, to ask after many of these silences and invisibilities to tell the stories of those leaving these objects. She thus aims to allow migrants to speak rather than speaking for them: she states, ‘I am the shepherd of the work, not the face of the work. It belongs to the collective unconscious and history. All we're doing is picking it up and putting it together, archiving it and presenting it for generations to come.’Footnote 52
Interestingly, James has encountered very little resistance to her work, despite the fact that immigration is an extremely contested issue, particularly in Border States and the part of Arizona in which she lives and works. She attributes this to the fact that her work is ‘undeniable, indisputable. Memorials are about death. You insult the dead at your own risk.’Footnote 53 Her argument, that somehow death presents itself as beyond mastery, as beyond politics, gets at the way in which memorials allow for the memorialisation of life and death rather than coopting either. Death is that common human element, which at the same time can be disruptive. Because of this, it opens up spaces for resistances through memorialisation.
Neil Bernstein describes his project as offering water, shelter, and ‘a sense of accomplishment for migrants’.Footnote 54 It was built along a well-known trail for migrants crossing the Arizona desert from Mexico in Arivaca. The sculpture is a thirty foot high and forty foot long structure built with piping which is filled with water for the migrants who cross.Footnote 55 Because it provides water, it gets at the very biological processes at stake in crossing and in securing the border. The sculpture is painted with metallic gold and covered in golden fabric, ‘symbolizing the “Veil of Tears” illegal immigrants and their families endure’.Footnote 56 As a result, Bernstein views it as a ‘beacon of hope for the hopeless’.Footnote 57 It is lit up to help migrants find it in the desert. Bernstein was inspired by his treks throughout the desert area near Tucson after working in New York in the Twin Towers during 9/11. He narrowly missed being in the North Tower on 9/11, and knew many of the victims.Footnote 58 On one of his walks through the desert, he found the shoes of a three year old little girl who died in the process of crossing the desert from Mexico, which inspired him to create an area of refuge for the migrants crossing and also a symbolic art piece to bring the issue of immigration at a human level to greater attention. As he states, ‘when you're out in the desert, there's no line in the sand, there's no entry port. What I wanted to do is create a monument where migrants could feel welcome.’Footnote 59
Interestingly, the bridge is constantly producing and reproducing itself. Aside from the fact that it has been rebuilt several times due to vandalism that set out to destroy the installation, it has also been the subject of a different type of what we might normally think of as vandalism. Bernstein has in fact asked migrants to graffiti the sculpture. He took portions of the bridge back and forth across the border so that migrants could sign it.Footnote 60 Migrants and their families and others from both sides of the border have also been encouraged to donate photographs and other objects to be placed on the bridge as symbols.Footnote 61 In its new location at the Santa Fe museum, the installation has also been the subject of graffiti. An American flag hung backwards at the site was painted with various messages, including the statement ‘libertad, esperanza, amor, fe’, ‘Donde esta la justicia?’, ‘si tu quieres todos la puedes’, and ‘Santa Fe Art Nazis’ with a swastika.Footnote 62
It is imperative to address the vandalism surrounding Bernstein's installation. When built in the desert in Arivaca, it was met with resistance. According to Bernstein, ‘we were followed, repeatedly threatened and shot at before the bridge was finally demolished by redneck vigilantes with pickup trucks’.Footnote 63 The first piece was destroyed by two men who identified themselves as Minutemen. They stated, ‘we don't want no Jews from New York down here putting stupid art up in our territory’.Footnote 64 The sculpture has been destroyed six times. The final destruction of the piece was on 31 July 2008, when at the Museo Cultural in Santa Fe. It was cut from its straps and fell onto the roof of the museum.Footnote 65 Given the expense to build each time, it was not rebuilt at the museum. Bernstein cites plans to show the piece in New York and Washington DC in the future.
So the question is, why was Bernstein's piece met with such resistance? It seems as though it is not a matter of providing water to migrants crossing, which has indeed been a contentious issue in recent years with groups such as No More Deaths placing water stations in the desert. But this seems to be a peripheral issue to Bernstein's installation. The main issue seems to be with the existence of the structure itself, the memorial function of the piece. Thus it is not the practical significance, but the symbolic significance, that its opponents take issue with. So what does the piece represent, beyond a beacon of hope for migrants? The sculpture is no longer placed in the desert, so it bears questioning what it represents when it no longer acts as a shining welcome for migrants in the desert.
Alejandro Santiago's art offers a unique perspective because it focuses on the emptiness and absence and loss in the places that undocumented migrants come from, rather than on their deaths in the United States. Santiago was born in Teococuilco, Mexico, in the 1960s, and left to work in Europe. When he returned to Mexico, he found that more than half of his village was gone: left to the United States, totalling 2,500 people. Santiago decided to repopulate his community by constructing 2,500 ceramic figures to represent this migration, plus a figure representing his own return to his home community, thus the name of the installation: 2501 Migrants. Each figure is slightly different, and Santiago attempts to ‘integrate art with the names and faces of daily life’.Footnote 66 The figures are smaller than life-size and clay-coloured. One commentator describes them as ‘crude but ingeniously expressive figures … lifelike both in their collectivity and their subdued individuality’.Footnote 67 Another describes their ‘googly eyes’, noting that they look like ‘C-3PO's long-lost pre-Columbian ancestors’.Footnote 68 The sculptures are hewn with tools, sometimes a machete, and the bodies and faces look scarred and worn, evocative of the travails the bodies of the migrants have gone through in their crossings.
Like Valarie James' figural work, Santiago's work focuses on the individual and their physical and bodily human experience. As Reed Johnson elaborates, ‘the closer you look, the more singular each appears. “They overflow their condition of stone and transmit their humanity,” says museum director Abad.’ They draw on the biological, human features, the very things that subject one to sovereign power, as a means of individualising migrants. Santiago himself even engaged in an illicit desert border crossing in order to physicalise the representations he is sculpting.Footnote 69 What makes Santiago's figures so interesting for our discussion here is their haunting nature. Scott Norris characterises their presence as ‘almost inexplicable, almost ghostly’, stating that we have trouble knowing who/what we are looking at, whether we are looking at the living or the dead, the migrant with a job in the US, or the migrant who died crossing the desert. Like spectres, they disrupt our conceptions of visual symmetry because we look at them, even as they are not truly there, indeed the intention is for the viewer to recall their absence even while looking at the figures, and, as Norris says, ‘for the most part they ignore you’.
The figures will be exhibited first in Santiago's home village in Mexico, then in a location in the desert that spans Mexico and the US, intended to represent the path of the migrant. The figures thus start out as a memorial to the absences and losses produced by mass migrations from Mexico to the US, and then come to act as a figural memorial to migration and the migrants themselves, as these figures follow the same path across the border as their predecessors, the migrants they are modelled after. The figures will remain in the desert, though many of the migrants moved on from the desert to lives in El Norte. The migrants who remain in the desert died there, their bones mingling with the sand. It is these migrants we now turn to.
Paupers cemeteries: ‘no olvidado’
There are many migrants who are buried throughout the south-west, but there are specific towns whose graveyards are full of grave markers for undocumented migrants whose remains were found in the nearby deserts. Holtville, California is one of these towns, located about 120 miles east of San Diego. The pauper's cemetery opened in 1995, shortly after the increased border enforcement that occurred with Operation Gatekeeper. A section of Terrace Park Cemetery was set aside for the indigent, which has mostly meant undocumented immigrants since its opening. In 2001, there were 121 undocumented migrants buried there.Footnote 70 SueAnne Ware describes the cemetery there in 2007 as having over 400 grave markers, many anonymous migrants.Footnote 71 By 2008, news articles cite 656 gravesites,Footnote 72 a testimony to the increase in crossing deaths. This area's landscape is problematic: muddy earth is beginning to collapse onto the graves of undocumented immigrants.
At the cemetery there is a stark division between the private part of the cemetery and the indigent part where undocumented immigrants are buried. The main part of the cemetery is grassy, covered with flowers, quiet and almost idyllic, the sort of atmosphere one expects from a cemetery, a peaceful final resting place. The indigent part of the cemetery is barren desert, not covered with grass, without flowers, replicating the harsh desert conditions in which these migrants died. The land is beginning to cave in where the gravesites are located, their resting places emulating the fact that their deaths were not easy ones.Footnote 73 The main part of the cemetery is adorned with carved headstones made of traditional marble. The grave markers on the other side are simple bricks.
The bricks are engraved with the name of the deceased: in most cases in Holtville they read John or Jane Doe as indications of their unidentified status; part of the problem of identification lies in the fact that many migrants travel without identification of any sort, so it is impossible to even pinpoint which country they are from. Additionally, many lose their identification along the way or at times it gets stolen. Another issue is that bodies are often not discovered until weeks or months after the death, making identification more difficult.Footnote 74 Border Angels, a non-profit group which sets up water stations in the desert and tries to prevents deaths among people crossing in the San Diego area, sets up handmade wooden crosses at each brick. The group has a monthly pilgrimage to the cemetery in Holtville to bring these crosses and flowers to commemorate those who have died crossing the border. Border Angels also petitions the government to provide grass to cover the barren desert gravesites and to pay for headstones.Footnote 75 Many of the wooden crosses at the gravesites read, ‘no olvidado’, meaning ‘not forgotten’.Footnote 76
It is in this memorialisation that these crosses have the potential to posit a resistance to the mechanisms of statecraft elaborated earlier. For, what is not forgotten? Surely, it refers to the individual themselves in some way, yet the individual is unidentified, so how can he/she be remembered? He/she cannot be remembered in her unique characteristics, in his/her personality or job or family or friendships, because these are all unknowns. Perhaps it is his/her very anonymity which is not forgotten, the very fact that he/she is without these identifying characteristics that we usually associate with remembering a deceased. The most compelling part of this is that it is ultimately an untraditional remembering, because it does not rely on recalling time spent with the individual or who that person was. It is not mourning based on loss of one with potential, for how can this be evaluated when the person is unidentified? It is mourning for mourning's sake, mourning at its most basic level, of human for human, grief without regard for classifying a life a grievable life,Footnote 77 grief simply because it is life. Yet it is precisely this disruption of the identification of the deceased and the classification of grievable life which makes the Juan Doe graveyards sites of contestation.
In Texas outside of Brownsville lies Kennedy County, population 417. Bodies turn up everywhere, found by ranchers, Border Patrol, hunting guides, and oil field workers. One ranch manager has personally found five people dead in the last ten years. Some of the deceased were recently died, some simply piles of bleached bones. A former county sheriff, Rafael Cuellar, Jr., used to receive anonymous phone calls about a group crossing that had left someone behind, giving very general information about the location. Searchers would look for them, sometimes finding them alive, usually finding bones months later. ‘The dead were often arranged as reverential still lifes by a sibling or a friend who was with them at the end. Hands were folded across chests. Voter registration cards were laid out beside them. Crosses made from tree branches stood above them. Holy cards rested on their chests.’Footnote 78 The county cemetery is again divided into immigrant and non-immigrant. Plain pine crosses mark the graves of undocumented immigrants. There are also aluminum markers which tell the information known: ‘unknown male’, ‘john doe’, ‘unknown skeletal remains’.Footnote 79 There are spaces in between the markers, where there once were bodies which ended up being identified, exhumed, and returned to family in Mexico or Central America. These absences between the makeshift markers are the exception: the majority of the graves remain unidentified. The corporeality of the remains speaks loudly by virtue of their anonymity. They are made into a symbol of immigrant death, a phenomenon which also remains anonymous.
Death in this instance comes to be represented specifically through the body. By corporealising death, it is in fact also politicised. The body is itself a physical monument, but in this case commemorates a disruption because the body is of an anonymous person, an undocumented individual who comes to represent this lack of documents in the eyes of the state. These undocumented immigrant gravesites are not simply graves: they can also be conceived of as sites of politics and of political contestation. The bodies interred are not simply bodies, but symbols of a larger political debate about documentality, but beyond this about sovereignty, citizenship, and identity. Because they lack documents, even dead they can pose a threat to the sovereign ordering mechanism because they cannot be situated within its logic. Mark Salter discusses the way that documents such as a passport or other identity documents in the zone of an airport act as identification, but more than this they place the holder within an ordered system; they locate us where we belong, they situate us within the logic of the functioning of the state apparatus.
Salter theorises the international airport as an example of this, as a heterotopia, an intersection of governmentalities, where domestic and international, political, economic, and social all operate together. The airport is a state of exception, where we submit to security checks which we would otherwise not submit to, saying to ourselves, ‘only at the airport!’Footnote 80 The international airport is representative of the border itself, which is polysemic. This means that the border means something different to different people crossing it. For example, John Doe can easily pass through the border crossing with his American passport, situate himself within the sovereign apparatus with his documents, and conform to the customs of the state as he passes through Customs. Jose Doe may have a harder time because he may not be able to situate himself within the sovereign apparatus as easily. Mohammed Doe may be subject to an altogether different sort of crossing where he is constituted as a threat to the sovereign apparatus. Salter theorises that for the sovereign who privileges territoriality, mobility is a deviance. When we cross the border, we must confess this deviance in order to be let back into the state. The border crossing agent knows how to identify us, how to situate us, according to our paperwork, our name. It is the ultimate location where we fully submit to the sovereign apparatus and agree to the state of exception.Footnote 81 But what happens to those who do not or cannot submit, who cannot identify or locate themselves within the sovereign apparatus?
Undocumented immigrants can befuddle the sovereign system of identification because they are without identifying, placing, ordering documents. Thus, even dead, they are buried on ‘American’ soil, yet they are not clearly identified as ‘American’, and in fact never can be as a result of their death. It is when the dead undocumented migrant is made known in this anonymity by virtue of the memorialisation practices I have discussed here that the potential for resistance occurs. Beyond disrupting law and order by crossing in the first place, they are seen as challenging the rule of identification and placement by which we bury our dead as well. Ever since the First World War, the US has privileged identification when it comes to the dead. The most important thing is to name the individual, then place them in their appropriate context. The undocumented immigrant disrupts this very possibility. As such, his/her gravesite is never simply a grave, but is rather imbued with the politics of documentality. We can explore documentality beyond simply the idea of documents in their physicality. For undocumented immigrants, it is not simply their lack of physical papers, but their potential disruption of the social ordering system which involves registering and classifying. Maurizio Ferraris argues that physical objects exist concretely, while social objects rely on inscriptions, which are the traces of their existence.Footnote 82 Social acts, then, exist by virtue of being written.Footnote 83 This gestures towards the idea that our physical documents simply serve as evidence of our classification within a larger schema. What frightens about the dead undocumented immigrant is not his lack of papers, because this does not matter once he is dead. Rather it is that he does not fit in to the larger logic which surrounds all of us, which identifies and places us. Even dead, he does not fit in; his biopolitical life, and indeed his death, cannot be appropriated by the state. He cannot be defined or situated, and as such poses the ultimate threat to this logic of identification, situation, and limitation: it exposes the inability of the state to fully and finally identify, situate, and limit. This threat is made clear when the death of the undocumented migrant is memorialised, mediated through the artistic and other memorial practices mentioned above.
Conclusion: counter-memorialisation
In positing the undocumented immigrant as a disruption to the logic of statecraft, it is important to address how counter-memorialisation discourse expresses this idea.Footnote 84 Why does the memorialisation of undocumented immigrants who die crossing the border create such controversy? Neil Bernstein's piece is exemplary of this in the way in which it spurred often violent responses by those who did not want it to do its memorial work, something different than the anti-immigrant sentiment which results in the sabotage of water stations.Footnote 85 Part of why Bernstein's work is so interesting is that it blurs the line between water station and memorial, calling our attention to the biopolitical work memorials can do. Counter-memorialisation discourses such as this express not only the contestation surrounding memory and the supposed concretisation of memory through the monument, but also expose the integral need for forgetting in statecraft. Memorialisation in specific contexts can pose a threat to this sovereign forgetting, by both reminding us of what we have forgotten, namely the abject, and by reminding us that we forgot it, indeed that we needed to forget it to imagine the state as something already constructed and sovereign. By exposing the abjection and our need for the abject for construction of our own identities as citizens, memorialisation of undocumented immigrants reminds us that the sovereign state is not fully and finally formed and crafted, and that statecraft is an ongoing performance and practice.
Some may argue that for the memorialisation of undocumented migrants to truly impact statecraft, it must have demonstrable institutional effects, such as changes of policy. My point here, however, is not that memorialisation of undocumented migrants necessarily affects policy changes. Rather, it looks beyond the institutional level at practices of statecraft at multiple levels. Recall the discussion of statecraft earlier in which I emphasised the way in which the doers of statecraft are not always congruent with policymakers. Statecraft is sustained by a myriad of political and social practices. Thus the point of this article is simply that dead undocumented migrants haunt American statecraft by reminding us that the state is crafted through social and political processes that constitute categories such as citizen, and construct the lives of citizens as grievable and the lives of others as ungrievable.Footnote 86 My hope in drawing attention to these lives that have been constructed as ungrievable is to open up for the potentialities of resistances, and acknowledge the small everyday practices of resistance that are currently being played out in memorialisation practices. Resistance always remains a potentiality, but it is in exploring what we should, perhaps ethically, be haunted by that such openings are created.
By way of conclusion, I'd like to address the corporeal remains left in the desert, both unknown and ungathered. At first blush it might seem as though these remains are beyond the bounds of the political because they are undiscovered. But it is perhaps these remains which act as the most poignant representations of border monuments precisely because of their lack of discovery and attention, though the practices of mediation of the deaths of undocumented migrants discussed above should not be understated. Bones in the desert go beyond the anonymity of Juan Doe cemeteries to a further level of anonymity. They are not simply undocumented or unknown in name, as in the unidentified grave sites. Their ontological status of undiscovery is itself potentially political, because it gestures to a power relationship, gestures to the narratives of statecraft, of territory, crossing, economics, social relationships, all of which lead to their existence in the first place. Simply because they are undiscovered does not mean that they are beyond the realm of politics: ‘undiscovered’ is itself a politicised status. Though undiscovered and unmediated through any specific political practice, they are there in the desert by virtue of their biological responses to statecraft: they have died in the desert because they crossed in resistance of the bordering and securitising mechanisms of the state. The very fact of them being undiscovered, ignored, uncounted, and that immigration reform never deals with the bodies in the desert, shows how they are troubling to statecraft. There's something that the state doesn't want to be visible in the desert, yet there is still a potential place for political discourse there. Bones in the desert are already politicised, even though they are undiscovered, by virtue of the bordering mechanisms of statecraft in a very specific securitising instance that rendered a human being in his/her biological vulnerability simply bare bones in the desert.
In this sense, the dead body itself is a site of contestation, not simply a form of resistance for those who build memorials.Footnote 87 The body itself becomes a contested site in relation to the emergence of subjectivity; it is these questions of subjectivity raised by the memorialisation of undocumented immigrants who die crossing the US-Mexico border that offer up the most interesting implications for conceptualising how statecraft functions through a myriad of social practices. Therefore, the dead body of the migrant need not be taken up and mediated by explicitly political projects; rather it testifies to the way in which this particular instantiation of sovereign power is reliant on bordering practices which label certain bodies as ungrievable lives. Acknowledging the grievability of bodies in the desert is the first step towards a possible resistance.
