\'No exponga su vida a los elementos\': the Political Ecology of the US-Mexico Border is the Sonoran Desert

Student: Pietro Autorino Student Number: 344 3637 University: Ruperto Carola, Heidelberg Program: MA Transcultural Studies Course: Political Ecology and Alternative Agriculture Convenor: Dr Andrew Flachs Assignment: 1

Title:

“No exponga su vida a los elementos” the Political Ecology of the US-Mexico Border in the Sonoran Desert

Date: March 15th, 2017

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(fig.a) The image above features one of the official signs posted by the US Border Patrol (USBP) along the US South-Western Border with Mexico (McCune and Soden: 200). It warns to not expose oneself to the elements of this environment, which is presented as by “nature” hostile and deadly to humans. People about to trespass in the attempt to head North, others stuck at la linea, who keep trying after being detained and deported back to Mexico several times, as well as people who inhabit this (border)land: they will often encounter signs, posters, pamphlets, politicians’ speech, or border guards’ and activists’ warnings, carrying messages like this (De Leòn, 2015:29). For the last two decades, public discourse in the US has increasingly depicted the trans-border Sonoran Desert as a land characterized by death and suffering – its hostile terrain (De Leòn, 2015:31) as a trap for illegal migrants, whose bodies are dehydrated by the sun; their corpses reduced to bones by the vultures.

In the following, I am concerned with the production of the Sonoran Desert’s environment, as a process of negotiation between border enforcement policy and practices, together with groups from the realms of environmental activism and critical migration research. Hence, I argue that these different, and at times opposing, groups, eventually engage in discursive practices that come to constitute the same environmental ‘project’. In fact, they all accept the view that abstracts few specific characteristics of the Sonoran Desert’s natural landscape – for instance, ‘the elements’ as depicted on the sign above (fig.a). Such vision is based on the static idea of nature as pristine. This paper argues for how this idea is crucial to the racialization of the desert’s space, and the naturalization of the state borders. One the one hand, my argument strongly relies on the work of “critical” migration scholars, who convincingly draw the causal link between the structural violence at the borderlands and PTD policy (see Andreas, 2009; De Leòn, 2015; Nevins, 2002). On the other hand, I take issue with this body of scholarship, which has failed at challenging the static image of wilderness in the Sonoran Desert, as lethal and naturally unsuited to migrants. To the contrary, I show how this literature relies on abstraction of the desert as pristine, hostile to migrants. In the final part of the paper, I begin to disentangle the relationship between the border and the landscape of the Sonoran Desert, by also presenting three ideas of alternative approaches for the framing of migrant-desert relations.

From Habitat to Border The Sonoran Desert expands from the South of Arizona and California, to Baja California and the Sonora region of North-West Mexico. This area is particularly appreciated for its richness in biodiversity (Nabhan, 1986). Following conservationist concerns, numerous wildlife refuges and natural reserves were establish across the desert. Moreover, large parts of the region have been habitat to native populations since pre-Columbian times. Also referred to as the ‘Desert People’, the Tohono O’odham still inhabit the desert, where they grow nutrient foods, while cultivating sacred and intimate relations with the surrounding environment (Nabhan, 1982). Studying the livelihoods of the Tohono O´odham, ethnobotanist Gary Nabhan counted ‘over 475 wild edible species in the Sonoran flora, and roughly 25 crop-species […] cultivated since pre-historic times’ (1986: 6). This and extensive other evidence make for the large possibility to find life and beauty in the Sonoran Desert. However, since the frontier separating Mexico from the United States of America was drawn through its landscape, the Sonoran Desert has been increasingly depicted as the scene of migrants’ death. As historian Patrick Ettinger notes, the US immigration authorities had already interpreted the wilderness of the mountains and the desert as potential allies in the fight against illegal entries with the Chinese Exclusion Acts of 1882 (Ettinger, 2009). While the ‘desolate routes deprive migrants of access to food and water […] only along well-defined roads or on railroads could immigrants obtain the necessary resources for travel, and it was along those routes that immigration patrols might be stationed to capture undocumented immigrants’ (Ettinger, 2009:156-7). This quickly trickled down to the media. For instance, an 1891 edition, the Harper’s New Monthly Magazine featured an illustration depicting a Chinese coolie perishing on the floor of the Sonoran Desert, for an article entitled Dying of Thirst in the Desert (Remington cited in Ettinger:60). Indeed, Ettinger reports how, following the ethnic ban, many Chinese undocumented individuals unable to enter the country through Ellis Island, attempted to cross the Sonoran Desert, often dying from dehydration, exposure, or murder (fig.2 in Ettinger, 2009). Already in the late nineteenth century, we see the emergence of a vision that juxtaposes death at the border with death in the desert. In other words, once certain features of the Desert´s nature were identified as ideal deterrents for unwanted immigrants, the whole of the landscape started to be seen as an ally of the federal agency, enforcing the US border. Over one hundred years later, the view of a pristine, wild nature protecting America alongside border guards, against smugglers and immigrants, has evidently persisted, and arguably grown. I argue that this narrative is re-forced through a discourse, which associates the American border space, with the natural space of the desert. I see this juxtaposition, and the interpretation of the desert as a border, as the negation of the Desert´s quality as a habitat.  Hence, I attempt a partial reconstruction of this process, which I frame as a political

negotiation, between border enforcement policy, conservation discourse in the US, and critical migration scholarship.

Prevention through Deterrence (PTD) Extensive scholarly literature has accounted for the formulation and adoption of the PTD strategic paradigm of the USBP as the turning point in the more recent history of the politics of mobility between Mexico and the US (see for example Andreas, 2009; Chavez, 2011; Doty, 2011; De Leòn, 2015; Dunn, 1996, and 2009; Hernandez, 2010; Nevins, 2002; Trevizo, 2013). Launched in El Paso in 1993, the “Operation Blockade” was the first attempt that succeeded at pushing undocumented migrants away from major entry corridors, crossing the border along the more perilous terrain of remote areas (De Leòn, 2015:31). Similar strategies were quickly adopted along the border under the names of “Operation Gatekeeper”, “Operation Safeguard”, and “Operation Rio Grande”. In fact, shifting traffic away from cities proved expedient, for it made it easier for the Border Patrol to monitor crossings away from the urban crowds, and it pushed migrants “out of sight”; hence, it gave ordinary citizens the impression that the “problem” of immigrants was being tackled successfully (De Leòn, 2015:32). Soon after, with the Strategic Plan of 1994 this strategy was adopted under a nation-wide plan, under the name of PTD (USBP, 1994). Such plan ‘predicted’ that ‘illegal traffic [would] be deterred, or forced over more hostile terrain, less suited for crossing and more suited for enforcement’ (USBP, 1994:7, emphasis added). It also acknowledged that an increase in violence was expected, since it pushed “illegal entrants crossing [into] deserts, mountains, rivers [where they] […] can find themselves in mortal danger” (USBP, 1994:2). While the implementation of PTD along the US-Mexico border, was successful at funneling migrants away from the major entry corridors of major urban areas like El Paso, Nogales and Tijuana, certainly, this policy did not stop people from trying to cross the border. Between 2000 and 2013, in the Tucson sector´s mountainy and under-populated area of the Sonoran desert, a total of almost 5 million people were apprehended while crossing illegally1. Moreover, in the early 1990s, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported relatively low numbers of migrant deaths, whereas under PTD the count of dead bodies found in the US-Mexico Borderlands grew much higher (Haddal, 2012:32). The Department of Homeland Security estimated that 5,596 people died overall while trying to cross, between 1998 and 2012 (De Leòn, 2015:36). On top of that, it should be acknowledged that governmental institutions tend to be 'cautious', and report lower numbers than those recorded by independent groups (see Haddal, 2010:fig 10). Yet, between 2000 and 2014, the bodies of 2,771 people were found in Southern Arizonian section of the Sonoran Desert only (De Leòn, 2015:36)                                                                                                                         1 (as cited in De Leòn, 2015:6) U.S. Customs and Border Protection, “United States Border Patrol: Southwest Border Sectors; Total Illegal Alien Apprehensions by Fiscal Year (Oct. 1st through Sept. 30th),”www.cbp.gov/sites/default/files/documents/BP%20Southwest%20Border%20Sector%20Apps %20FY1960%20-%20FY2014_0.pdf.

most of these in the strip of the desert that runs from the city of Nogales (a major transit point of people and goods moving across the border), westwards until Sasabe, and north, between the Tumacàori and Baboquivari mountain ranges, until the city of Tucson (see map below; De Leòn, 2015:36). It did not take long until this section of the desert gained notoriety on mainstream media as the corridor of death (see for example, National Geographic Online Magazine, 2003).

(fig.b, map from De Leòn, 2015: 15)

The Corridor of Death: a Desert against the Migrants While the growth in numbers of people risking their lives by crossing the desert can be linked to PTD, the public discourse has rather often showed a tendency to first associate the rise in deaths to the desert´s hostile environment. In the case of the USBP, the early documents of the PTD era were able to predict the violence would rise with people crossing through more remote areas (see for example, USBP, 1994:2). Nevertheless, later operations such as “Desert Safeguard” were re-phrased in terms of humanitarian search-and-rescue missions, which would be, rather ironically, implemented by employing more agents and new surveillance technology2. While extensive research has shown how the federal strategy has been trying to deflect the blame for migrants perishing, from policy to smugglers or even migrants themselves (see for example, Nevins, 2002:7; and Trevizo, 2013), it was only more recently, that research has inquired over the tactics of the relationship between USBP and the desert (De Leon, 2015). Yet, we can point out to the connection between PTD and the choices that border crossers make over whether, where, and how to enter the desert, already by simply comparing images of the wall by Nogales (fig.c), and the vanishing, minimal, fence found along parts of the desert (fig.d); while other sections of the desert are not fenced at all3. Hence, the ambiguous role played by USBP “offering” to come and rescue migrants after having pushed them into the desert, can be seen as the construction of a ´moral alibi´ (Doty, 2011). Such alibi is also reinforced through onthe-ground propaganda, with pamphlets that the US Department of Homeland Security distributes to charity-ran migrants shelters along the border: these warn the reader in Spanish ‘The next time you try to cross the border without documents you could end up a victim of the desert’ (cited in De Leòn, 2015:29). This echoes the content of the signs I show at the beginning of this paper, warning passers to not expose their life to ‘the elements’ (see fig.a). Evidently, these warnings evoke and re-produce a vision that mobilizes the desert’s nature, as an ally of the border, against the migrants, who deliberately defy the elements, by crossing ‘without documents’. The view that extracts just few specific features of the desert’s complex, bio-diverse ecology (i.e. the dry heat, the rare water, presence of rattlesnakes, and pungency of several plants), and so clearly interprets them into one direction (i.e. against the migrants), is strategically based on a process of abstraction. Such notion I derived from James Scott’s theorization of scientific forestry methods for rendering the landscape ‘legible’ to state-led interventions and planning in late 18th century Prussia and Saxony (Scott, 1998). In his case-study, Scott highlights how the forest’s natural abundance and diversity, as well as the richness in uses and values that this had for local populations, got completely elided by the assessment systems, which informed the cadastral map; for this prevalently focused on recording land in terms of size, value, as a productive asset and/or as a commodity (Scott, 1998:47).                                                                                                                         2 http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0311/feature1/online_extra.html 3 http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/03/160304-us-mexico-border-fence-wall-photosimmigration/

(fig.c, credits to Mike Wells Photography)

(fig.d, credits to Bob Kee)

According to Scott, this case is exemplary for how often “knowledge and control require a narrowing of vision” and should be seen “as a metaphor for the forms of knowledge and manipulation characteristic of powerful institutions with sharply defined interests” (Scott, 1998:11). While it is acknowledged that some degree of abstraction is virtually necessary to any attempt of analysis, the disappearance of ‘the forest as a habitat, […] replaced by the forest as an economic resource’ implies more radical mystification, and simplification (Scott, 1998:13). Similarly, the abstraction of “the elements” out of the desert’s landscape, leaves out all the desert’s qualities as a habitat, and replaces them with a view that naturalizes the border. To distinguish from Scott’s study, I see this abstraction as a rather ongoing process, with its outcome not so clearly identifiable, as in a finished product such as a cadastral map. However, a similar extent of mystification persists in the process that abstracts the desert’s pristine nature, as deadly to migrants. This is particularly evident, in the view that the desert as such would tend to keep out black undocumented immigrants, while at the same time, manifesting itself in all its sunset beauty and fantastic organ pipe cactus4, for the white audiences of tourists and hikers (for further account of whiteness, see next paragraph).

Trashing Nature: Migrants against the Desert The construction of the abstract view of the desert as hostile pristine nature should be also understood with regards to race and whiteness. Scholars in American history have shown that the very idea of wild, pure nature, came out of the attempt to preserve the pure essence of the nation, from large arrivals in the 20th century (Cosgrove, 1995:35), as well as to protect it from American Indians, who were hence removed through the creation of national parks (Cronon, 1996). On the other hand, environmental historians have extensively demonstrated how the modern idea of a timeless, immaculate wilderness is almost always ecologically inaccurate. Indeed, it often ignores prior factors such as long lasting indigenous practices and livelihoods, as well as modern constructions, such as roads, fences, mines (Harvey, 2007). Critically, the idea of (and the movement for) wilderness emerged in a historical time characterized by ‘obsession over purity of bloodlines and the nation´s body politics’ […where] the natural ‘destiny’ of whites’ in the West was that of conquering the rest (Kosek, 2010:154-6). Therefore, scholars with a critical approach to the intersections between nature and race, have argued that policy and discursive practices construct certain natural spaces, as pertaining to whites (see for example, Braun and Castree, 2005; Baldwin, 2009; Laura Pulido, 2000). Such can be said of the conservationist narrative, which understands the presence of migrants in the Sonoran desert, as harmful to the environment, and adverse to conservation tourism (Alexander, 2013:7).                                                                                                                         4 See for example, https://organpipehistory.com/

By making claims about whose bodies belong in the landscape of the Sonoran Desert, and whose not, white conservationist discourse perpetuates the racialization of the desert space. In fact, while brown immigrants’ bodies are made illegal and deportable in the desert as a border space, they are further portrayed as ‘out of place’ in its natural environment (Alexander, 2013:6). On one hand, environmentalist concerns over border enforcement practices in the desert endangering the survival of rare animal species, produced more progressive arguments, advocating for substantial changes in the border regime (Alexander, 2013:4-5). However, another consistent part of the conservation groups active in the Sonoran desert, demonstrated unease and suspicion over the amounts of personal items, left behind by migrants, while crossing the desert (see fig.e, below). This discourse, which Sarah Ray calls ‘the poetics of Trash’, reinforces the view of immigrants as ‘dirty, ecologically irresponsible, and morally impure’ (Ray, 2010). The idea that the presence of migrants disrupts the wilderness in the desert, is also perpetuated by humanitarian aid groups, whose members take action and organize trashpicking hikes (Sundberg, 2008). As environmentalist groups are still mostly basing their vision and activism on ideas of pure wild nature (Alexander, 2013:15-6), they often frame the figure of the migrant as ‘un-ecological’ by nature, and hence contribute strongly to the naturalization of the border and the racialization of the desert’s space.

(fig.e: credits to Michael Wells Photography)

Migration Scholarship at Odds with Nature So far, critical migration scholars have failed at substantially challenging the discursive practices that abstract the landscape of the Sonoran Desert, as hostile, and deadly to migrants. While the broad category of ‘critical migration scholarship’ contains contributions from several disciplines, these all take a critical stance with regards to the politics of the nation-state’s border as method5, in processes of inclusion and exclusion (Mezzadra and Nielson, 2013). The need to point out the scarcity of research in this field, which does not take for granted the role of the desert´s environment, lies at the core of this essay’s argumentation. In fact, policy-based arguments and human-rights approaches, are mostly focusing on migrants’ experience of suffering and dying in the desert (Doty, 2011; Dunn, 2009; Ruiz Marrujo, 2009; Slack and Scott, 2011). Therefore,  the violent elements in the relationship between border crosser and the desert, are preferred and hence abstracted from the rest, in order to construct the case for migrants’ basic rights, The ‘Undocumented Migration Project’6, led by archeologist-anthropologist Jason De Leòn, can be singled out as a rare example of an analysis more interested in the border’s juxtaposition to the desert’s landscape (De Leòn, 2015). In that, this work builds a strong critique of the US border regime under PTD, as politically, and morally, responsible for migrants’ death in the Sonoran Desert. Hence, its argument paves the way towards the de-naturalization of the violent border, for it unmasks its relation to the natural space. Yet, De Leòn acknowledges once that ‘the beauty of the desert’s landscape is overwhelming’, whereas, in the rest of the book, he generates an exceptionally large number of death-metaphors for the desert, such as: ‘a deathscape’, ‘land of open graves’, ‘mars-like landscape’, ‘rugged desolate terrain’, ‘a deadly alien planet’, ‘a killing field’, ‘a massive open grave’, ‘crime scene’, ‘death site’ (De Leòn, 2015) or even, a place that should be marked on maps with the ‘Here Be Monsters’ (De Leòn, 2015:28). De Leòn criticizes the USBP for ‘hiding behind the viciousness of the desert’ (p.3, emphasis added), and yet, still recognizes the desert’s environment to function ‘as the perfect silent partner’ for border control because of its “natural” processes (p.61). In fact, he studies such ‘viciousness’ to the detail, by emphasizing, and abstracting, the exact characteristics of the desert’s wilderness, as ‘the federal agency’s not-so-secret weapon’ (p.8). Firstly, the desert’s capacity to erase traces of the dead bodies is a USBP ‘partner in crime’, from a forensic point of view, since it deletes the evidence of people perishing in the desert (p.83). Indeed, the heat, sand, and wind, not only de-hydrate and consume the migrants throughout the journey, but also conduce an action of erosion, which turns the bones into dust. This also questions the validity of body counts, and the numbers of death in the desert/ at the                                                                                                                         5 Here ‘method’ is meant as both the technology, and trigger for such processes (see Mezzadra and Nielson, 2013). 6 See: http://undocumentedmigrationproject.com/ (last accessed: March 12th, 2017)

border (p.84). Secondly, De Leòn reproduces the scavenging activity of the desert’s fauna, by placing the carcass of a pig, and filming how vultures reduce it to bones over the following days (p.77). These “natural processes” are presented as perpetuators of necroviolence – for ‘the action of animals, insects, and various chemical and environmental actants, are nevertheless part of a larger enforcement paradigm designed by Border Patrol’ (p.84). Ultimately, this study views the Sonoran Desert’s natural environment, as co-opted by US necropolitics. Even though De Leòn denounces the political hand orchestrating desert’s action onto the undocumented border crossers, he does not depart from a universal view of what the desert does to migrants’ bodies. Indeed, this is even more evident in his attempt to present the reader with a more detailed phenomenology of ‘the everyday terror of the desert’ (p.44), by writing a semi-fictionalized ethnography of a group of migrants crossing the desert. Based on years of interviewing migrants, as an anthropologist, and researching materiality of border crossing in the desert, as an archeologist, de Leòn writes a ‘typical border crossing experience’ (p.43). While I appreciate the methodological choice of the researcher pushing the boundaries of empathy, and following lines of narration (Ingold, 2015) also with the imagination, I found De Leòn’s attempt even more at risk of generalizing the essence of an experience, as universal. By claiming that there is a typical experience of crossing the desert as an undocumented migrant, it seems to me, too many factors, are overlooked7. While it is not in the aim of this essay engage with the perception of the environment (see for example Ingold, 2000), I do suggest later in this essay, directions towards which we could look in search of a more inclusive narrative. Nevertheless, so far, the suggestion of a ‘typical border crossing experience’ seems unlikely to challenge the narrow visions that abstract the desert, as a landscape hostile to immigrant bodies by nature. Bordering practices of PTD policy, as well as public discourse coming from other realms, such as the media, academia, and activism, co-produce the view of desert´s nature, as essentially hostile to migrants. The entanglement between the different perpetuators of the discourse, can be framed together under a common ‘creative’ project. According to Anna Tsing, a project is ´an institutionalized discourse with social and material effects […which] combines environmentally significant ideas, policies, and practices´; hence, she asks ´what counts as “the environment” in any given political negotiation, corporate strategy, research initiative, livelihood trajectory, or policy program? How are new “environments” created within these projects?´ (2001:4). Yet, in the context of sustainable development, Tsing understands environmental projects as ‘organized’. Translating this for the project here under scrutiny, it can certainly not be said to be explicitly co-organized by the media, scholars,                                                                                                                         7

These range, from gender, to class and race, to individual emotions, and/or strategies to face the

challenges presented by the landscape, as well as the pressure of the border, and so on.

and the USBP together; for the combination of actors at stake should not be seen as a collaborative coalition. However, there is a good extent of shared understanding and indirect agreement, which consequently creates a ‘new environment’. So is the Sonoran Desert’s nature, mystified, simplified, and abstracted, as hostile to migrants. Hence, the framing of critical migration scholarship as an active part-taker to this project helps to shed light on the broader necessity to de-naturalize the border. As I conclude this paper, I outline three possible trajectories for setting nature in motion, starting from the question of what’s left?, which I answer three times.

What’s left? The major argument of this essay is that the production of the desert as a border space required the abstraction of a narrow, simplified, mystified vision of the desert´s nature. This views the desert, not so much, as a space where people hide, run, while they get robbed, trafficked, or chased by the border guards on military vehicles; but rather where they de-hydrate, eventually die, and decompose quickly through the action of the desert´s elements. Abstraction is the selective ‘dragging’ (-trahere) of certain qualities ‘off’ (ab-) the broader reality, for the sake of knowing, analyzing, and controlling it. Yet, Scott points out, “the best way to appreciate how heroic was this constriction of vision is to notice what fell outside” (Scott, 1998:12). Therefore, to ask ‘what´s left?’ at the end of this paper, certainly means to ask ‘what was left out?’. Indeed, the other face of abstraction is the much larger value of meaning, and life, which is being elided. In the case of the Sonoran Desert, its habitat, the possibility of a life in the desert, for people to simply walk through the desert, like Tohono O’odham poet, Ofelia Zepeda, re-claims: ‘The true story of this place/ recalls people walking/ deserts all their lives and/ continuing today, if only/ in their dreams./ The true story is ringing/ in their footsteps in a / place so quiet, they can hear/ their blood moving/ through their/ veins./ Their stories give shape to the/ mountains encircling this place.’8 Moreover, to ask ‘what’s left?’ is also to ask ‘what is progressive?’. If conservation activism, and even the majority of critical migration studies, can be understood, as part of the same project, creating the same environment, then what view stand ‘left’ of such a project? A first answer to this lies in the need to experiment with views of nature that move away from ‘just nature’. In other words, while there is increasing consensus amongst scholars, that we cannot know nature (Braun and Castree, 2005:4), we also should not reject the idea of nature altogether. Hence, we need to move this notion of nature around (perhaps left-wards) - not ahead, nor backwards (Tsing, 2015:5). This means to overcome the nature/culture divide, by crossing the boundaries between the two. In other words, to acknowledge the human and social components of the landscape, is to look at collaboration across                                                                                                                         8 from Where Clouds Are Formed, by Tohono O’odham poet Ofelia Zepeda

difference (Tsing, 2015:). Recently, scholars have framed the work of the No More Deaths group, also operating in the Sonoran Desert, in terms of social nature theory (see Alexander, 2013). While conservation efforts are first moved by sentiments that want to preserve, and ‘save nature’ in the Desert, the experience and the time spent in the desert seemed to have changed the personal view of each member. In fact, the more activist experienced the landscape, the more critical questions with regards to the social character of this environment would emerge from their concrete experiences (Alexander, 2013:27-9). Hence, it appears clearer how everyone’s view of nature is informed by their own subjectivity, and by the context. For instance, some members stopped removing ‘trash’ from the desert, when they understood that certain items, left in a certain space, had the function of showing others the path, or marking a good spot for hiding and resting (Alexander, 2013: 23-6). To move beyond the idea of a universal view of nature is the first progressive step to be taken (left-wards).

(fig.f, credits to Michael Wells Photography)

Moreover, the No More Deaths group, similarly with others doing these actions, has been placing jags of water, and food, along migrant trails through the desert, interpreting the desert as a landscape of hope. Hence, hope is the key to the third reading of the question ‘what´s left?’. The photo posted above, depicts the word ‘America’, engraved by a border crosser on the bark of a tree in the desert (see fig.f). It certainly will take a certain dose of ‘faith’, for someone to claim that the act of engraving that word in the tree was a manifestation of hope. Yet, I am moved by the conviction that the desert is full of evidence of migrants’ hope to survive the journey, and reach their companions, in ‘America’. This evidence is no longer labeled as trash, or other sorts of ‘un-ecological’ behavior, but it becomes part of the desert’s landscape: a landscape marked by hope and sings of (precarious) survival. Through her research, Anna Tsing interpreted foraging for matsutake mushrooms, as a metaphor of looking for ‘the possibility of life in capitalist ruins’ (Tsing, 2015). Hence, paraphrasing Tsing, one could ask, what possibility of life is left for migrants in the desert?

(fig.g, credits to Michael Wells photography)

One attempt to answer will come from looking around for signs of collaboration and survival trying to spot, or, as in Tsing, to notice, possibilities of assemblage between border crossers and the desert. The image above (fig.g), depicts the sanctuary, which was established in the Sonoran Desert, where people crossing the border stop by to say their prayers – Si Dios quiere, voy a pasar (De Leòn, 2015:2). This is a place where a gathering of people, who happen to be there, because of the wall, and the coming harvest, the sun, and/or the USBP, becomes a happening (Tsing, 2015:29). Migrants in the midst of precariety and indeterminacy, crossing the ‘corridor of death’, still manage to interpret the landscape thorough hopeful eyes: by establishing a sanctuary in the rocks, they perform a ‘creative act of dwelling’ (see Besky, 2014:86). Instead of working against nature in the desert, this can be read as an attempt of surviving with the desert. This paper started by outlining the diffused narrative that the wilderness in the Sonoran Desert constitutes a vital threat to those who wish to cross it illegally. Hopefully, by now, the paradox behind this view has been successfully un-covered, and substantially challenged. I have constructed the relationship between the border and the desert’s landscape as rooted in border enforcement strategies. Moreover, I have argued that, both the discursive practices of white conservation groups, and the strategy of critical migration scholarship to engage with the desert as border space, are based on static views of pristine nature, which in turn they reinforce. At the roots of this lies a process that constricts the vision of the desert, by abstracting specific features of its flaura and fauna, which are depicted as hostile to undocumented migrants. I conclude by hinting to ways by which this process of abstraction can be countered. Hence, I shed light on other possible views that can be noticed outside of the narrow vision dictated by the state’s national borders. These range from native indigenous poetry, to resocialized and subjective views of nature, to visions of hope and survival with the desert.

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