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Scales of Suffering in the US-Mexico Borderlands

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Abstract

Since the 1990s, US border policies have worked to funnel undocumented migration into remote stretches of the Sonoran Desert, where deadly terrain and temperatures make border crossing most dangerous. This weaponization of the desert finds some cover, we argue, behind the scalar projects of state-centered maps emphasizing vast geography and gross statistics over personal pain and trauma. Counter-mapping against these projects, we draw on archaeological and ethnographic data from the Undocumented Migration Project (UMP), and geospatial data for thousands of deceased migrants across southern Arizona, to witness how migration, as both socio-historical process and humanitarian crisis, emerges from human-scale strategies and experiences of suffering.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Alanna Warner-Smith and Sarah Platt for the invitation to participate in this special issue, and Pamela Chauvel, James Flexner, Kate Franklin, and Alice Wright for their critical comments on an earlier draft of this paper. We are also grateful to the many members of the Undocumented Migration Project who helped with data collection in Arizona and Mexico between 2009 and 2013. Our archaeological research has been made possible by the students in an Institute for Field Research summer program (2012 and 2013) and by the community of Arivaca, particularly Jill Farrell and everyone at the Arivaca Action Center who let us occupy their space almost every summer. We would also like thank La Gitana Cantina and our family there: Maggie, Fern, Penny, Joe Broadhurst, Bradley Knaub, Drew Can Do, Mayor Kenny, Sean Rojas, Steve Shepard, Pool Player Gary (RIP), and Ronnie (RIP). Finally, our work would not be possible without the help of Memo, Lucho, Lucy, and the many people who have graciously shared their migration stories with us.

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Correspondence to Cameron Gokee.

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Gokee, C., Stewart, H. & De León, J. Scales of Suffering in the US-Mexico Borderlands. Int J Histor Archaeol 24, 823–851 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10761-019-00535-6

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