Current Magazine

Book Review
Jason De Leon’s The Land of Open Graves
De León, an anthropologist, founded and heads the University
of Michigan’s Undocumented Migration Project, a study that
uses archaeological, forensic, and ethnographic methods to
enhance understanding of unauthorized migration between
Mexico and the United States. The project provides much of
the material upon which his well-informed and informative
book is based.
The book’s focus is on the grueling journeys of migrants
who seek to circumvent Washington’s ever-more-formidable
policing apparatus in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. In pursuing
this, De León illuminates their drive and creativity, as well as
the myriad forms of suffering they endure — and which often
kills them.
For De León, the countless tragedies
that befall migrants are “neither random
nor senseless.” And unlike Luis Alberto
Urrea’s much-praised, but politically
problematic, book, The Devil’s Highway
(2007), which largely blames smugglers
for migrant deaths and does little to
challenge the factors that underlie the
fatalities — De León does not hesitate to
indict U.S. authorities. Migrant deaths,
he argues, are the predictable results of
“a strategic federal plan,” which he likens
to a killing machine “that simultaneously
uses and hides behind the viciousness
of the Sonoran Desert.”
The governent’s plan is called “Prevention
Through Deterrence” (PTD), and
it serves as the book’s temporal framing.
As Timothy Dunn’s excellent Blockading the Border and Human
Rights has shown, PTD was first developed in El Paso in 1993.
By amassing agents and policing infrastructure in the most urbanized
areas along the U.S.-Mexico boundary, the strategy effectively
forces migrants to cross the U.S.-Mexico borderlands
in remote zones, the far-from-unrealized hope being that the
arduous terrain and the associated costs and dangers will dissuade
migrants from continuing their journeys.
In making some rather dense academic concepts come
alive, De León powerfully shows how PTD involves the effective
enrollment of non-human elements like poisonous snakes,
mountains, extreme temperatures, and the desert itself in the
policing apparatus. Indeed, he characterizes nature as “the
best and most lethal weapon the Border Patrol has.”. Clearly,
it is not a pristine nature, but a “hybrid geography”, one that
embodies dynamic ties between humans and the non-human.
This, he explains, has served to create a “setting in which the
Border Patrol can draw on the agency of animals and other
non-humans to do its dirty work while simultaneously absolving
itself of any blame connected to migrant injuries or loss of life.”
De León brings his readers into the complicated lives of
many and takes them to various sites — including a migrant
shelter where people recently deported from the United States
struggle to figure out their next steps, and the home of the
loved ones of Maricela, an Ecuadorian migrant whose decomposing
corpse he and his students stumble
upon in southern Arizona. In doing
so, the author exhibits sensitivity, sympathy,
and self-reflection. He knows that in
conducting research among highly marginalized
and vulnerable communities,
he risks being “an academic voyeur” as
they share their hopes and pains with
him and, by extension, his audience.
Given such care and self-awareness,
two problems with the book stand out.
First is De León’s shocking decision
to buy and execute five pigs so as to
understand what happens to human
corpses due to the animals and insects
that feast upon them and exposure to
the desert elements. (Pigs, in terms
of anatomy, amount of hair, muscle
content, etc. are good proxies for humans
in forensic tests.) As he watches one pig descend into
a three-minute “death dance” after someone he hired shoots
the animal in the head, the author is troubled by what he witnesses.
It is, he says, “violent despite all the precautions we
took.” However, he declares the violence warranted because
“other than obtaining human bodies donated to science,”
there was “no feasible alternative.” Of course, there was one:
not conducting the lurid experiment, not least because it
contributes nothing of significance to the project, other than
(unintentionally) raising questions about research ethics.
Second is De León’s failure in the final pages to take a
stance against the broad apparatus of exclusion, instead weakly
offering that “[t]here is no easy solution.” He defends this
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