Hostile Terrain 94
Hostile Terrain 94 is a participatory art project sponsored and organized by the Undocumented Migration Project. The installation is composed of more than 3,200 hand-written toe tags filled out by the community, each representing a migrant who has died trying to cross the US-Mexico border at the Sonoran Desert of Arizona between the mid-1990s and 2019. The exhibition is installed on the first floor and the accompanying publication was written by both graduate and undergraduate students at Stanford University.
Hostile Terrain 94 is a participatory art project sponsored and organized by the Undocumented Migration Project. The installation is composed of more than 3,200 hand-written toe tags filled out by the community, each representing a migrant who has died trying to cross the US-Mexico border at the Sonoran Desert of Arizona between the mid-1990s and 2019. The exhibition is installed on the first floor and the accompanying publication was written by both graduate and undergraduate students at Stanford University.
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A CLIFF NEAR CABORCA<br />
JON AYON ALONSO<br />
My father grew up in San Luis Rio Colorado, Mexico. The Sonoran<br />
Desert, a landscape of extremes—hot, cold, bright, dark—is his most<br />
familiar terrain. As a child, I made the journey southward to Mexico with<br />
my family many times, our car weighted down with bulk bags of rice,<br />
beans, and flour, our tires overinflated so that the car’s bottom wouldn’t<br />
drag and spark along the road. Our visits felt joyous and celebratory as<br />
we reunited with our family on the other side of the border. It was only<br />
later I learned of the fear that oppressed my father on those journeys.<br />
While interviewing him for a film I made about immigration, he<br />
revealed to me that for fourteen years of my childhood, my parents had<br />
been undocumented. They had kept this fact hidden from me, so deep<br />
was their fear I could accidentally betray them.<br />
Despite never having been expressed or acknowledged, this fear<br />
permeated the fabric of our family. I didn’t have to see gravestones or<br />
fatality rates to be reminded that we were the unfortunately fortunate<br />
ones, and that this fortune came with both debt and duty: a debt to<br />
those who did not make it across, and to the family we left behind;<br />
a duty to make the most of our opportunity living in a capitalist<br />
superpower—a duty to work, to consume, to provide. Homes can be<br />
traumatic places for first-generation immigrant children. They can<br />
buckle and cave from the pressure to make every choice count. You<br />
aren’t allowed to dream in a childhood where dreams have died for<br />
your opportunities. Even now, as a grown man and father myself, I am<br />
influenced by these forces with every decision I make, every opportunity<br />
I accept or decline. I constantly fight my instinct to keep my head down,<br />
stay quiet, and survive. And I often wage this daily fight alone, as one of<br />
the only first-gen Latinx students in my graduate classes at Stanford.<br />
<strong>Hostile</strong> <strong>Terrain</strong> <strong>94</strong> at the Anderson Collection {installation detail}, 2020<br />
8 HOSTILE TERRAIN <strong>94</strong> | ANDERSON COLLECTION AT STANFORD UNIVERSITY HOSTILE TERRAIN <strong>94</strong> | ANDERSON COLLECTION AT STANFORD UNIVERSITY 9
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