Hostile Terrain in a Pandemic

Martha Alejandra Peraza was 44 when she died crossing Arizona's Sonora desert, killed by a border policy that funnels undocumented migrants into the most hostile terrains of the US/Mexico border.

When PhD candidate Laura Velázquez and I hung a tag in the UofA’s FAB gallery bearing witness to Martha Alejandra's death, we were finally finished building the Hostile Terrain 94 exhibit, a global participatory art project that the Covid-19 pandemic fundamentally transformed.

The Hostile Terrain 94 project first came to my attention in March 2019, when my terrific undergraduate student, Shelby Drozdowski, emailed me about it. The prospect of organizing volunteers to memorialize the thousands of undocumented migrants who have died in Arizona’s Sonora desert since 1994 was daunting but exciting.

Fast forward to March 2020: I had successfully applied to host the project, I had secured two grants to fund the exhibit, and I had received over 3,000 toe tags and a massive border map in the mail.

I also had seven classroom talks scheduled, with more to come over the summer. In each of those sessions, I would talk with participants about the US border policy called Prevention Through Deterrence, then take some time to fill in tags with the names and details of undocumented migrants killed by border walls and policing practices that channel them into deadly deserts and rivers.

But when the University of Alberta went into emergency lockdown on March 17th, all of my plans went on immediate hold. I needed to figure out how to teach 160 students online, and I needed to spend half my workday building LEGO robots with my now-daycareless son.

As the snow melted and Winter 2020 classes ended, I turned my attention back to the project. But this time, I was full of doubt. In the context of so much pandemic loss, was it right for me to ask volunteers to fill in toe tags that contained upsetting details about migrants’ brutal deaths?

I ended up putting that question to the project’s creator, UCLA anthropologist Jason de León. He encouraged me to see the project in relation to the pandemic. The very same people who are most vulnerable to Covid-19 are the same people who lose their lives in the desert: those who are marginalized because of poverty, racism, and state neglect. These are children, women, and men who deserve to be remembered, and the policies responsible for their deaths need to be recognized. And although the pandemic had further tightened border controls, individuals desperate to find safety and security were still crossing the desert into the US, and they were still dying en route.

Covid-19 upended almost all of my plans for the project. The exhibit was supposed to be over before the November 2020 US presidential elections; now, it wouldn’t run until February 2021, at the earliest. Live talks and classroom visits would have to take place online, and all the money I had secured for an opening reception would now be directed toward postage, so I could safely get the tags to and from roughly 300 workshop participants.

I was particularly nervous about running the workshops over Zoom, worried that the awkwardness of the online platform was ill-suited for the emotional labor necessary to run the sessions in a sensitive and respectful way. Thankfully, and in no small part because of the skills of my talented project partner, Laura Velázquez, my fears proved largely groundless. Able to turn their cameras off and mute their microphones, many participants let down their guards and cried as they wrote the tags -- something they might not have felt comfortable doing during an in-person session.

Because there was no rush to finish their assigned tags during the workshop itself, many participants ended up sharing their tags with their parents, adult children, and spouses, bringing even more people into the project. One student’s musician dad was so moved that he composed a song about these lost lives. The extra time also allowed participants to pen personal messages of remembrance on the backs of the tags they completed. One student drew beautiful memorials on the backs of her tags, and photos of that artwork are on display in FAB gallery, alongside the larger exhibit.

Running the sessions online also allowed for more inclusive participation. I was able to mail tags to students living in Ontario, British Columbia, Saskatchewan, and Banff. UofA students living outside Canada were also able to participate -- filling in virtual tags over email. I printed off their completed tags, and then cut and pasted (with scissors and glue) their virtual tags onto actual ones that could hang in the exhibit. The resulting tags aren't the prettiest, but they signal just how deeply our UofA students care about the humanitarian emergency on the US/Mexico border. It was especially moving to have the participation of a student who lives in Mexico, and who completed her tags with her Mexican husband and mother-in-law.

There were massive headaches, to be sure. Campus closures and disruptions to university mail delivery led me, Laura, my husband, and even my elderly parents into a last-minute scramble to complete tags stuck in mail-delivery limbo. Laura and I also did all the physical labor of pinning the 3295 tags on the 16-foot-long border map in FAB, as my concerns about physical distancing made me reluctant to recruit more helpers. Yet for all the logistical challenges created by the pandemic, the work of talking about the border crisis with 300 workshop participants, and completing and hanging tags that memorialize those killed by inhumane border policies, was one of the most powerful experiences of my academic career.