Violence and Migration on the Arizona-Sonora Border

2010 was a significant year for immigration issues along the United States-Mexico border. In April, Arizona signed the most extreme law against undocumented immigrants. In August, 72 hopeful migrants were massacred in Tamaulipas by alleged drug traffickers, and the Arizona desert claimed a record 252 lives in fiscal year 2010. These events were part of the trend that began with border militarization in the mid-1990s and escalated in the wake of 9/11, resulting in the extremely violent character of the undocumented border crossing experience. This is manifest, not only in the frequent reports of abuses by various actors along the border, but also in the consolidation of undocumented migration with the trafficking of narcotics. The authors have documented many cases of robbery, kidnapping, physical abuse, rape, and manipulation by drug traffickers. In this article, we discuss these different manifestations of violence by understanding both the structural constraints that create and characterize violence, as well as the individual reactions to the factors. The authors propose the conceptualization of “post structural violence” as a manner of enhancing the discussion of agency within and as a reaction to the structural conditions generated by border security and immigration policy.

Mirativity in Morphology

Broadly defined, mirativity is the linguistic term often used to describe utterances that speakers use to express their surprise at some unexpected state, event, or activity they experience. As an illustration, imagine the following scenario: rain is an infrequent occurrence in the Arizona desert, and the news forecast predicts another typically long stretch of sunny weather. Wanda and her colleague are planning a hike in the mountains that afternoon. Aware of this prediction, and being familiar with the typical desert climate, they step outside into the pouring rain. This elicits the surprise of Wanda: based on the weather forecast and coupled with her background knowledge, the rain is an unexpected event. As such, Wanda has a number of linguistic options for expressing her surprise to her colleague; for example, Wow, it’s raining!It’s raining!No way, it’s raining?(!)I can’t believe it’s raining(!)I see it’s raining(!)It looks like it’s raining(!)Look at all this rain(!) These utterances provide a sample of the diverse lexical and grammatical strategies a speaker of English can deploy in order to express surprise at an unexpected event, including expressive particles such as wow and no way, surprised intonational contours (orthographically represented by the exclamation mark ‘!’), rhetorical questions, expressions of disbelief, and evidential verbs such as look and see. When we look across the world’s languages we find that there is considerable intra- and cross-linguistic diversity in how mirative meanings are linguistically expressed. The examples above show how English lacks specific morphology dedicated to mirativity; however, the focus of this article is on the role morphology plays in the expression of mirative meanings.

Adventures scaling the realized niche, saving the world, and searching for values

I describe my unlikely path into marine science from a childhood in the Arizona desert and Oregon woods. Without realizing it, I developed a sense of place in nature and the value of open interdisciplinary communication among diverse scientists. My undergraduate education emphasized physiological adaptations to the environment or what might now be considered the “fundamental niche”, and my graduate thinking was inspired by a population/community based evolutionary understanding of how strong interactions define a “realized niche”. I have attempted to define strong interactions in three different ecosystems. This difficult problem is confounded by the loss of natural systems resulting from human impacts. I discuss my frustrations with eroding conservation efforts in a society that is rapidly devaluing nature and consider how we might recover our most fundamental values. I conclude that there is an urgent need to improve field-based teaching of undergraduate non-majors about nature and to be much more effective in our interactions with the general public. If we hope to have our legacy include a liveable world with natural places, we urgently need to act unilaterally to shift some of our values and reward systems towards the challenge of educating the undergraduates and especially the general public.

A Vigil at the End of the World

An account of a vigil held by undocumented immigrants "at the end of the world," in the Arizona desert on a march to an immigration detention center, reveals how the voicing of emotional anguish contributes to a politics of bodily extremity used to engage the state. Immigration activists deploy tactics of historical human rights campaigns, like the bodily protests of Gandhi or Cesar Chavez, in order to contest state power. Similarly, the meaning of the vigil is shaped by the willed endurance of the early Christian martyrs and the "sacred suffering" of the enslaved invoked by antebellum abolitionists. Yet its ultimate target is secular: the Department of Homeland Security and, ultimately, the president. The most transformative claim of these activists denies the need for divine intercession: despite their lack of formal status, undocumented immigrants can make their case for redress of grievance directly to the political leaders of the nation.

The Politics of Seeing: Affect, Forensics, and Visuality in the US-Mexico Borderlands

This chapter focuses on Who Is Dayani Cristal (2013), a hybrid documentary-fiction film that combines forensic attempts to identify a body found in the southern Arizona desert with the fictional retracing of his steps along the migrant trail, running through Central America up to the deadly stretch of desert known as the “corridor of death,” where his body is ultimately found. The author examines the film alongside a range of other contemporary visual and new media texts, including the Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0/B.A.N.G. Lab’s 2010 “Transborder Immigrant Tool” and John Craig Freeman’s 2012 “Border Memorial: Frontera de los Muertos.” Within the context of visual economies that simultaneously promote both the radical invisibility and hypervisibility of undocumented border crossers (both alive and deceased), this chapter investigates how visual memory mapping projects work to redirect the gaze toward new ways of seeing and feeling. In so doing, I argue, memory mapping functions as a visual strategy to ask, and to challenge, why certain lives are rendered visible and thus grievable and others not.