The Border and Its Bodies examines the impact of migration from Central America and México to the United States on the most basic social unit possible: the human body. It explores the terrible toll migration takes on the bodies of migrants—those who cross the border and those who die along the way—and discusses the treatment of those bodies after their remains are discovered in the desert.

The increasingly militarized U.S.-México border is an intensely physical place, affecting the bodies of all who encounter it. The essays in this volume explore how crossing becomes embodied in individuals, how that embodiment transcends the crossing of the line, and how it varies depending on subject positions and identity categories, especially race, class, and citizenship.

Timely and wide-ranging, this book brings into focus the traumatic and real impact the border can have on those who attempt to cross it, and it offers new perspectives on the effects for rural communities and ranchers. An intimate and profoundly human look at migration, The Border and Its Bodies reminds us of the elemental fact that the border touches us all.

Thomas E. Sheridan is a Distinguished Outreach Professor at the University of Arizona. He has written or co-edited fifteen books, including Landscapes of Fraud: Mission Tumacácori, the Baca Float, and the Betrayal of the O’odham, which won the Past Presidents’ Gold Award from the Association of Borderlands Studies.

Randall H. McGuire is a SUNY Distinguished Professor at Binghamton University in Binghamton, New York. He has authored or co-authored twenty-­one books and conducted an archaeology of the contemporary study of the border wall separating Ambos Nogales (Nogales, Arizona and Nogales, Sonora). Since 2010 he has been involved with the humanitarian aid group No More Deaths.

“The Border and Its Bodies breaks away from regular treatments of migration and forces us to look at the physiological signs of expulsion, risk-filled travel and border crossing, psychological suffering, health deterioration, and untimely death of human beings whose only sin was to look for a better life.”
—Tony Payan, co-editor of Undecided Nation:Political Gridlock and the Immigration Crisis

“The Border and Its Bodies is a timely exploration of how the lives of migrants and residents on both sides of the U.S.-México line are shaped by the enforcement of militarized border policies.”—Dawn Paley, author of Drug War Capitalism

"The Border and Its Bodies is a remarkably cohesive collection. ... the articles within this book are very clear, making it a suitable text for a variety of undergraduate and graduate classes that address issues related to migration, borderlands, or public policy."—Linda C. Noel, The Journal of Arizona History