front cover of The Border and Its Bodies
The Border and Its Bodies
The Embodiment of Risk Along the U.S.-México Line
Edited by Thomas E. Sheridan and Randall H. McGuire
University of Arizona Press, 2019
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.

Contributors
Bruce E. Anderson
Jared Beatrice
Rebecca Crocker
Jason De León
Linda Green
Randall H. McGuire
Shaylih Muehlmann
Robin Reineke
Olivia T. Ruiz Marrujo
David Seibert
Thomas E. Sheridan
Angela Soler
Ruth M. Van Dyke
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Crossing with the Virgin
Stories from the Migrant Trail
Kathryn Ferguson, Norma A. Price, and Ted Parks
University of Arizona Press, 2010
Over the past ten years, more than 4,000 people have died while crossing the Arizona desert to find jobs, join families, or start new lives. Other migrants tell of the corpses they pass—bodies that are never recovered or counted.

Crossing With the Virgin collects stories heard from migrants about these treacherous treks—firsthand accounts told to volunteers for the Samaritans, a humanitarian group that seeks to prevent such unnecessary deaths by providing these travelers with medical aid, water, and food. Other books have dealt with border crossing; this is the first to share stories of immigrant suffering at its worst told by migrants encountered on desert trails.

The Samaritans write about their encounters to show what takes place on a daily basis along the border: confrontations with Border Patrol agents at checkpoints reminiscent of wartime; children who die in their parents’ desperate bid to reunite families; migrants terrorized by bandits; and hovering ghost-like above nearly every crossing, the ever-present threat of death.

These thirty-nine stories are about the migrants, but they also tell how each individual author became involved with this work. As such, they offer not only a window into the migrants’ plight but also a look at the challenges faced by volunteers in sometimes compromising situations—and at their own humanizing process.

Crossing With the Virgin raises important questions about underlying assumptions and basic operations of border enforcement, helping readers see past political positions to view migrants as human beings. It will touch your heart as surely as it reassures you that there are people who still care about their fellow man.
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Migrant Feelings, Migrant Knowledge
Building a Community Archive
Robert McKee Irwin
University of Texas Press, 2022

The digital storytelling project Humanizing Deportation invites migrants to present their own stories in the world’s largest and most diverse archive of its kind. Since 2017, more than 300 community storytellers have created their own audiovisual testimonial narratives, sharing their personal experiences of migration and repatriation. With Migrant Feelings, Migrant Knowledge, the project’s coordinator, Robert Irwin, and other team members introduce the project’s innovative participatory methodology, drawing out key issues regarding the human consequences of contemporary migration control regimes, as well as insights from migrants whose world-making endeavors may challenge what we think we know about migration.

In recent decades, migrants in North America have been treated with unprecedented harshness. Migrant Feelings, Migrant Knowledge outlines this recent history, revealing stories both of grave injustice and of seemingly unsurmountable obstacles overcome. As Irwin writes, “The greatest source of expertise on the human consequences of contemporary migration control are the migrants who have experienced them,” and their voices in this searing collection jump off the page and into our hearts and minds.

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front cover of Sonata
Sonata
By Charles Bowden; foreword by Alfredo Corchado
University of Texas Press, 2020

"I believe every sunrise and I remember the smell of wet grass, the color of robins, and rustle of leaves on the big oaks that outlive nations, all this comes with each sunrise."

Sonata marks the sixth and final installment of Charles Bowden’s towering “Unnatural History of America” series. While his earlier volumes were suffused with violence and war, Bowden offers here a celebration of rebirth and regrowth. Rendered in Bowden's inimitable style, more prose poetry than reportage, he evokes panoramas that contain the potential for respite and offer a state of grace all but lost in the endless wars of man.

Bowden travels back in time to the worlds of artists Francisco Goya and Vincent van Gogh, the latter painting furiously against encroaching madness. “Van Gogh tries to dream a life of color,” writes Bowden. “Powder blue sheds, yellow stubble, pink skies—but the fears and dark things drag him down.” As Bowden’s vivid prose wrestles with the madness of the world, van Gogh’s paintings represent an act of resistance, ultimately unsuccessful, against depression and suicide.

Moving from the vibrant hues of van Gogh’s painted gardens to America’s southern border, Bowden returns once more to the Mexican asylum run by "El Pastor," Jose Antonio Galvan, who was first introduced to readers of the sextet in Jericho. Here, too, is the dream of a garden that will be planted in the desert, a promise of regeneration in a world gone mad. Poetic, elegiac, and elliptical, Sonata is the final, captivating book of Bowden’s monumental career.

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front cover of Unsettled Borders
Unsettled Borders
The Militarized Science of Surveillance on Sacred Indigenous Land
Felicity Amaya Schaeffer
Duke University Press, 2022
In Unsettled Borders Felicity Amaya Schaeffer examines the ongoing settler colonial war over the US-Mexico border from the perspective of Apache, Tohono O’odham, and Maya who fight to protect their sacred land. Schaeffer traces the scientific and technological development of militarized border surveillance across time and space from Spanish colonial lookout points in Arizona and Mexico to the Indian wars, when the US cavalry hired Native scouts to track Apache fleeing into Mexico, to the occupation of the Tohono O’odham reservation and the recent launch of robotic bee swarms. Labeled “Optics Valley,” Arizona builds on a global history of violent dispossession and containment of Native peoples and migrants by branding itself as a profitable hub for surveillance. Schaeffer reverses the logic of borders by turning to Indigenous sacredsciences: ancestral land-based practices that are critical to reversing the ecological and social violence of surveillance, extraction, and occupation.
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