Abstract
Thousands of Mexican and Central American migrants have died in their journey toward the United States in the past two decades. In both the United States and Mexico, many of the dead remain unidentified due to a lack of standardized DNA testing and the lack of political will to identify migrant remains. US immigration policies as well as neoliberal economic policies in Mexico and Central America which have displaced rural and urban workers have produced the current “disappeared” along the US-Mexico border and along Mexico’s vertical border, extending over 1,000 miles from Central America to the United States. A focus on the individual responsibility of coyotes and narco-traffickers and even on the supposed recklessness and ignorance of migrants themselves cover up the fact that these deaths are state crimes – the deaths are known outcomes of state policies that criminalize the working poor and militarize borders. This chapter explores the reasons state-driven violence may be “missed,” ignored, or simply dismissed as the fault of migrants themselves. Finally, it examines the ways migrants, their families and loved ones, and other members of civil society seek to identify and remember the dead, protest violence against migrants, and demand the defense of immigrant rights.
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Notes
- 1.
The list comes from Brooks County from October 2013; numbers of identified and countries are constantly revised as some are identified months or years later.
- 2.
In her writing about the arpilleras (woven cloths representing the circumstances of the disappeared in Chile), Marjorie Agosín notes that the disappeared under Pinochet were made to appear absent. She observes that “The arpillera presents a clear narrative and accuses those who have lived lives in opposition to human dignity” (2008: 35).
- 3.
The Migrant Rights Collective was established in Houston in the Fall 2012 to address the growing numbers of migrant deaths in South Texas and support locating the missing and identifying the dead. The Collective works together with families in the Houston region who are searching for missing loved ones to achieve the following: (a) pressure authorities for policy changes at the state and federal level, (b) seek necessary services, and (c) give visibility to the issue of migrant deaths and unidentified human remains on the border. The mission of the Forensic Border Coalition (FBC) is to support families of missing migrants searching for their loved ones and to address problems related to the identification of human remains found near the US-Mexico border.
- 4.
US Border Patrol, Deaths by Fiscal Year, https://www.cbp.gov/sites/default/files/assets/documents/2016-Oct/BP%20Southwest%20Border%20Sector%20Deaths%20FY1998%20-%20FY2016.pdf.
- 5.
Lynn Stephen writes of the “new disappeared, assassinated, and dead” to describe those who have met violence on the US-Mexico border in the contemporary period.
- 6.
Anthropologists Sally Engle Merry and Susan Bibler Coutin examine knowledge systems as “part of conflicts rather than extrinsic to them”; they note that technologies “produce and reinforce hierarchies between what is ‘knowable’ and what is not” (2014: 1). Their work follows that of scholars such as Jean and John Comaroff who analyze the uses of numbers in “the construction of moral publics, so integral to debate about democracy, freedom, security, human rights” (2006: 211).
- 7.
- 8.
The budget for US Border Patrol alone was 3.7 billion dollars for the Fiscal Year 2015. https://www.cbp.gov/sites/default/files/assets/documents/2016-Oct/BP%20Budget%20History%201990-2016.pdf,
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Kovic, C. (2018). Naming State Crimes, Naming the Dead: Immigration Policy and “The New Disappeared” in the United States and Mexico. In: Latham, K., O'Daniel, A. (eds) Sociopolitics of Migrant Death and Repatriation. Bioarchaeology and Social Theory. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61866-1_4
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