JE #5

"I walked a long way, and many things happened that I do not remember. I went through villages where people gave me food and told me the way to Tucson. I saw places where people did not live anymore, the fruit trees gone wild, the houses empty. I learned to walk a long way without water to drink. I learned to eat whatever there was to eat" (Alcalá, 42). I found this excerpt to be parallel and contingent to the ongoing experiences of migrants traveling south-north searching for the possibility of a ("better") future. Shark Tooth and her people were forced to migrate due to geopolitical and economic strife, just as "the other North Americans" (Mexicans), Central and South Americans are pressed to re-locate in search for (the opportunity of) an opportunity, or perish. And the excerpt continues, "[w]hen men came on horses, I flattened myself against the ground and hid until the strangers were gone, pressing myself hard into the sharp rocks and thorns so as to seem part of them. After a while, I felt that I really was part of them--no longer human or part of a village, but just another part of the desert. I did not think, I did not feel. I just walked" (42). Each new body found on the border, ceases to be human or part of a village, and instead becomes part of the deadly and barren Arizona desert's mass grave.  And unlike our protagonist, the unidentified bodies documented in Mark Silver's short documentary, perish before they can even dream of having a mirage or a shade to safeguard them from the unbearable and overwhelming solar heat. 
Now, let's play with the description of the short film which reads, "forensics experts in Arizona struggle to identify the bodies of migrants who perished while attempting to cross illicitly from Mexico into the United States." When I read this passage I immediately thought of Shelly, as a forensics expert (after the thorough archival research she had conducted on the now "extinct" Opata), and yet struggling to identify the bodies (including hers) of (Opata) migrants who (culturally and historically) perished while attempting to cross (")illicitly(") from Mexico into the United States. I see how we are able to fit in both stories, as they travel along in time, with the ongoing human rights crisis at the US-Mexico border. It was almost eerie the way that a single descriptor fits three (Concha, Rosa and Shelly's) narratives. What is most eerie and frightening, is that this is becoming more and more of a reality that calls upon no longer the sole attention of concerned Latin Americans and/or United States' peoples. But as neoliberalism advances, political and social inequality reign, more and more parallels will continue to be drawn between the U.S-Mexico border and say, "capsized boats in the Mediterranean Sea filled with migrants from Africa and the Middle East, and in the seas of north Australia. (Silver)"