JE #5: How Borderlands History Repeats Itself

"We lay upon the ground, blind, deaf, at the mercy of the desert and its guardians" (Alcala 39)

As Marc Silver points out in his article "Bodies on the Border", migration is not a unique experience to the US-Mexican border. However, the increased surveillance and security that has taken place along the border in recent years, has created a rise in the number of deaths of migrants who are coming to the US. In comparing the current status of Arizona's border to Concha's story it is important to understand that like Concha and the Opata, current day immigrants are forced to migrate as a means of survival. In Flower in the Skull, Kathleen Alcala depicts the brutality through which the Spanish and later Mexican government destroy the indigenous community of the Opata. Violating the Opata's land, women, and community, Concha along with the Opata are forced to migrate north across the Sonoran desert in search of a means of survival. Similarly, today the U.S. has violated Mexico and Central America through policies like NAFTA and through political involvement such as by the School of the Americas, that it has left Mexican and Central Americans no choice but to migrate in order to survive. Like the short documentary, "Bodies on the Border" states, even the impenetrable Sonoran desert can't sway immigrants from crossing because they know that their only means of economic stability is crossing this desert into the U.S. 

Ultimately the need to survive means the need to migrate, translating to "no longer [being] human, or part of a village, but just another part of the desert. I did not think, I did not feel, I just walked." (Alcala 42)

Furthermore, as Concha's migration slowly stripped her of her past and her memory, it also stripped her of her identity. Crossing the border, she became "just 1 of 800 cases" (Bodies on the Border). As we followed her memory, we began to trace the identity she left behind in her migration. Similarly, the members of the Missing Migrants Project were using forensics to trace the identities the bodies found left behind. In this manner we are reminded that like in the past, today immigrants are being forced to leave their identities behind to assimilate (and enter) into an American culture that continuously increased surveillance along its borders to keep them out. 

Concha and the Opata had to cross the Sonoran desert to survive because colonization destroyed their land, and their means of surviving. Similarly today, the US has played a role in Mexico and Central America's failing economies and growing disparities between the rich and the poor leading the poor to migrate as the only means of surviving.