JE #5

Marc Silver reports in his documentary short and accompanying article, “Bodies on the Border,” that in the past 23 years, 2,200 border crossers “have been found dead in the Arizona desert.” Silver attributes these and other migrant deaths, such as those in the Mediterranean Sea and seas north of Australia, to a “combustible mix” of “economic disparity, political instability and harsh immigration policies.”  In Silver’s video, Robin Reineke says that the bodies of dead migrants that are being discovered on the border, “are teaching us about what human rights means in a globalized economy.” What Concha’s story demonstrates in Kathleen Alcalá’s Flower in the Skull, is that the displacement of peoples out of México and into Arizona spans much further back into history than is generally discussed in the current public discourse on immigration.

The structural conditions that motivate migrants to cross the México-U.S. border today are different than those that forced Concha and her family from their home among the Opata in the Sonoran Desert; but by looking back to the late 1800s through the eyes of Concha, we see that these migration patterns, and the ideologies that allow for systemic violence to be perpetrated against entire people groups that are being reproduced today, were established long ago.

What struck me most about Silver’s video was what Reineke said about personhood -- that the items found with the bodies, such as money, clothes, toothbrushes, rosaries, are “really representative of personhood in a way that the bodies and the bones aren’t necessarily.” In The Flower in the Skull, Concha’s journey from El Arbolito to Tucson strips her of her personhood. She is first abandoned by her mother, and then her sisters are taken away from her. By the time she arrives in the U.S., she is so afraid she hides in a bush. When Shark Tooth's body, with its dirty face and hair "full of weeds and brambles" (43) is discovered by La Plancha, Shark Tooth is given a new name, Concha, which further removes her from her former identity.

I like this journal prompt because it is important to draw parallels between these two sources. It is necessary to examine and speak about what is presently happening on the border in the context of the border’s history.