JE#5

"We had no choice. We had to pick up our feet and put on our sandals and walk. Away from our homes, our fields, away from our mountains and valleys, away from our rivers and sacred place, away, even, from our sky" (Alcalá, 5) 

These lines, written by Kathleen Alcalá in her novel The Flower in the Skull and uttered by the character Concha, could have been said and are probably felt by many immigrants who travel (and perish) through the Sonoran desert and into Arizona today. Alcalá's story of Concha and her Opata family's journey across the very desert holds many parallels to the bodies depicted in the documentary "Bodies on the Border" where Concha's words of having "no choice" but to walk away from all that is familiar and head north are met with the bodies filmed by Marc Silver. In the New York Times article that accompanies the short documentary, Silver exclaims, "Even as fewer people are believed to be crossing the border illegally, the number of migrant deaths has remained high (the remains of at least 116 people have been found this year in Arizona), and a greater proportion is likely dying" (Silver). "Bodies on the Border" makes the argument that increased militarization of the U.S. Mexico border has led to an increased number of deaths, and unidentified bodies in the Arizona desert. While this is portrayed in the documentary vis-a-vis a day in the life of Dr. Bruce Anderson and Robin Reineke, I am left wondering, who is dedicating their life's work to identifying the bodies of the women of Juárez, not too far away in another desert mass grave. Unlike Concha who was able to survive and leave her desert home, how many of the Opata who remained in the contentious territory where Mexicans, Yaqui and Apache fought perished under such a situation?  What the unidentified bodies found in the Arizona desert, Concha and the women of Juarez know for sure is that they had no chocie but to seek out opportunities in order to survive. These narratives of brown bodies walking away from their sky, their mountains, and their homes in search for a better economic outcome are lost in the rhetoric of the Obama administration. instead, the desert becomes a place where death is a daily occurrence, both in fiction and in real life.