The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail

In Jackson Heights, Queens, De León meets Christian, the Ecuadorian brother-in-law of Maricela, the body found in the previous chapter. Christian, who left his home country in 2001, as part of the wave of 137,000 Ecuadorian migrants to the United States, sends money home to “support an extended family, to build a house he has never set foot in, and to clothe, feed and educate a son whose hand he has never held” (221). He says he tried to discourage Maricela from emigrating, because he did not want her to undergo the same traumatic experiences as him.

As bad as the border crossing is for Mexicans, for many non-Mexican nationals, it’s even worse, because it is a process that can last for weeks or even months. Christian left Ecuador because his family was impoverished and he needed to go to the United States to make enough money to support and educate them. Given that his trip, made on September 16 or 17, 2001, was in the wake of 9/11, Carlos thought he could help clean up the destroyed buildings in New York. He was especially sad about leaving his sister, Vanessa, whom he loved most at the time: “These are the things that leave a mark on you. You can’t leave them behind” (224).

The “expensive obstacle course” that non-Mexican migrants must make through Central America and Mexico before they even get to the border is more dangerous even than what awaits them in the desert (225): “For Central and South Americans, Mexico is its own hybrid collectif of immigration enforcement” (225). The conditions are so dire that many people disappear on this leg of the journey.

Christian crossed the border in a large group, at a time before the post-9/11 escalation in security. Christian got caught by Border Patrol twice and even ended up spending Christmas and New Year’s in jail. His uncle hired a lawyer and when he got out of jail, Christian made his way to New York, where his family were. He found that Queens seemed dirty and that he owed $21,000 for the trip, including interest. While Christian’s trip is characterized by “high drama,” it is typical of the fate of many from Latin America who make their way north (235).

Although Christian has enjoyed good economic opportunities and liberties from being in the United States, he is always conscious of the high personal cost needed to support his family back in Ecuador and “the tension of being caught between two disparate worlds is the source of much pain” for him (236). He fears that he may get found out for being undocumented and be deported back to Ecuador, where he may no longer be accustomed to life.

De León goes to visit Maricela’s family in Cuenca, Ecuador. They are living in a house that is known as “Christian’s house” (238) because he has funded it, even though he has never been there. Maricela wanted to build such a house for her own family after she returned from America. De León’s visit is a populous one; he is accompanied by his photographer, Mike Wells, and their spouses and children. They are warmly welcomed by Doña Dolores, Maricela’s mother-in-law, and Vanessa, Christian’s sister and Maricela’s sister-in-law. They talk about the trauma they experienced following Maricela’s disappearance and death.

De León tells Maricela’s story “through the eyes of the relatives who watched her leave, desperately searched for her when she went missing and dealt with the aftermath of her death” (243). The relatives describe how Maricela was vivacious and popular, loving music and dance. She was so happy that she earned the nickname “mariposa,” which means butterfly (244). Upon realizing that there were few opportunities for her children in Ecuador, she determined to go to the United States. Her parting words to her mother-in-law were ominous: “Whatever my destiny is, I must go” (245). The last the family heard from her was a Facebook message saying she was getting ready to go into the desert.

De León writes that are significantly fewer ethnographic accounts and journalistic data focused on the experiences of female border crossers than male ones. This is due both to a male subject research bias and the fact that women make up less than 15% of the population of undocumented migrants per year. Women are also 2.67 times more likely to die from exposure to the desert than men; this figure leads researchers to hypothesize that chauvinistic smugglers tend to view women as liabilities, and are therefore more likely to abandon them.

When it became evident that Maricela was lost, her family worried about her and solicited help both from the brother, who had paid for her to go, and from the pasador, or people smuggler. The family still do not know exactly what happened to Maricela in the desert. However, her brother-in-law, who accompanied her on the trip, said something about Maricela feeling sick and sitting on a rock and then being separated when something happened to startle the group.

It was difficult for Christian to look for Maricela, especially because he was undocumented, spoke little English, and risked being deported himself if he called border control. Also, he would not be able to obtain precise enough information about where she was in the desert: “By design, locating someone in the depths of the [desert] is nearly impossible” (248). Christian tried calling hospitals, jails, and immigration and detention centers in Arizona, but there was still no sign of Maricela.

On July 27, Christian was told that they had found Maricela and forensics wanted information on her fingerprints and other aspects of her identity. The family was devastated to learn that Maricela had died and said they would not believe the fact of her death until they saw her body.

When Maricela’s decomposing body was loaded onto a plane in New York City, “Maricela, like many dead border crossers, transformed from being an anonymous subject unrecognized by the state to a documented Ecuadorian citizen accorded rights and privileges by both her native country and the one that sought to exclude her” (251).The family waited in anticipation for Maricela’s body and her wake was attended by hundreds of people.

Viewing the body is an important part of mourning for Catholics because “it is what makes the death real” (253). Maricela’s family was no exception. Christian, who had viewed the body in New York, warned the family not to open the casket because Maricela’s body was badly decomposed. Still, the family opened the casket and saw that Maricela’s face was gone and her body was mutilated, revealing the necroviolence she suffered in the desert.

The family was eager to see the pictures De León had taken of Maricela in the desert. Christian noticed that in De León’s photographs, Maricela retained her hands, whereas her corpse was handless. De León speculates that the fingers were cut off to get Maricela’s fingerprints. Vanessa, Maricela’s sister-in-law, finds the process of looking at De León’s photographs helpful: The desert corpse is more recognizably Maricela than the body that was brought to them in pieces, and seeing the images helps move her mourning process along by making the death “more intelligible” (258).

A few years later, the aftermath of Maricela’s death is still felt. Her children still cry, miss their mother desperately, and eagerly visit her grave at the cemetery, which they must pass every day on the way to school. Vanessa, who looks after Maricela’s children, is still traumatized by Maricela’s death and dreams of her. In some of Vanessa’s dreams, Maricela protests that she is still alive; in the latest dream, she says that she is now fine and at peace.

Vanessa then contacts De León to tell him that they have another family member who is lost in the desert.

The missing relative in question is José Tacuri, who was 15 years old when he left Cuenca for New York. José disappeared in the Arizona desert, just south of Arivaca.

De León attempts to find José by contacting his parents, Gustavo and Paulina, who live in New York and emigrated there to provide for their family. He also interviewed Manny and Felipe, the two teenage cousins José had been traveling with, as well as his family in Ecuador.

José’s family and his pregnant girlfriend are in a state of “grief, confusion, and desperation” about the mysteries surrounding José’s body (274). It is a state clinical psychologists call “ambiguous loss” and “is the most stressful loss because it defies resolution and creates confused perceptions about who is in or out of a particular family” (274). Without having corporeal evidence, the family cannot accept that José may be dead. As De León writes, “if seeing the ravaged body of a person you love is the physical manifestation of Sonoran Desert necroviolence, then having no corpse at all is its spectral form” (266). He contends that:

[T]he Sonoran Desert did what Border Patrol strategists wanted it to do. It deterred José Tacuri from entering into the United States. But instead of just stopping him, the hybrid collectif swallowed him alive, erased all traces of him, and sent shockwaves of grief felt as close as New York City and as far as Ecuador (274).

While José’s sister sits in his room and clutches at his clothes, his grandmother still wanders off late at night, looking for him among the local hooligans. His girlfriend vows she will eternally wait for him, confident that they will find some way to be together.

Given that José’s parents migrated to New York in the wake of post-9/11 border security, they would not be able to return to Ecuador to visit without risking their safety and permanent deportation. They thus fall into the category of a “permanently settled undocumented population” in the United States: people who cannot risk a visit home but aim to substitute their presence with gifts for their children (270).

Although José’s absent parents lavished him with goodies, these were no substitute for their love, and on entering adolescence, José began to rebel. He blamed his parents’ abandonment of him for his rebelliousness and told his father “that being reunited with [them] would fill his emptiness inside” (270).

José’s journey to the border was relatively uneventful, but once in the desert, he struggled to cope with the heat and having drunk all his water, and with his electrolytes low, became drowsy. As helicopters began to circulate and catch migrants, the cousins told José that they were going to keep going and left him sitting at the bottom of a hill. That was the last time they saw him, and they are uncertain of what happened to him. José’s child, Maria José, was born in November 2013; she is a partial comfort to his family in the wake of his death.

After weeks of planning, De León arranged for José’s mother, Paulina, and the two cousins, Manny and Felipe, who accompanied him across the border, to have an interview with an agent from the Border Patrol’s Public Information Office and its Search, Trauma and Rescue Team (BORSTAR). When Manny and Felipe are interviewed by BORSTAR, they “have conflicting accounts regarding how many days they spent in the desert, and their memory of details such as landmarks and cardinal directions they walked are vague” (281). Twelve days after the interview, De León receives an email from BORSTAR stating that they will not continue to search for José, though they think that he likely crossed the boundary east of Sycamore Canyon and separated from his cousins northwest of Atascosa Peak.

In the conclusion to his book, De León looks at the factors that would make people such as José and his parents “leave their homes and families to risk life and limb in the desert for the chance to scrub toilets for minimum wage” (283). These include global economic inequality, political instability, war, famine, government corruption, and unregulated capitalism. There are many paths of action that could be taken, such as enforcing a new guest worker program or equalizing trade relations between the United States and Latin America, so that the latter’s residents are not so deprived that they feel they must leave home. De León concludes that “the United States’ need for cheap labor that can be controlled with the threat of deportation and the duplicitous stance that we don’t want undocumented laborers in our country” wins out and stops any real progress (284).

De León recognizes that there is no easy solution to these problems and states that, anyway, this is not the goal of his book, which instead aims to “show the devastating impact that our boundary enforcement system has on people’s lives” (284). He has tried to “demystify” the process known as “Prevention Through Deterrence”, showing the “complex forms of violence” that arise from it (284). He also intends that his book acts as a testimony for the brave undocumented people who have either made it through the desert or being killed in their attempt to cross it. In providing a space where the general reader can grieve for individuals such as Maricela and José, De León hopes to enshrine a sense of how “our worlds are intertwined and the ethical responsibility we have to one another as humans” (285).

De León is conscious that even as his book goes to press, the perils of undocumented migration and the journeys taken by migrants continue and develop in new ways. More and more Central Americans who are fleeing poverty and violence are joining the masses of migrants who are seeking a new life in the United States. While President Obama, on November 20, 2014, announced an executive action to temporarily stop the deportation of undocumented migrants who arrived in the United States before 2010 or have at least one child who is an American citizen, this has done nothing to help the main actors in De León’s book or the 6-7 million undocumented migrants who do not meet the qualifying criteria. It also does nothing to change how the border is policed or stop the flow of undocumented migration.

Life continues to be hard for the main actors in the book. Memo and Lucho live in continual fear of being deported and missing the families they have left behind in Mexico and not seen for 20 years. Christian has suffered an injury that limits his ability to work, but he does his best to earn and send money back to his family. Meanwhile, José’s girlfriend, Tamara, is raising their daughter and continues to hope that he will return.