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

The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail is a 2015 work of nonfiction and the winner of four awards, including the J.J. Staley Book Prize in 2018. Drawing on his expertise in anthropology, ethnography and archeology, author Jason De León, Executive Director of the Undocumented Migration Project and current Professor of Anthropology and Chicanx Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, critiques the federal border enforcement policy known as Prevention Through Deterrence. The book explores themes of The Sonora Desert as a Migration Deterrent, Undocumented Border Crossers and the American Dream, and Community and Survival on the Migrant Trail.

This guide references the 2015 first edition from the University of California Press.

Content Warning: The guide contains graphic descriptions of death and dead bodies and anti-Latinx racism that appear in the source text.

Plot Summary

From the outset of his book, De León argues that Prevention Through Deterrence, the US border control policy that routes migration away from urban areas and forces migrants into the Sonora Desert as a means of preventing undocumented immigration, is actually a tool that allows the inhospitable terrain, rather than the US government, to erase and dispose of undocumented migrants’ bodies. De León states that the policy, which has been in effect since the mid-1990s, uses nature as to disguise the federal government’s responsibility for migrant deaths.

De León opens his book with his first day of ethnographic research in Nogales, Mexico, during which he sees the body of a migrant who has perished in the desert. This image of a corpse being left to the flies leads into De León’s thesis, which seeks to expose the cascade of consequences the Prevention Through Deterrence has for undocumented migrants and their families.

The primary section of De León’s book, “Dangerous Ground,” discusses the policy of Prevention Through Deterrence and the role of human and nonhuman actors in relation to the policy. Through expeditions that include a journey looking for migrant remains in the desert, and using the bodies of freshly killed pigs to assess the rate of decomposition, De León brings the reader into close contact with the violence that migrants experience and the way federal border policy uses the desert to do its “dirty work” (68).

Part 2, “El Camino,” introduces the reader to Memo and Lucho, two repeat border crossers De León meets at the migrant shelter Albergue Juan Bosco in Nogales. The ensuing chapters follow the two men’s experiences of the cycle of attempted crossing, deportation, and preparing to cross again. De León accompanies Memo and Lucho to the grocery store, where they buy $26 of provisions for their journey through the Sonora Desert. He then visits the US Border Patrol’s billion-dollar collection of detection “gadgets” and notes the disparity in cost and technical sophistication between the migrants’ preparation and that of Border Patrol. Nevertheless, De León shows that between 92% and 98% of those attempting to cross into the US eventually do make it across the border, as with each failed attempt they gain greater knowledge of the desert and develop new technologies of their own.

In the final part of the book, “Perilous Terrain,” De León recounts the journey taken from finding a woman’s decomposing corpse in the desert to tracing her identity and learning how her family responds to her loss. He presents the disparity between Border Patrol and the family’s perceptions of the victim, an Ecuadorian woman named Maricela. Whereas Border Patrol view Maricela as a necessary casualty of undocumented migration, her family, both near and extended, continue to feel her loss, which irrevocably changes their lives.

De León then shows, through the case of José Tacuri, the trauma faced by families who are not able to recover the body of a loved one who disappeared in the desert. He thus exposes how the policy of Prevention Through Deterrence, which forces migrants to cross a deadly landscape at their own peril, has consequences not only for the individual, but for their entire family and community.

De León concludes with a call to action, asking the reader to empathize with the migrants whose stories populate his book and to fully recognize their humanity. He admits that there is no easy solution for the problem of unauthorized migration but suggests fairer economic policies between the United States and its Central American neighbors, so that fewer migrants feel that their home countries lack opportunity and that the perilous journey of entering the United States without documentation is their only choice.