HT94: Something More than Mourning

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Background

I am graduate student in Theater and Performance Studies at WUSTL with a bent toward art history. I took Contemporary Art of the U.S.-Mexico Border and Beyond with Dr. Ila Sheren in Spring 2020, and I became invested in the life and performativity of the inanimate at the border in the course. Borders are nothing if not attempts to govern the social through the instrumentalization of the material, and the straightforward aesthetics of Hostile Terrain 94 illustrate the consequences of this dynamic.   

I first heard about Jason De León’s important work at the U.S.-Mexico border when he delivered the Holocaust Memorial Lecture at WashU in December 2019. De León discussed several of his research projects in the talk, all of which seek to understand and document the experience of crossing the border. 

Much of De León’s recent work explores the grim consequences of “Prevention through Deterrence,” a bundle of policies and executive orders enacted under Clinton and upheld or intensified by the Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations. Under PTD, the United States securitizes and militarizes only parts of its border with Mexico, with the strategic aim of forcing unapproved migrants to cross on foot in some of the harshest conditions on the planet. An anthropologist by trade, De León collaborates with teams of ethnographers, who train to cross the border in the Sonoran Desert. They engage with migrants in the process of crossing, but they also find the remains and/or personal effects of migrants who died making the journey. 

The traveling exhibition State of Exception/Estado de Excepción (2013-2017) presented traces of crossings De León and his teams found in the Sonoran. Though he was initially reticent to approach these objects as art, State of Exception/Estado de Excepción models De León’s turn to public-facing scholarship that uses art installations to confront the material realities enacted by PTD. Among the most striking elements of the State of Exception/Estado de Excepción is a full wall of backpacks recovered from De León’s research trips. These and many other items form an object record of life – and death – on the move.  

De León’s research for The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail continues in this vein, emphasizing the atmosphere of anonymized death that marks migration flows in the Sonoran. In his Holocaust Memorial Lecture, De León recounted the discovery of dead bodies in his ethnographies of border-crossing for the book. He also made clear that he and forensic anthropologists on his team often discovered only trace indications of migrants’ bodies or property because their remains were otherwise materially annihilated by desert heat and wildlife. 

Theory

In The Land of Open Graves De León identifies two bodies of theory relevant to the corporeal erasure at the border. The first is Bruno Latour’s work on actor-network theory, which introduces the term “actants” to describe both the animate beings and inanimate objects that “modify a state of affairs” (71). De León calls the spectrum of actants imbricated in PTD – from desert heat and scavenging animals to human traffickers and politicians – the Hybrid Collectif.  

The second body of theory De León engages is Achille Mbembe’s notion of “necropolitics,” which asserts that the primary characteristic of sovereign power is the capacity to determine who lives and who dies. De León indicts the Hybrid Collectif as necropolitical actor, exposing the multiplicitous network of actors that produce and codify the Sonoran atmosphere of death for its desecration (and often total obliteration) of the bodies of its victims. The destruction of the dead body, or necroviolence, renders the dead an example of what happens to those who defy necropolitical authority. 

Aesthetics

Hostile Terrain 94, so named for the year PTD formally began, is an aesthetic redress of necroviolence in the Sonoran. Unlike State of Exception/Estado de Excepción, HT94 does not present the artifacts of crossings as a traveling exhibition. The project instead forms communities at several host sites throughout the world, where interested people convene to fill out “toe tags” for every individual who died crossing the border. All known identifying information available about a lost migrant is listed on the tag that represents them; many of the tags are marked with “unknown” on every identifying line. Once complete, the tags are placed on projected map of the border in the precise position where their remains were found or indicated. Undocumented Migration Project (UMP), which organizes HT94 and other projects under De León’s leadership, identifies memorialization and collective mourning with the families of the lost as core objectives for HT94. 

A Proposal

I respect the significance of these objectives as a refusal to forget the dead, especially when the conditions of their de facto murders rendered them unidentifiable non-persons. As a participant in WashU’s iteration of HT94 and an advocate for the work of UMP, however, I respectfully call the project to conceive of its import as something more than mourning. This call is not naïve to murdered migrants’ rights to recognition and remembrance, but I fear that if we draw the line on HT94 at the project’s awareness and memorial functions that we reify the necroviolence of the Hybrid Collectif. 

I propose that we instead think about HT94 as an act of aesthetic re-materialization. Yes, the project serves as a memorial and site of communal grief. So, too, it is an active refusal to relegate the stories, and indeed the bodies, of the lost to death and dematerialization. HT94 insists that these people continue to matter and forges a global community whose collective labor enshrines their stories in actual matter (the toe tags) that occupies real and symbolic space. This adjustment in frame doesn’t bring the lost back to life, but it moves beyond ruminations on HT94’s memorial gravitas to consider the project as a modality of life-affirming resistance.