ASU professor details the haunting consequences of migrant deaths in 'Border Afterlives'

For a while now, Arizona State University professor Gabriella Soto has been working with the University of Arizona’s Binational Migration Institute to count migrant deaths at the border in Pima County.

They knew the work they were doing was important, but in 2011, they realized just how important. That year, there was a spike in deaths starting in southern Texas, and Soto and her collaborators grew concerned that officials there weren’t counting or investigating the deaths the same way they were in southern Arizona.

And when they began looking into it, they discovered the situation was even worse than they imagined. The standards for reporting, investigation, and handling of these deaths varied widely from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. In many cases, they weren’t being investigated at all.

Soto chronicles all of this — and proposes a new framework for understanding border deaths — in her new book: "Border Afterlives: Migrant Deaths, Forensic Investigations, and the Politics of Haunting."

The Show spoke with her about it recently.

Full conversation

GABRIELLA SOTO: In California, we found that after a year, if remains were unidentified, they would be scattered either at sea or in the desert.

In Arizona, remains are kept indefinitely with DNA taken or other identifying features preserved. So those individuals could be identified in the future.

And then in Texas, where I ended up doing more extended field work, we found that there was no DNA being taken. The cause of death was assumed. People were being buried without further efforts to identify them.

And I think if forensic investigation is the means internationally, nationally, by which accountability can be had, then it also has to be the place that we have to stop talking about these deaths as accidents.

Because to me, the broader pattern is that, you know, border security has historically been very popular in our country, right? They, you know, Democrat, Republican, across the board, there's been more and more funding every year for border security.

But I think we say border security as an idea that happens over there.

SAM DINGMAN: Right.

SOTO: But people don't realize that there's a death toll that comes with it, and there has been, and I think we're seeing things that are happening in urban spaces now that are bringing to light, like, oh, maybe when we were talking about border security, like, were we talking about this? I don't think we were talking about this, but it has been this all along.

DINGMAN: But then critically with those, I mean, I assume you're referring to Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

SOTO: Among others. Among others. Coraldo, Lunas, Campos.

DINGMAN: Yes.

SOTO: Silverio Villegas González was taking his child to school in Chicago and was shot multiple times. And which is, you know, also something I think we have this aphorism that, you know, we're all equal in death. And maybe that's spiritually true, but forensically in terms of like the justice system, it's not.

DINGMAN: In the case of these deaths, you have referred to them as structural homicides, which I'm interested in how you arrived at that phrase, but also the idea of a structural homicide would ideally necessitate the existence of a structural homicide investigation.

SOTO: Right.

DINGMAN: But as you, again, write about, that gets complicated very quickly because you would be potentially asking one government agency to investigate another government agency that has arguably perpetrated this homicide.

SOTO: Right, yeah. You know, we have a kind of a mass casualty incident, an extended mass casualty incident. And that group of people systematically being unidentified, under-investigated.

You know, we have an obligation to investigate suspicious deaths. And that notion of what is a suspicious death sort of varies from place to place.

I think a lot of border counties assumed that border crossing deaths were not suspicious because they knew without really investigating that people were dying largely of dehydration or exposure. But if we're not investigating suspicious deaths, like, well, what if there's a larger cause? But then there's a social cause.

What happens to families who don't know what happens to their loved one? What happens when deaths can continue preventably with impunity and there's just not attention to that?

DINGMAN: Well, and this leads, I think, to the, you know, the third part of the subtitle of your book, which is, the full title of the book is "Border Afterlives, Migrant Deaths, Forensic Investigations, and the Politics of Haunting."

SOTO: Right.

DINGMAN: And that haunting piece is extremely potent because as you write in the book, this is a direct quote from the book, you say, "I write this book because I want these deaths to haunt you, too. I don't necessarily need you to know the details of what happened in each case. I refuse to draw your attention to bodies as objects of horror."

Tell me what you mean by that.

SOTO: I was thinking of two things. First, there has been an outreach campaign, first by the Border Patrol, then the Department of Homeland Security, had images that were circulated beyond the border, into the south, into Mexico, into Central America, that said, “Do not come.” You know, there are dangers here. And they consider this a public outreach campaign that we're preventing deaths by circulating these images.

And it was usually images of people in prone positions, usually men in states of decomposition that were images of real death from the borderlands. They're like, “we're letting families know that if they send their people, they're responsible for their deaths,” which I thought was such a a twist of maybe the reality of what's happening, that people come to improve their circumstances.

And then the other thing that happens is also in the circles of people who want to bring attention to these deaths that are happening. They will use some of these images, too, to shock the public. And, you know, in shocking to, you know, to make people change their minds.

DINGMAN: Right, right. This is a human rights crisis. This is something that is worthy of your attention.

SOTO: But it also is something that makes the deaths seem less human, that these are objects of horror rather than people.

And I think when I wrote about haunting, what I've been thinking about for a long time as someone who's been working in the borderlands, working on the topic of deaths, is what will change minds? What is going to be the X factor that changes this from, you know, a perennial conversation we have about deaths on the border to something that actually changes minds?

DINGMAN: Right.

SOTO: Which overlaps with this idea that if you encounter a ghost, if you're haunted, you have to do something about it. You can't walk away. There's something like pity that you have and you can walk away or change the channel when you see, you know, terrible things happening on the news and it's happening over there. And it's like, well, that's terrible, there's nothing I can do about it, move on, to, OK, this is something that is impacting me or, you know, in my mind in a way that's visceral that I have to do something about it.

And so the language, and I'm not advocating for people to believe in ghosts necessarily, but that language of haunting I find is the potential intervention that we aren't just talking about, you know, numbers. These deaths are preventable. They're not accidents, strictly speaking.