I was really excited to read this book, the Land of the Open Graves, because I had the opportunity to meet Jason de Leon last semester when he came to campus during his exhibit, Hostile Terrain. I got to chat with him in a small group of anthro and CLACX grad students, and I remember his demeanor feeling really casual and familiar. He dropped a few f bombs almost immediately into the conversation. So when I started reading this book, I was reading it in his voice and picturing his demeanor. When he used the word “dude” on page 2 to describe the man who had died, I was not as surprised as I think I would have been, had I not been thinking about Jason the person. I like how he draws in the reader, noting on page three, “If you live in the United States, you already know many of the people you will meet in these pages” (3). This really draws everyone in–yes, you already know these people. You can’t turn away or think that this somehow does not affect you. If you live in the US, this is something you know about. This is something you have stake in, something you can’t ignore. This is a moral injustice you must pay attention to.
I really like his framing of “documenting the undocumented” and the continued imagery of the invisible/visible divide. The invisible borders, invisible consequences, invisible humans who are all made that way as an intentional tactic by the US federal government. When he talks about the Tohono O’odham “Desert People,” (7-9), I really appreciate the way that he makes their lives visible. He doesn’t fall into the trap of presenting the desert as a barren, lifeless, human-less place, but for the migrants attempting to cross it, which is an easy thing for many migration stories to do. Instead, he points out that yes, there are people who live in the beauty of the desert and call it home. But for others, the “border crossers who pass through this region do not share in the cultural acumen that conceptualizes this landscape as inviting” (8). I just love this sentence, because he’s honoring the people who do, naming them and explaining them, but then also saying that for others, the border crossers, it is not experienced in this way, and both of these relationships can exist simultaneously.
I think it’s hard to overstate the impact of NAFTA on the increase in migrants coming from Mexico in 1994, so I also appreciate his connection to that law and the impact of regional and global economic phenomenon. I wonder, in thinking with Anna Tsing’s Mushroom at the End of the World, are there places in the border crossing experience that could be considered “salvage accumulation?” In this case, are the humans themselves part of the accumulation?
I’m also left thinking about his description of Seth Holmes’s work, as well as other journalists that took the journey alongside migrants, but with their passports at the ready to save them, if necessary. Did Seth Holmes write back? And does he stand by this? I wonder if de Leon could ever conceive of a way in which someone could take the journey (with a US passport) and do it ethically? Is it always going to be problematic because of the power differential? Lastly, I’m really excited and inspired by his idea of “holistic anthropology,” drawing on each subfield to draw an entire picture. While I’m not sure how I will use archaeology in my work, I do expect to use biological anthropology, as well as linguistic anthropology to describe maternal health in my own work.