The Dead Are Coming: Border Memorials, Desire, and the Possibility of Justice

What are the cultural barriers against which we struggle when we try to find out about losses that we are asked not to mourn?

Hoag 2014, 1

This photo essay about the US-Mexico border begins with a memorial project in a very different border region: carried out in 2015 by the Center for Political Beauty in Germany. The project, “The Dead Are Coming,” involved the ritualized performance of (re)burial of remains of undocumented travelers, transported from their anonymous graves near the EU’s Mediterranean border into Berlin’s city center. “The Dead Are Coming” included multiple events: An actual single re-burial was performed with full rites, followed by the creation of symbolic graves on the lawn in front of Germany’s parliament building.

To prepare for this, the Center facilitated the forensic identification of many undocumented migrant individuals who died crossing the Mediterranean border, for whom little investigation had taken place prior—a routinized neglect of forensic care for the remains of undocumented travelers in some parts of southern Europe (e.g., Kovras and Robins 2016), and indeed an issue that has also haunted the investigations of undocumented people in many parts of the US Southwest (e.g., Spradley 2021). In this way, the Center provided answers for families missing their loved ones and gained permission to transport one identified individual into Germany. Though her family supported the actions, immigration restrictions prevented them from attending. The deceased's husband, though residing in Germany, was confined to a camp where he awaited official recognition for his asylum claim. He too was prevented from attending the ceremony in person.

Not prevented from attending were European policy-makers, though they neglected to do so. The Center had arranged a special viewing site for these authorities, which they left empty as a symbolic feature of the event (Bertrand-Hottcke and Kettner 2022).

The Center framed their actions as a reinterpretation of Sophocles’ Antigone—in which the sister of a political outcast defied authorities, risking her own life to bury her brother for whom the rites of the dead had been denied.

On its webpage for the action, the Center foregrounded this review of the events by a German newspaper:

In their analysis of “The Dead Are Coming,” and while acknowledging the ethical controversy of the performance, authors Bertrand-Höttcke and Kettner described its power in imagining a fictionalized but realistically hopeful humane response to the continued mass casualties of the continent’s border defenses. Its innovation, they said, was in a way that it simultaneously compelled viewers to ask questions about accountability: This is “critical practice of disclosure since it reveals that what we accept as normal and as the political status quo is, at least to a certain extent, the product of civil cowardice, of moral indifference, and of bad politics” (Bertrand-Höttcke and Kettner 2022, 292).

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In her writing on the “pain of others,” Susan Sontag (2003) described the inequality of people’s ethical responses to encounters with grave violence experienced by others they perceived as far removed from themselves. She described the tendencies of war photographers reporting from places distant to capture the faces of the dead for mass consumption—at first blush, an act of unflinching reportage. In contrast, closer to home, there was a consistent practice of respectful distancing in photographs of the dead.

By way of example, the dead produced by the United States’ recent mass shootings—usually children—are never depicted in the news. Instead, the public consumes images from the sanitized scenes of the crimes paired with images captured from the victims’ lives—not their ends.

Sontag’s point was about the way people can empathetically consume pain when we comprehend its origin as distant from us. It is sad, but it is happening over there. We might interpret positively the idea of photographing the faces of the distant dead as a provocation to act in the face of this distance, but Sontag argues the inverse. The respectful distance for the dead closer to home is a nod to their political personhood that demands sensitivity; these individuals are grievable. Those further away do not command this respect. They are not “ours.”

And yet, because such mass shootings often take place using weapons of war that not only pierce the body, but virtually explode the internal organs of the victims to inflict maximum damage, some have argued that we—the public—should be forced to witness these carnal wounds: This is what it means for military-style weapons to be in the hands of the general public; this is what a lack of regulation of such weapons means (e.g., Linfield 2022). Former Homeland Security secretary Jeh Johnson endorsed this imperative, comparing it to the decision of Emmett Till’s mother to insist on an open casket at the funeral of her son—a 14-year old Black boy who was brutally murdered by racists in Mississippi in 1955. Her action was to “[l]et the world—make the world—see what her son’s tormentors had done. And the world did: The photograph of Till taken by Jet magazine was reproduced throughout the country and abroad and helped invigorate the civil rights movement” (Ibid.).

What distinguishes the Till photographs from Sontag’s concerns is that Till’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, demanded her son’s body be unflinchingly photographed with the insistence that his death inflicted a moral wound on a society that did nothing to stop racist violence. People mobilized to save their souls, because his death was posed in direct relation to a national community.

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In the last several years, other writers have confronted parallel questions by considering what it would mean to “bring the dead back into society” in the US-Mexico borderlands (Délano Alonso et al. 2016). To some degree, “The Dead Are Coming” did this for the EU. I wonder, though, if it did not also effectively “other” those remains it transported? Is the demand for those from some imagined “over there” to physically come here so we can, in effect — if not actually—look into their faces, in the same act that Sontag described as problematic? If the events were meant to highlight the implication of the EU public in border policy, was the postmortem valorization of the unconsenting dead who lacked such attention in life the appropriate means to do so?

In the United States, it seems like we have created a moral alibi for ourselves in relation to this violence, imagining that violence at our borders is justified by the understanding that these borders are war zones and spaces of invasion (cf. Reineke and Martínez 2024). In war zones, one can morally commit violence as an act of self-defense. This translates into the law—the state’s vehicle of moral order. Federal border agents, just as US police, have qualified immunity from violence they can justify in the course of their jobs. In careers where there is an expectation of violence directed at your body, and when your body stands between that violence and a wider public, the defensive violence you might commit is deemed morally defensible. But that leaves a wide—virtually fathomless—purview for its justification.

These frameworks of morally permissible violence are subject to contention when one introduces an alternative view of the facts, or contests those facts altogether. Most people in the interior of Europe nor the United States ever confront the carnage entailed in their defensive postures. Those who work in the borderlands, however, must consider the wider forces at play driving people to leave their homes and take the risk of entering a foreign country without assurances of safety. They see that mass deportations mean that those who attempt to navigate the borders without documents re-enter the country at almost any cost to rejoin the families from whom they were violently separated. The view of these forms of uprooting as an invasion is then a gross misrepresentation.

If defense of sovereign borders is intertwined with defending the sovereign public, this defense is in the public’s name, as are its harms. When people die as a result, it is logical to consider this the fault of that public—as it is with those who actually carry out violent policies.

Whether consenting or not, all parties are inexorably intertwined in a troubled moral community (cf. Povinelli 2011) because those who die are “a part of our substance; [because] we have put too much of ourselves into [them], and participation in the same social life creates ties which are not [easily] severed” (Hertz 1960, 82)—even if these ties are a product of a confrontational dynamic in which a public might justify certain lives as expendable. Perhaps, our interconnection is more of a spirit debt (cf. Langford 2009), “[f]or violence pursues the dead into their very afterlives, violating them in ways that do not simply terrorize the living or desecrate the corpse in a symbolic reference to our future or past violations, but that materially wound and rend social worlds in the present” (Langford 2009, 684).

The wider point is about those who experience violence at borders, and how to act on a vision of change that can disclose this radical reality for its injustice and tragedy. I once thought that the gravitas of invoking thousands of connected and preventable deaths was itself a claim to significance. Clearly we have this dynamic where borders and those who cross them seem quite distant, but I believe that my theory of change was unwittingly parallel to what Sontag described as the issues with foreign correspondents photographing the faces of the foreign dead. I too once thought that this was unflinching reportage, but instead I was emphasizing the distance between us.

I think of Eve Tuck’s (2009) recommendations for moving beyond manifesting damage—death alone—as the basis for change. Instead, Tuck recommended a move towards change that acknowledges the harm done while focusing on the desire for something different. In this sense, “The Dead Are Coming” was entirely successful, creating a tableau for desired justice.

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In the remainder of this photo essay, I build from the foundations of the Center for Political Beauty to consider the memorializations and protests I have witnessed in southern Arizona that highlight our relationships with the dead in a number of ways.

Every year since 2004 (with the exceptions of two pandemic years) the Migrant Trail participants have gathered to embark on a 75-mile pilgrimage in remembrance of those who have died during undocumented border crossings in the region. They walk from Sasabe, Sonora in Mexico into Tucson, Arizona—a city center that serves as a critical waypoint for those endeavoring on an undocumented journey through southern Arizona.

Participants carry crosses bearing the names of recovered remains from the preceding year—where those recovered are likely only a fraction of all who die. Sometimes the crosses read desconocido or unknown.

At intervals, especially when passing through US Border Patrol checkpoints, the participants engage in a call and response: Each participant yells at the top of their lungs the name of the person on their cross. In unison after each name, all other participants respond, with equal volume: ¡PRESENTE!

This photo depicts the end of the trail where we collect all the crosses together for a final public ceremony of remembrance. (Photo courtesy of Patrick Richardson)

Local artist and Samaritan humanitarian group member, Alvaro Enciso, started a project in 2012 to leave crosses behind at the sites of each set of undocumented migrant remains recovered in Arizona and New Mexico.

When death investigators are called to a scene, they gather all evidence associated with that death, such that sites of profound loss are left without any witness marks of what occurred. Alvaro endeavors to change that—creating sites of memory and grief that dot the region.

On one occasion when I accompanied him, we sought a permit to plant crosses on the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge—a protected wilderness area near the border. Ultimately, the permit could not be secured, with the volunteer docent on duty that day proclaiming her incredulous misgivings at the prospect of planting crosses to mark each death recovered on the refuge (that I recorded in my field notes after the fact): Can you imagine? This place would look like a cemetery! (Photo courtesy of Patrick Richardson)

The southern face of the US-Mexico border wall has been a canvas for artists, especially in city centers like Nogales, Sonora in Mexico. Years ago, one of the artists told me that his goal was subversion—to confuse who the wall was keeping out, with installations invisible to those facing the wall on the US side.

Most of the installations memorialize the dead, unsettling the purpose of the wall as infrastructure of exclusion.

The next four images are among these: one by an artist I could never track down, the second attributed to Machete Arte, and the last two from an installation by artists Taller Yonke and Alfred Quiroz: Paseo de Humanidad. Paseo de Humanidad incorporates both Aztec symbolism into the contemporary framework of a lethal border apartheid.

Behind each photo, you will see candles drawn on each post along the wall—votives. (Photos by author)