THE BORDER AND ITS BODIES AMERIND STUDIES IN ANTHROPOLOGY Series Editor, Christine R. Szuter with special assistance from Joe Wilder and the Southwest Center of the University of Arizona AMERIND STUDIES IN ANTHROPOLOGY THE BORDER AND ITS BODIES THE EMBODIMENT OF RISK ALONG THE U.S.- MÉXICO LINE EDITED BY Thomas E. Sheridan and Randall H. McGuire e University of Arizona Press www .uapress .arizona .edu © by e Arizona Board of Regents All rights reserved. Published ISBN- : - - - - (cloth) Cover design by Leigh McDonald Publication of this book is made possible in part by the proceeds from a permanent endowment created with the assistance of a Challenge Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a federal agency. Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Names: Sheridan, omas E., editor. | McGuire, Randall H., editor. Title: e border and its bodies : the embodiment of risk along the U.S.- México line / edited by omas E. Sheridan and Randall H. McGuire. Other titles: Amerind studies in anthropology. Description: Tucson : e University of Arizona Press, . | Series: Amerind studies in anthropology | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Sum- mary: “is volume oers a critical investigation of the risk and the physical toll of migration along the U.S. southern border”— Provided by publisher. Identi£ers: LCCN | ISBN (cloth) Subjects: LCSH: Immigrants—Mexican- American Border Region—Social conditions. | Border crossing—Mexican- American Border Region. | Mexican- American Border Region—Emigration and immigration—Social aspects. Classi£cation: LCC JV .B | DDC ./—dc LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/ Printed in the United States of America ♾ is paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z . - (Permanence of Paper). CONTENTS Acknowledgments vii Introduction. The Border and Its Bodies: The Embodiment of Risk Along the U.S.- México Line 3 Thomas E. Sheridan and Randall H. McGuire 1. Crossing la Línea: Bodily Encounters with the U.S.- México Border in Ambos Nogales 41 Randall H. McGuire and Ruth M. Van Dyke 2. Seeking Safety, Met with Violence: Mayan Women’s Entanglements with Violence, Impunity, and Asylum 71 Linda Green 3. “Como Me Duele”: Undocumented Central American Bodies in Motion 99 Jason De León 4. Singing Along “Like a Mexican”: Embodied Rhythms in Mexican Narco- Music 124 Shaylih Muehlmann 5. Necroviolence and Postmortem Care Along the U.S.- México Border 144 Robin Reineke 6. Etched in Bone: Embodied Suffering in the Remains of Undocumented Migrants 173 Angela Soler, Robin Reineke, Jared Beatrice, and Bruce E. Anderson 7. Bodily Imprints of Suffering: How Mexican Immigrants Link Their Sickness to Emotional Trauma 208 Rebecca Crocker vi Contents . Narrating Migrant Bodies: Undocumented Children in California’s “Little Arizona” Olivia T. Ruiz Marrujo . “War Stories” and White Shoes: Field Notes from Rural Life in the Borderlands, – David Seibert Contributors Index ACKNOWLEDGMENTS First, all of us would like to thank President Christine Szuter and the sta of the Amerind Foundation for their incomparable hospitality in hosting our research seminar in March . It was a memorable expe- rience for all of us to spend £ve days on Amerind’s beautiful campus in southeastern Arizona, exchanging ideas and laying the groundwork for this book. We also wish to thank Joe Wilder, director emeritus of the Southwest Center, and the Haury Foundation for partially funding the seminar itself. Co- editor Tom Sheridan would like to thank his former students, three of whom— Robin Reineke, Rebecca Crocker, and David Seibert— have authored chapters in this volume, for educating him about the hu- man costs of immigration along the U.S.- México line. He would also like to thank ranchers in the Altar Valley Conservation Alliance for sharing their experiences of the immigrant surge and the impact it had on their lives and their businesses. Co- editor Randy McGuire and his co-author, Ruth Van Dyke, would like to recognize No More Deaths/No Más Muertes for welcoming them to be part of their important humanitarian work in Ambos Nogales. Most especially we want to thank David Hill, who has been the lead- ing force in the Ambos Nogales work for many years. We also must thank the many migrants we met in Ambos Nogales for sharing with us their stories and experiences. ey are valiant people struggling to better themselves and their families. ey deserved far more assistance and help than we could give them. THE BORDER AND ITS BODIES Introduction e Border and Its Bodies e Embodiment of Risk Along the U.S.-México Line omas E. Sheridan and Randall H. McGuire Ever since the establishment of the present-day border, border- land residents have crossed it as a way of life. —Geraldo Cadava, Standing on Common Ground Beginning in the s, in response to an unprecedented surge of mi- grants from México and Central America, the United States has milita- rized its southern border and made it far more dangerous for those who try to cross it without documents. More than , individuals have died and hundreds of thousands more bear the scars of their passage as they suer detention, deportation, or life as an “illegal alien” in the United States. National ideologies use citizenship to equate liberty with freedom of movement and to regulate the mobility of noncitizens based on coun- try of origin, race, class, and gender (Kotef ). On the U.S.- México border, liberty becomes a bodily experience. Freedom of movement or the lack thereof privileges some and stigmatizes others. In all too many cases, that stigma serves as a death warrant. us, studying the border as embodied experience gives us intimate and profoundly human insights into the political, economic, and cultural dynamics of undocumented immigration and its relationship to transnational processes. Using the body as the site of analysis humanizes current political and policy debates about immigration and draws attention to the most basic human costs of calls for even greater militarization of the U.S.- México line. To that end, a group of archaeologists and cultural and biological anthropologists met for four days in March to take part in an ad- vanced seminar entitled “e Border and Its Bodies: e Corporeality of Risk Along the U.S.- México Line.” Cosponsored by the Amerind Foundation and the University of Arizona Southwest Center, the semi- nar explored how risk becomes embodied in the lives— and deaths— of omas E. Sheridan and Randall H. McGuire undocumented Mexican and Central American migrants. Our focus was on trauma, speci£cally the physical and psychological trauma of travel- ing to and trying to cross an increasingly dangerous border. For some, the trauma ends in horri£c deaths from heat stroke and dehydration. For many others, the trauma continues to imprint itself on their bodies as they try to evade apprehension and build lives for themselves al otro lado— “on the other side.” Anxiety, depression, hypertension, diabetes— migrants actually get sicker the longer they stay in the United States. e seminar was held at the Amerind Foundation campus in Dra- goon, Arizona, less than miles from the international border. It is a harsh and beautiful landscape— one that has seen its share of migrant deaths; there is a red cross with green accents and white lettering com- memorating “Omar García Herrera, Age , //” on Dragoon Road near the Amerind campus. Amerind is also located in the same county where someone murdered rancher Rob Krentz in (Duara ). Even though most of our attention focused on migrants, seminar partic- ipants David Seibert and Tom Sheridan talked about the toll the migrant surge took on rural residents in southern Arizona. e seminar culmi- nated in a public program at Amerind. ere rancher Dennis Moroney shared what it was like to live and work in a place as hundreds of migrants crossed his ranch and several died. In this introductory chapter, we lay the groundwork for understanding the corporality of risk on the border and introduce the chapters of the volume. Our studies take an anthropological approach to understand- ing the experience of border crossing. More speci£cally, we focus on how that experience becomes embodied in individuals, how that em- bodiment transcends the crossing of the line, and how it varies depend- ing on subject positions and identity categories, especially race, class, and citizenship. All of this happens in a historical context that sets the prior conditions for the embodied experience of today. ose conditions include endemic poverty and enduring racism against Native people, collapsing rural economies because of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), civil war in Guatemala, gang violence in Hondu- ras and El Salvador, the drug trade and corruption in México, and other “push factors” in México and Central America. We ask basic questions: Why do the migrants run such terrible risks— which for women include the probability of rape— to make their way through México and enter Introduction the United States? Why are they afraid to return to their home coun- tries? Why don’t their own countries address the problems that drive them northward? And, above all, why are they dying on the border? e experience of border crossing is not a single event but rather a journey with lifelong consequences. At a larger scale, the embodied experiences of undocumented migrants on the U.S.-México line are part of a global process of immigration from the global south to the global north, a pro- cess that kills many more people in other parts of the world like the Med- iterranean. We conclude our discussions by introducing the individual chapters of the book. AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL APPROACH Anthropology is both the most scienti£c of the humanities and the most humanistic of the sciences. (Wolf ) Our seminar used an anthropological approach to understand the cor- porality of risk along the U.S.-Mé xico line.