Southern Arizona has become one of the most perilous zones for illegal border crossings in the United States, with staggering accounts of migrant arrest, injury, and death. However, there is a lack of visual mapping of how the desert landscape is mediated and instrumentalized by multiple and intersecting actors. This project explores a counter-mapping methodology, overlaying a range of open-source data – including online government sites, research and conservation groups, academic publications, works by artists and activists, migrant testimonials, and photographic documentation – in a manner that reveals a new reading of the border landscape.
Movement across this landscape is in constant flux, and every aspect of its terrain is mediated, instrumentalized, and weaponized by a complex web of actors, including the government, ranchers, conservationists, migrants, human coyotes, plants, and animals. This is not a fixed landscape; importantly, every life-giving or shelter-giving source is also life-threatening.
“Prevention Through Deterrence” correlates topography with border enforcement strategy to uncover how the landscape is weaponized to deter illegal border crossings. “Clandestine Migration” demonstrates, on the one hand, how migrants use the natural environment to navigate through the desert without being noticed, and on the other hand, how creating movement inequity and personal identity.
“Desert Water” maps the intersections between managed ranching landscapes and water infrastructure in relation to animals and migrants. “Hidden Violence” highlights stories of plants that offer shelter but end up as sites of sexual violence, as well as desert-adapted plants and animals whose natural survival mechanisms prove deadly.
At the core of this counter-mapping is the realization of the stark contrast between humanitarian acts and certain strategies that intentionally direct migrants toward their peril or surveil their struggle for dozens of miles. The concept of Arithmetic of Compassion indicates that the greater the number of human casualties, the greater indifference society feels as the staggering numbers become abstract and incomprehensible. The divisive political impasse allows us to forget about the humanitarian principles of this issue, which this counter-mapping project seeks to reveal.
Counter-mapping the U.S.-Mexico Border Landscape
Student: Qizhi Gao
University: University of Toronto
Advisor: Liat Margolis, University of Toronto
