Life and Death on the Migrant Road

The land of open graves: living and dying on the migrant trail

US-Mexico border immigration policy = a murder plan using the desert as an accomplice?
Using flesh and blood to collide with structural violence and deformed globalization🚫
🔔The natural killing fields of the US-Mexico border: an ethnography of life and death for migrants! MacArthur Fellow and University of California anthropology professor Jason De León retraces migration routes, tracking and interviewing border crossers, exposing the US government's murderous scheme disguised in the treacherous desert.
🧭 Ethnography + archaeology + forensic medicine, biopower (Foucault) + state of exception (Agamben) + necropolitics (Mbembe), employing multiple anthropological approaches to reconstruct desert violence, using classical theory to examine the insignificant political presence of immigrants, directly confronting the sovereign's indifference, hypocrisy, and cruelty. "The death toll of immigrants is an indicator of the effectiveness of the strategy...Effects are only achieved when violence increases."
📷First-person narratives from border crossers combined with over 60 documentary photographs allow eyewitnesses to speak out and bear witness through images, leaving behind a bloody indictment of inhumane immigration policies and the distorted process of globalization before traces along the way are erased, suffering is forgotten, and evidence of crimes is erased.
🗽Anthropologist Fan Ke, international relations scholar Lü Xiaoyu, sociologist You Tianlong, and other experts sincerely recommend: This is a moving and heartbreaking work, a microcosm of the overall collapse of American politics, economy, and society, and a magnificent epic in the style of a modern Odyssey!
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【Content Introduction】
Western of the sprawling US-Mexico border lies the Sonoran Desert, known as the "barren wasteland," a longtime route for undocumented Latin American migrants. The towering wall ends there, and by crossing the desert's death checkpoints, migrants can finally join the US's illegal labor force. However, countless lives are lost along the way. Anthropologist Jason De León has personally traversed desert migration routes, interviewed border crossers, collected remains like clothing and bones, rescued the injured, and witnessed death firsthand. He sees the desert as a heterogeneous conglomerate meticulously engineered by the US government: luring migrants into taking risks, outsourcing dirty work, and "laundering" itself through the natural environment. This dead land is filled with the pain of lost life, and underlying this lies the vast economic divide and intractable political ills between the two worlds.
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【About the author and translator】
Jason De León (born 1977) is a professor of anthropology, professor of Chicano and Mesoamerican Studies, and director of the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research focuses on Latin American migration, theories of violence, and contemporary archaeology. He is the director of the Undocumented Migration Project. In 2017, he received a MacArthur Fellowship for his outstanding contributions to migration studies.
Lai Yingman, translator, holds a master's degree in philosophy of science from the London School of Economics and Political Science. He has translated works such as "The Last Season in the Mountains", "The Responsibility of Genius: A Biography of Wittgenstein", "Reflections on Success" and "Polympic Scholars and Their Times".
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Related comments
De León presents a vivid indictment of the killing fields along the US-Mexico border, revealing the brutality of global inequality through bloody scenes and personal suffering. De León, a self-proclaimed "refugee" of archaeology, is in fact revitalizing the field by breaking down its traditional disciplinary boundaries. He unreservedly offers new approaches to theory, method, and public anthropology.
—Philippe Bourgois, professor of anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles and author of The Dignity of Life
This moving and poignant book recounts the arduous journey of undocumented immigrants through the Arizona desert to the United States. The author, having personally experienced this life-or-death journey, examines actor networks, multispecies ethnography, and the ontological turn, examining Foucault's biopower within the politics of death. The author seeks to explain why the vast majority of migrants who die in the desert leave no trace—the diverse forces of agency that contribute to this outcome.
--Fan Ke, Emeritus Professor of the School of Social Sciences and Director of the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Nanjing University. With a touch almost reminiscent of a novelist and an incredibly intimate distance, anthropologist De León reveals the numerous dilemmas of "navigating the lines" in the desert of the American border. Those who embark on this unknown journey are tantamount to accepting an open invitation to death. Their traversal of the artificial border between "developed and developing countries" is also an attack on the distortions and deformities of globalization, thus conjuring up a magnificent contemporary Odyssey-like epic.
Lü Xiaoyu de León, assistant professor at the School of International Relations at Peking University and a young writer, presents the seemingly simple act of "voting with your feet" in a complex, yet interconnected narrative, condensing the border crisis into a microcosm of the overall collapse of American politics, economy, and society. These refugees pursuing the "American Dream" are unaware of the nightmare that awaits them, woven by callous immigration officers, rigid immigration laws, a polarized two-party system, a dysfunctional federal system, a paralyzed system of three branches of government, and rapacious globalization. This institutional nightmare, combined with a harsh environment, creates their "open grave."
You Tianlong, associate professor of sociology at Yunnan University and scholar of international migration studies

2024-04-01

上海书店出版社

Yeren

434

9787545823172