Abstract
Thousands of Mexican and Central American migrants have died in their journey toward the United States in the past two decades. In both the United States and Mexico, many of the dead remain unidentified due to a lack of standardized DNA testing and the lack of political will to identify migrant remains. US immigration policies as well as neoliberal economic policies in Mexico and Central America which have displaced rural and urban workers have produced the current “disappeared” along the US-Mexico border and along Mexico’s vertical border, extending over 1,000 miles from Central America to the United States. A focus on the individual responsibility of coyotes and narco-traffickers and even on the supposed recklessness and ignorance of migrants themselves cover up the fact that these deaths are state crimes – the deaths are known outcomes of state policies that criminalize the working poor and militarize borders. This chapter explores the reasons state-driven violence may be “missed,” ignored, or simply dismissed as the fault of migrants themselves. Finally, it examines the ways migrants, their families and loved ones, and other members of civil society seek to identify and remember the dead, protest violence against migrants, and demand the defense of immigrant rights.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
The list comes from Brooks County from October 2013; numbers of identified and countries are constantly revised as some are identified months or years later.
- 2.
In her writing about the arpilleras (woven cloths representing the circumstances of the disappeared in Chile), Marjorie Agosín notes that the disappeared under Pinochet were made to appear absent. She observes that “The arpillera presents a clear narrative and accuses those who have lived lives in opposition to human dignity” (2008: 35).
- 3.
The Migrant Rights Collective was established in Houston in the Fall 2012 to address the growing numbers of migrant deaths in South Texas and support locating the missing and identifying the dead. The Collective works together with families in the Houston region who are searching for missing loved ones to achieve the following: (a) pressure authorities for policy changes at the state and federal level, (b) seek necessary services, and (c) give visibility to the issue of migrant deaths and unidentified human remains on the border. The mission of the Forensic Border Coalition (FBC) is to support families of missing migrants searching for their loved ones and to address problems related to the identification of human remains found near the US-Mexico border.
- 4.
US Border Patrol, Deaths by Fiscal Year, https://www.cbp.gov/sites/default/files/assets/documents/2016-Oct/BP%20Southwest%20Border%20Sector%20Deaths%20FY1998%20-%20FY2016.pdf.
- 5.
Lynn Stephen writes of the “new disappeared, assassinated, and dead” to describe those who have met violence on the US-Mexico border in the contemporary period.
- 6.
Anthropologists Sally Engle Merry and Susan Bibler Coutin examine knowledge systems as “part of conflicts rather than extrinsic to them”; they note that technologies “produce and reinforce hierarchies between what is ‘knowable’ and what is not” (2014: 1). Their work follows that of scholars such as Jean and John Comaroff who analyze the uses of numbers in “the construction of moral publics, so integral to debate about democracy, freedom, security, human rights” (2006: 211).
- 7.
- 8.
The budget for US Border Patrol alone was 3.7 billion dollars for the Fiscal Year 2015. https://www.cbp.gov/sites/default/files/assets/documents/2016-Oct/BP%20Budget%20History%201990-2016.pdf,
References
Agosín, M. (2008). Tapestries of hope, threads of love: The Arpillera movement in Chile. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.
Bacon, D. (2014). Immigrant labor, immigrant rights. NACLA Report on the Americas, 47(1), 64–69.
Baker, L. E. (2013). Corn meets maize: Food movements and markets in Mexico. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.
Bourgois, P. (2004). The continuum of violence in war and peace: Post-cold war lessons from El Salvador. In N. Scheper-Hughes & P. Bourgois (Eds.), Violence in war and peace. Malden: Blackwell.
Butler, J. (2010). Frames of war: When is life grievable? London: Verso.
De Genova, N., & Peutz, N. (2010). The deportation regime: Sovereignty, space, and the freedom of movement. Durham: Duke University Press.
De León, J. (2015). The land of open graves: Living and dying on the migrant trail. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Due Process of Law, Centro de Derechos Humanos Fray Matías de Córdova, & El Hogar de la Misericordia (2008). La crisis de derechos humanos en la frontera sur de México. Centro de Derechos Humanos Fray Matías de Córdova, Washington, DC/Tapachula.
Dunn, T. (2009). Blockading the border and human rights: The El Paso operation that remade immigration enforcement. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Edkins, J. (2011). Missing persons and politics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Gomberg-Muñoz, R. (2012). Inequality in a “Postracial” era: Race, immigration, and criminalization of low-wage labor. The DuBois Review, 9(2), 339–353.
Harvey, D. (2005). A brief history of neoliberalism. New York: Oxford University Press.
Jimenez, M. (2009). Humanitarian crisis: Migrant deaths at the U.S.-Mexico border. San Diego: ACLU of San Diego & Imperial Counties and Mexico’s National Commission of Human Rights.
Kovic, C. (2010). The violence of security: Central American migrants crossing Mexico’s southern border. Anthropology Now, 2(1).
Merry, S. E., & Susan, B. C. (2014). Technologies of truth in the anthropology of conflict. American Anthropologist, 41(1), 1–16.
Paz Carrasco, M. A., Cerda García, A., & Ledón Pereyra, A. (2016). Mirar Las Fronteras Desde El Sur: Salud y migración en la frontera México-Centroamérica. Guatemala-Mexico: Mesa de Coordinación Transfronteriza, Migraciones y Género, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Unidad Xochimilco, voces Mesoamericanas, Acción con Pueblos Migrantes, A.C.
Petrich, B. (2014). Arriba al D.F. caravana de migrantes centroamericanos. La Jornada. April 23, 2014.
Rosenblatt, A. (2015). Digging for the disappeared: Forensic science after atrocity. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Rubio-Goldsmith, R., McCormick, M. M., Martinez, D., & Duarte, I. M. (2006). The ‘Funnel Effect’ and recovered bodies of unauthorized migrants processed by the Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner, 2990–2005. Report Submitted to the Pima County Board of Supervisors. Tucson: Binational Migration Institute.
Sapkota, S., Kohl, H. W., Gilchrist, J., McAuliffe, J., Parks, B., England, B., et al. (2006). Unauthorized border crossings and migrant deaths: Arizona, New Mexico, and El Paso, Texas, 2002–2003. American Journal of Public Health, 96(7), 1282–1287.
Seelke, C.R., & Finklen, K. (2016). U.S.-Mexico security cooperation: The Mérida Initiative and Beyond. Congressional Research Service, 75700. https://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/row/R41349.pdf.
Stephen, L. (2008). Los Nuevos Desaparecidos y Muertos: Immigration, militarization, death and disappearance on Mexico’s Borders. In B. Sutton, S. Morgan, & J. Novkov (Eds.), Security disarmed: Critical perspectives on gender, race, and militarization (pp. 79–100). New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Texas Code of Criminal Procedure (n.d.). Chapter 63: Missing children and missing persons. http://www.statutes.legis.state.tx.us/Docs/CR/htm/CR.63.htm.
U.S. Border Patrol (2016). Southwest border deaths by Fiscal Year. U.S. Customs and Border Protection. https://www.cbp.gov/sites/default/files/assets/documents/2016-Oct/BP%20Southwest%20Border%20Sector%20Deaths%20FY1998%20-%20FY2016.pdf.
Villegas, R. D., & Rietig, V. (2015). Migrants deported from the United States to the northern Triangle: A statistical and socioeconomic profile. Washington, DC: Migration Policy Institute.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 Springer International Publishing AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Kovic, C. (2018). Naming State Crimes, Naming the Dead: Immigration Policy and “The New Disappeared” in the United States and Mexico. In: Latham, K., O'Daniel, A. (eds) Sociopolitics of Migrant Death and Repatriation. Bioarchaeology and Social Theory. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61866-1_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61866-1_4
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-61865-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-61866-1
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)