This article discusses a few cases of recent migrant deaths, and argues to see them as more than isolated incidents.
When the .40 caliber hollow-point bullet struck Guillermo Martinez Rodriguez in the back, he was returning to Mexico with two other acquaintances, one of whom may have been his brother. After staggering across the border wounded, Guillermo eventually reached a local Tijuana hospital where he passed away the next day, 30 Dec. 2005. He was the last known person to die that year at the hands of the Border Patrol. And, though already a husband and a father of two small children, he was barely eighteen years old.
Fifteen months later, Guillermo’s death has become another notch in the U.S.-Mexico border’s kill-count. He is now joined by approximately 300 more people who, despite undergoing different circumstances, fared no better.
Several weeks ago, after being pulled out of a canal, Benjamin Rivera Nevarez was proclaimed dead at Thomason hospital in El Paso, TX. Along with two other migrants, Benjamin had drowned while trying to enter into the U.S. without proper documentation. He was 38 years old and hailed from Chihuahua, Mexico. The other two—33 year-old Silvestre Garcia Gonzalez of Durango and an unidentified man—were found earlier that day, presumably in another part of the canal. Only five days prior the original group that Garcia Gonzalez was traveling with had reported him missing.
These two seemingly disparate tragedies, perhaps in the imaginations of many related only in the sense that people ended up dying, can be situated within a larger, more insidious context. That is, the men like countless others were attempting to navigate around an extremely militarized boundary—a boundary whose current incarnation is more treacherous and deadlier than ever—and in doing so, passed away.
They were all so-called “illegal aliens,” and as such, in the eyes of many, their fate was well-deserved. Advocates for the continued militarization and fortification of the border likely see these men as pathologically criminal. In cold logic, they would perhaps respond with a clever rhetorical question that goes something like: “What part of illegal do you not understand?” (Few can escape the power of a label.)
The complex circumstances which contributed to them hazarding such a fatal journey are rendered irrelevant by this simple “fact.” Crossing the border as an undocumented immigrant is notoriously dangerous and deadly. And many migrants are generally well-informed of the perils they may face along the way—not simply extreme weather conditions and rabid vigilante groups, but the uncertainty of living in a constant state of vulnerability. But, again, none of the reasons that informed their decision to move are considered by those who would love to build a wall, or something like it.
If undocumented immigrants are not seen as they should be, as sentient human beings who lead complex lives, then it is much easier to see their deaths as a kind of natural occurrence or rare phenomena. It is also much easier to pretend that there are no structural problems underpinning their deaths specifically and immigration issues more broadly. Moreover, migrant deaths in the borderlands, it would seem, were nothing more than a handful of incidents involving unfortunate individuals whose luck ran out somewhere in between Sonora and Arizona.
For the most part, academic research on border deaths has highlighted the ways in which “larger” forces, including governmental policy, play an important role in ensuring fatalities. Take for instance, the “funnel effect”—the process by which certain parts of the border, usually urban and heavily populated spaces, are increasingly fortified so as to direct the flow of undocumented movement to more desolate and more hazardous areas of the border. The guiding assumption behind such policies is perhaps that with the possibility of death heightened, the likelihood of crossing is reduced.
On the contrary, according to a recent comprehensive study on migrant deaths prepared by the Binational Migration Institute, its findings “unambiguously confirm” that certain U.S. immigration regulation policies effectively create said “funnel effect,” which is indeed “the primary structural cause of death of thousands of [Latin American] unauthorized men, women, and children who have died while trying to enter the U.S.” With that in mind, it becomes clearer that Guillermo, Benjamin, and Silvestre are linked not only by death, but by a structure behind it.
To end there would be to ignore the point entirely. They, like so many others, were human beings caught in the throes of a growing regime of death. There is nothing normal or random about such tragedies.
Is there anything normal about having to pull a man’s submerged body from a canal? Is there anything random about a gunshot wound? And are the hundreds of miles of fencing rammed into the earth either?
