The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail

De León’s photographer, Mike Wells, is a consistent if silent presence in the book. Wells accompanies De León everywhere, from the Sonora Desert to the Juan Bosco migrant shelter in Nogales, to the house of Maricela’s relatives in Cuenca, Ecuador. His black-and-white photographs provide vital visual accompaniment to De León’s descriptions; through them, we can observe the flimsiness of the Sonora Desert portion of the US-Mexico border, which appears as little more than a garden fence. Other photos show the deformation of migrants’ feet after traversing the desert and the unsophisticated kitchen of an impoverished Ecuadorian family, complete with dirt floor and wood fire. In their candid depictions of the arid desert, the violence suffered by migrant bodies, and the poverty that causes people to feel that their homeland can offer them no hope of advancement, Wells’ photographs speak to the actions and environments of the world of undocumented migrants.

To De León, 40-year-old Memo looks like the Mexican comedic actor Cantinflas, because both have “round faces, dark moustaches and contagious smiles” (89). Memo also reminds De León of a beloved but now deceased family member, who had a similar taste for dirty jokes and chingaderas. De León and Memo hit it off immediately.

Memo was born in 1969, in a small town on the border of Jalisco and Michoacán, but grew up in Veracruz. He felt compelled to leave because local salaries were low compared to the cost of living. He grew up with “only [enough] money to eat and barely dress” himself and left school in fifth grade because he had to work to earn a living (95). Memo was in his twenties, with a broken marriage and two young children, when he made his first border crossing into the United States, with a friend who had a brother-in-law in America.

In the ensuing decades, Memo crossed the border 15 times, picking up low-wage work and “drinking too much” (98). Memo’s propensity for drink got him into trouble on one occasion, when he was arrested for drunk-driving and deported to Tijuana. He remains determined to cross the border when De León meets him, alongside his staunch buddy, Lucho. Memo feels that the economic conditions in Mexico make it impossible for him to return there, though he does entertain the hope of returning to Mexico and visiting his ailing mother, whom he has not seen for almost 20 years. Struggling to make ends meet in the United States, where he is exploited for cheap labor, Memo’s dream of reunion seems like a fantasy. De León uses the determined, wisecracking, yet ultimately tragic figure of Memo, who is trapped by his poverty and permanently estranged from his family in Mexico, to show how even those who survive the challenges of desert life never achieve a truly “happy ending” (286). His fate is intended to appeal to the reader’s compassion and sense of justice.

Memo’s friend, Lucho, is a foot taller and 20 pounds lighter than Memo. He is around 47 years old when De León meets him. De León writes that “Lucho is dark-skinned with an unbelievably mellow disposition” and a permanent “slight grin on his face” (90). De León marvels at how Lucho has been able to keep “a perfect set of teeth” and does not show the “physical wear and tear” that one would expect from a 47-year-old who has worked as an undocumented manual laborer in the United States for 30 years and crossed the border multiple times (90). He met his traveling companion and friend Memo in a detention center after ICE deported him.

Lucho has significant family roots in the United States and has lived in Arizona for a long time. He owns a trailer and two cars. He feels compelled to return to the United States because he “nothing really to go back to” in Jalisco, Mexico, where he is from (104). When he succeeds in making the final crossing with Memo, he works hard doing “odd jobs and temporary contract work” and continues to “drink heavily” (196). Unlike Memo, whose rendition of the desert-crossing becomes more humorous with the passing of time, Lucho’s becomes “serious and morose upon reflection” (197). While a traumatized Lucho determines to never make another journey through the “Arizona wilderness,” he “spends a great deal of time looking over his shoulder” for ICE agents who may drag him back through there (286).

Maricela, the Ecuadorian mother of three who left her family behind in Cuenca to be able to better provide for them, is introduced as the corpse De León and his students find in the desert. Dressed in camouflage clothing, Maricela is “lying face down in the dirt” as though “she collapsed mid-hike” (210). By the time De León and his students find her body, it is in the stages of early decomposition. Without documentation, she risks becoming another faceless corpse the Border Patrol will dispose of without trying to identify her or contact her family.

To keep this from happening, De León and his photographer, Mike Wells, insist on completing the story of who she is and track down her identification and her family members. A brave, optimistic character who was determined to go to the United States and send back money to create a better life for her children, Maricela left in pursuit of her “dream,” despite her family’s protests and fears for her (252).

De León shows the lengths Maricela’s family pursued to find out what happened to her in the desert. The body that was returned to Maricela’s relatives in Ecuador was unrecognizable as hers, having “no face, no hands” (256). Its state made it difficult to accept that the corpse really was Maricela. However, upon seeing De León’s photographs, Vanessa, Maricela’s sister-in-law, feels more at peace for getting closer to the facts of how she disappeared and died. By showing the reader who Maricela was in life, rather than just treating her as a victim of the desert, De León makes it more difficult for the reader to dismiss her as just another migrant who died crossing into a land where she was unwelcome.

José Tacuri, 15 years old at the time he leaves Cuenca, Ecuador, to join his parents in New York, disappears in the Sonora Desert after he manages to successfully cross the border.

De León visits Tacuri’s house in Ecuador to find that 15-year-old José has a room “decorated with a combination of items from his fading childhood and his burgeoning adolescence” and dressed in “hip-hop” clothes (265). He looks like “he is posing for the cover of a mix-tape” (265). Feeling “el dolor de dólares” after his parents emigrate to New York to better provide for the family, and that their gifts were not enough for the emptiness he felt at not seeing his parents, José determines to make the perilous migration journey himself (268).

José arrives to the reader as impetuous and immature, given his acting out and rebelling when his parents leave and his reliance on them for economic support when he has gotten his girlfriend back in Ecuador pregnant. The irresolution of his adolescent state is magnified by his disappearance without a trace in the Sonora Desert, and the family cannot grieve for him because “they will always maintain hope that he is alive” (275).

José’s example is important in De León’s work because his disappearance without leaving any bodily trace causes the family to suffer “ambiguous loss,” a state that creates “confused perceptions about who is in or out of a particular family” (274). As traumatic as the recovery of Maricela’s remains was for her family, the lack of a body makes it hard for José’s family to gain closure, and they find themselves engaging in confused acts, such as looking for him in his old Cuencan haunts. José’s example also shows the far-reaching consequences of the Prevention Through Deterrence affect not only the individual concerned, but also their entire family and community.