54 pages • 1 hour read
The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail
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Symbols & Motifs
Shoes
Shoes are essential agents for determining whether people will be able to pass through the desert or not. They are a consistent motif in De León’s book, a symbol of passing and a barometer of the weathering effects of the desert on migrant bodies. Impoverished border crossers often do not have state-of-the-art hiking boots and instead make do with the most amenable footwear they are able to afford or get their hands on. The stealing of shoes is a common crime in the Albergue Juan Bosco, where desperate migrants eager to make another crossing cannot resist taking shoes that are in a better condition than their own. Indeed, in the Albergue, a marker of an untrustworthy person is someone who steals another’s shoes and therefore sets back their next attempted crossing.
Shoes often get destroyed beyond the point of usefulness. The state of José’s shoes, which are “starting to fall apart,” and have “soles […] coming unglued” is symbolic of the wearer’s own physical exhaustion and lack of willpower to carry on with the difficult journey across the desert (272; 273). As De León writes, “those who can’t keep up with the group because of blisters or worn shoes are often left behind, which can be a death sentence” (181).
As De León has shown in his own archeological research of abandoned shoes, hardier, more resourceful desert-crossers go to creative lengths to sustain their footwear. For example, in the Tumacáori mountains, De León found a pair of migrant shoes that had been “repaired with a bra strap and cord to attach the soles to the uppers,” so that the wearer could keep moving and continue their journey (181). De León applies the archeological concept of use wear, a term that refers to “modifications to objects that occur when people use them in various ways,” to make empirical evaluations of the distress that migrants endure in the desert (181). Unlike blood, vomit, and other bodily fluids that are quickly eviscerated by the desert, shoes are more enduring and are tangible evidence of the trauma experienced by migrants.
Brown Skin
The brown skin color of most Latinx migrants is a consistent motif in De León’s book; when he refers to migrants both individually and collectively, he emphasizes their skin color, which is different from that of the Anglo-American authorities that would keep them out of the United States.
At the Juan Bosco center for deportees, De León describes how as the police show up, “brown bodies are lined up and frisked” (123). “Brown” empirically describes the general color of the deportees’ skin, but because their bodies are referred to in the passive voice, they are disempowered objects while the police are the active subject. The skin color of the police is not stated and is perhaps left out because they are the ones with the authority and so have the privilege of not being defined by their color.
While De León does not make a specific statement about skin color, in several places, he implies that for many anti-immigration activists, undocumented immigrants crossing the US-Mexico border are not analogous to the impoverished Europeans who crossed the Atlantic in previous centuries. These anti-immigration activists are thereby making a distinction between the white Europeans and the brown Latinx migrants based not on their legality, but on their race. De León describes anti-immigration activists who generalize about Latinx migrants having little care for the natural environment as “racist” (191), and he displays discomfort with the white border agent’s insensitive response to Maricela’s brown corpse.
De León’s counter to the perception of Latinx migrants as a faceless brown mass is to describe the faces and personalities of the individuals he encounters on the trail. This makes them distinctive characters in the reader’s mind and thereby capable of having agency and leading their own lives. For example, there is “dark-skinned” Lucho, who “always seems to have a slight grin on his face […] as if he is in on some secret that he wishes he could tell you but can’t” (90). In the text, Lucho’s distinctive brown face is offered as a sort of preamble to his highly individual story. Thus, his skin color is part of his identity, but not his defining feature.
The Border
The border, a geopolitical line between the United States and Mexico that is at once real and symbolic, is seen differently by the Border Patrol and the Latinx migrants who cross it. For the Border Patrol, the line is a symbolic fixture that divides American land, terrain that only legal United States citizens should have access to. For Latinx border crossers, the border is a surmountable obstacle that stands between them and their dreams. De León even comes across the saying: “Para los Mexicanos no hay fronteras. (For Mexicans there are no borders)”; it is only a matter of one’s body keeping up with one’s faith as they make as many attempts as is necessary to get past Border Patrol and the desert (163).
Some American anti-immigration activists believe that the border, which in some places is a flimsy or nonexistent, is rather too symbolic, and would reinforce its physicality by building a more substantial structure. For example, Republican Herman Cain proposed a “real fence […] twenty feet high with barbed wire. Electrified with a sign on the other side that says, ‘It can kill you’” (156). While Cain is in favor of a prohibitive structure, De León argues that Prevention Through Deterrence relies on a vaguer idea of the border, whereby the Sonora Desert acts as a frontier that exhausts transgressors to death or to the point that they turn themselves in to Border Patrol.
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