Deaths, Visibility, and Responsibility: The Politics of Mourning at the US-Mexico Border

Abstract

Between 200 and 500 people have died every year along the United States-Mexico border since the late-1990s. The void of responsibility for migrant deaths is exemplified by the lack of care for and visibility of these bodies during the processes of recovery, identification, and burial. Many of the bodies, mostly those unidentified, are buried in cemeteries, potter’s fields, or even private ranches near the United States-Mexico border, often far removed from the public eye and with limited possibilities for identification by their relatives. Activists and migrant rights organizations try to fill the voids and pressure for state accountability by politicizing the remains of the dead migrants, and by challenging the boundaries of grievability. Interventions like these can be understood as a disturbance of a consensus, a politics of dissensus in Jacques Rancière’s sense.