Arizona Sonora Research Articles

Differences in Longevity and Temperature-Driven Extrinsic Incubation Period Correlate with Varying Dengue Risk in the Arizona-Sonora Desert Region.

Dengue transmission is determined by a complex set of interactions between the environment, Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, dengue viruses, and humans. Emergence in new geographic areas can be unpredictable, with some regions having established mosquito populations for decades without locally acquired transmission. Key factors such as mosquito longevity, temperature-driven extrinsic incubation period (EIP), and vector-human contact can strongly influence the potential for disease transmission. To assess how these factors interact at the edge of the geographical range of dengue virus transmission, we conducted mosquito sampling in multiple urban areas located throughout the Arizona-Sonora desert region during the summer rainy seasons from 2013 to 2015. Mosquito population age structure, reflecting mosquito survivorship, was measured using a combination of parity analysis and relative gene expression of an age-related gene, SCP-1. Bloodmeal analysis was conducted on field collected blood-fed mosquitoes. Site-specific temperature was used to estimate the EIP, and this predicted EIP combined with mosquito age were combined to estimate the abundance of "potential" vectors (i.e., mosquitoes old enough to survive the EIP). Comparisons were made across cities by month and year. The dengue endemic cities Hermosillo and Ciudad Obregon, both in the state of Sonora, Mexico, had higher abundance of potential vectors than non-endemic Nogales, Sonora, Mexico. Interestingly, Tucson, Arizona consistently had a higher estimated abundance of potential vectors than dengue endemic regions of Sonora, Mexico. There were no observed city-level differences in species composition of blood meals. Combined, these data offer insights into the critical factors required for dengue transmission at the ecological edge of the mosquito's range. However, further research is needed to integrate an understanding of how social and additional environmental factors constrain and enhance dengue transmission in emerging regions.

Walking the Migrant Trail: Community Resistance to a Weaponized Desert

Since 1994, migrant fatalities on the Arizona Sonora Border have grown significantly as a result of prevention through deterrence policies ostensibly intended to prevent unauthorized migration by making it dangerous and even deadly to migrate. Building on a growing body of scholarship documenting migrant vulnerability, this article examines the political dimensions and possibilities of the Migrant Trail, a seventy-five-mile collective walk from Sásabe, Sonora, to Tucson, Arizona, that seeks to witness and protest the deadly conditions created by border policy. Drawing on intimate ethnography, I conceptualize the Migrant Trail as a space of encuentro (encounter) and by extension, a pedagogical space, that reveals the deadly consequences of United States border enforcement and the ways in which contemporary policies weaponize the desert to control migration. Initially organized in 2004, the annual walk is an autonomous political intervention that moves beyond mainstream liberal institutions and electoral politics to provoke a series of critical realizations and insights and a new way of doing politics. Through this embodied experience, walkers become frontline observers and political actors. By publicly remembering those who have died crossing, they aim to interrupt state policies that actively disappear people in transit by disappearing their stories with them.

Global Citizenship Education Through Collaborative Online International Learning in the Borderlands: A Case of the Arizona–Sonora Megaregion

Scholars have argued that 21st century educators have the responsibility to incorporate global citizenship activities into academic curricula to meet the demands of an increasingly diverse world. Approaches to global citizenship education that have rendered positive results include service-learning, critical thinking activities, second language acquisition, and international exchanges. The current study explores a Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) project carried out between university students enrolled in universities located in the Arizona-Sonora Megaregión. The study found that before students participated in COIL they demonstrated a limited understanding of their neighboring country. At the conclusion of the COIL project students demonstrated global citizenship skills such as the ability to analyze international relationships, critically consume media, and make identify points of global interconnectedness.

The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border by Francisco Cantú

Reviewed by: The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border by Francisco Cantú English Brooks Francisco Cantú, The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border. New York: Riverhead Books, 2018. 250 pp. Cloth, $26; ebook, $12.99. By now it's unlikely that WAL readers haven't already come across a copy or review of The Line Becomes a River, or of an interview with Francisco Cantú, the book's young author. Since its release the book—part memoir, part investigation—has been featured by NPR, Salon, The Guardian, The Economist, the New York Times, and dozens of other major newspapers and magazines across the United States, Canada, Europe, and Australia. Although Cantú has published previously in Ploughshares, Harper's, Guernica, Zócalo, and Orion, clearly his debut book is directed toward a wider general readership. While primarily a chronicle of and reflection on Cantú's three years working as a US Border Patrol officer on the Arizona–Sonora border, The Line Becomes a River weaves in additional autobiography, family and regional history, and other wide-ranging multidisciplinary research on the ways in which the US's increasingly hardening southern border cuts across and through the lives of individuals and families, communities and landscapes. Beginning with Cantú's academic training, the book proceeds to recount his work as a field agent, then as an analyst in a Tucson intel center, mining databases to study traffickers' "smuggling techniques and crossing patterns" (93), concluding with his return to civilian life. From the start Cantú asserts that his intention in signing on with the Border Patrol is to gain a more direct, firsthand understanding of the borderlands. Indeed, his move to embed occupationally is not unlike earlier writers such as Richard Henry Dana Jr. enlisting as a sailor to experience and better represent life and work at sea, or John Muir herding sheep in order to appreciate the Sierra more intimately, with the various messy and often serious contradictions and ambiguities that attend such approaches. But the book's central driving tension is broached early on and revisited throughout, primarily in conversations between Cantú and his mother, herself a retired national park ranger, worried about more than just her son's physical safety. Appealing to their common concerns, [End Page 511] he asks about her own decision to join the Parks Service, "because you felt you could understand yourself in wild places?" He continues, "I know there's something there I can't look away from. Maybe it's the desert, maybe it's the closeness of life and death, maybe it's the tension between the two cultures we carry inside us. Whatever it is, I'll never understand it unless I'm close to it" (23). She responds unequivocally, reminding him that in joining a "paramilitary police force" he is "stepping into a system, an institution with little regard for people" (24–25). Early on Cantú briefly historicizes the border's current militarization, drawing from nineteenth-century survey reports to illustrate how "the line" was first produced. Beginning with political calculations, paper treaties, and territory purchases, the border becomes a line surveyed across the surface of the land and along the course of the Rio Grande/Río Bravo, where it "would again become fluid 'following the deepest channel' of the river" (42). He goes on to show how this reified boundary first took shape as seven stone monuments, then forty-seven (many of which were already being displaced or removed by the elements and local interests by the mid-1850s), and was eventually replaced by 215 iron obelisks, placed every two or three miles (49). Such passages, along with Cantú's own stories, demonstrate how arbitrary and untenable the project of maintaining and reinforcing such a boundary becomes, even from its inception. Beyond the narrative and the historical, Cantú's concerns here are also consciously representational. He frequently pauses his own account to consider how dominant narratives about the border have long tended toward fetishizing and commodifying violence (131–36), objectifying and dehumanizing migrants, and naturalizing their risks and their deaths (109–10, 187–88). Several episodes also depict some of the ways US border policy has effectively...

Serologic assessment for exposure to spotted fever group rickettsiae in dogs in the Arizona-Sonora border region.

Rocky Mountain spotted fever (RMSF) is a severe tick-borne rickettsial illness. In the south-western United States and Mexico, RMSF displays unique epidemiologic and ecologic characteristics, including Rhipicephalus sanguineus sensu lato (brown dog tick) as the primary vector. Expansion and spread of the disease from hyperendemic regions of Arizona or Mexico to new areas is a key public health concern. Dogs are thought to play an important role in the emergence and circulation of R.rickettsii in these regions and are often one of earliest indicators of RMSF presence. A canine serosurvey was conducted in 2015 among owned and stray dogs at rabies clinic and animal shelters in three southern Arizona counties where RMSF had not previously been identified. Of the 217 dogs sampled, 11 (5.1%) tested positive for spotted fever group rickettsia (SFGR) IgG antibodies, with seropositivity ranging from 2.9% to 12.2% across the three counties. Large dogs were significantly more likely than small dogs to have positive titres reactive with R. rickettsii; no additional statistically significant relationships were observed between seropositivity of canine age, sex, neuter or ownership status. In addition, 17 (7.8%) dogs had ticks attached at the time of sampling, and stray dogs were significantly more likely to have ticks present than owned dogs (p<0.001). All 57 ticks collected were identified as Rh. sanguineus s.l., and four (7%) had DNA evidence of genera-wide Rickettsia species. The results of this project demonstrated canine seroprevalence levels lower than those previously reported from dogs in highly endemic areas, indicating a low risk of SFGR transmission to humans in the southern Arizona border region at this time. Continued surveillance is critical to identify SFGR emergence in new geographic regions and to inform prevention efforts for humans and dogs in those areas.

Object Afterlives and the Burden of History: Between “Trash” and “Heritage” in the Steps of Migrants

ABSTRACTWith modern ruins, there may be diverging perspectives about whether the sites or objects are unsightly waste or artifacts. Among the local communities who routinely come into contact with such ruins, this viewpoint is often actively negotiated, and with it, so is history itself. Scholars of contemporary archaeology discuss the value of tracing these negotiations to understand the wider political and cultural process of historical creation, or negation. The situation becomes more complex in the wake of tragedy or disaster. Here, I explore the relationship of stakeholders on the Arizona–Sonora international border to the material culture of undocumented migrants, the objects left behind along the clandestine wilderness routes of migrant travelers abandoned en masse to ruin, as if in the fallout of disaster. But this disaster is human made, the product of US border policy. I consider these objects as a form of modern ruins that occupy a politically laden dialectical space between trash and heritage, a negotiation with ramifications for border policy. [contemporary archaeology, ruins, trash, heritage, US‐Mexico border]

Arizona Sonora Binational Cases: five years of surveillance

Objective: To describe 5 years of binational infectious disease surveillance using the binational variable in the medical electronic surveillance system in ArizonaIntroduction: Infectious diseases can spread across borders. (1) The Arizona Department of Health Services (ADHS) collects information on binational infectious disease cases and shares it with Mexico. Infectious disease investigation in Arizona is enhanced by using an electronic surveillance platform known as the Medical Electronic Disease Surveillance Intelligence System (MEDSIS), and in 2010 a specific variable for binational cases with Mexico was added to the platform. ADHS also maintains a binational case definition in the state reportable communicable morbidities manual. Arizona partners with the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)’s Division of Global Migration and Quarantine (DGMQ), US Mexico Unit (USMU), in a monthly binational case reporting project, and shares information with the Ministry of Health of the State of Sonora, Mexico, (SON MOH) to reinforce ongoing communication, to establish baseline disease patterns, and to help detect binational outbreaks. In 2007, the Ministry of Health of the State of Sonora began to use the MEDSIS system for real-time secure case notification, and secure file sharing, using the Arizona’s Health Services Portal and secure e-mail accounts for confidential communication between both states.Methods: From 2011 to 2015, the ADHS Binational Border Infectious Disease Surveillance (BIDS) program maintained a database to collect information on binational cases with Mexico, and coordinated regularly with SON MOH to investigate and respond to binational cases and outbreaks. In addition, a SAS program was created to search for possible binational cases not designated as binational using variables such as an address in Mexico and Mexican citizenship. The ADHS BIDS program investigated all suspected binational cases with Mexico and classified them as binational according to the case definition established by the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists (CSTE). The ADHS BIDS program also shared binational cases from Mexico with CDC DGMQ USMU through an Epi-X Forum and with SON MOH through MEDSIS or secure e-mail.Results: Between 2011 and 2015, the ADHS BIDS program investigated 2,158 possible binational cases with Mexico. From those, 70.44% (n=1520) were classified as binational with Mexico according with the CSTE case definition. The majority of cases were classified as binational because of travel to Mexico (n =1089, 71.6%), with 59% traveling to Sonora (n =641). The majority of cases during those 5 years were enteric diseases (n=1086, 71.4%), followed by vector borne diseases (n =131, 8.6%). Most of the binational cases reported had symptom onset between June and August, following the seasonality of both southbound travel and enteric diseases. Regular communication with Sonora facilitated detection of an average of three binational outbreaks per year. All confirmed binational cases were reported to CDC DGMQ USMU and SON MOH.Conclusions: Continuous sharing of infectious disease surveillance information between both states is essential in understanding the magnitude and types of reportable diseases in the Arizona/Sonora border region. Proper use of the binational MEDSIS variable enables a quicker identification of binational status, allowing for the prompt investigation of possible binational cases and detection of binational outbreaks. Binational outbreaks led to collaborative Arizona/Sonora investigations on several occasions, strengthening our relationship, coordination, collaborations, and understanding of the surveillance system used by SON MOH. Real-time exchange of information using the same secure surveillance system enables better situational awareness, more timely and accurate binational communication, and binational collaborations.

Thermal Sensations—Burning the Flesh of the World

Heat is an inescapable cosmological force. This thought experiment radiates around thinking thermal sensations as elemental intensities, “beings” in themselves, always moving through bodies, objects, and things, perpetually affecting and producing effects. Using infrared thermography and embracing a critical-aesthetics approach, we ignite thermal sensations, moving through the infernal city of Phoenix and the Arizona–Sonora borderlands. Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Gilles Deleuze are primary interlocutors in a sci-phi experiment that unfolds across two thermal imaginaries as movements in thought: (1) stranger things, and (2) desert of the real. This is our necessary passage from mysterious enchantments and curiosities felt in the thermal flesh of the world, stranger things, to the violence of thermal sensations in the desert of the real—human remains, migrant bodies, and the marginalized bearing traces of injury and injustice in the inferno where we live every day. Burning the flesh of the world helps render visible (sensate) the catastrophe of the present. There can be no resistance, no counteractualizations, and no sci-phi imaginaries of peoples and worlds to come, in the absence of thermal sensations touching, affecting, and moving all bodies of this earth.

Survival of the Endangered Pima Pineapple Cactus: Does Clearing Before Prescribed Fire Alter Survival Postfire?

Federal land managers and ranchers often use prescribed fire as a tool to reduce invading woody plants within desert grasslands of the arid southwestern United States. Managers must evaluate the threat of the burn toward the health and survival of plants of concern including how preemptive clearing before prescribed fire might benefit these species. One example is the endangered Pima pineapple cactus (Coryphantha scheeri var. robustispina), a small hemispheric cactus of desert scrublands and grasslands of south-central Arizona and northern Sonora, Mexico. In 2014, we examined survival of Pima pineapple cactus documented in 2009 or 2010 within grasslands of Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge in Arizona. Of the 72 sites observed, 35 had no burn after documentation and 37 experienced prescribed fire. Refuge staff removed vegetation between 0.3 and 3.0 m from the cactus preburn. We found that Pima pineapple cacti in areas subjected to prescribed fire and with preemptive clearing had the same survival statistically as cacti from sites that were not burned.

Arizona Sonora Borders (ARSOBO) Hearing Health Program: A Cross Border Project for Inclusion

Limited access to hearing health care, including hearing aids, is a universal and growing concern. This is particularly true in low- and middle-income countries, such as Mexico. Improving hearing health care equity within a large underserved infant to geriatric population in Mexico requires a foundation of trust and a culturally sensitive vision shared by all stakeholders. This article describes a cross-border hearing health care program that was integrated into an existing humanitarian project for individuals with disabilities. The program, called the Arizona Sonora Borders Projects for Inclusion (ARSOBO), based in Nogales, Sonora, Mexico, is building a “culture of health” in a border town divided by a fence. By crossing geographic, demographic, and social barriers, volunteers from Tucson, Arizona and Nogales, Sonora work to improve the quality of life for hearing impaired individuals, young and old.

Arizona Sonora Border Projects for Inclusion (ARSOBO), a US-Mexico NGO collaboration, develops a sustainable social business to train, employ and assist individuals with disabilities

Arizona Sonora Border Projects for Inclusion (ARSOBO), a US-Mexico NGO collaboration, develops a sustainable social business to train, employ and assist individuals with disabilities

Anthropogenic Disturbance Affects Movement and Increases Concealment in Western Diamondback Rattlesnakes (Crotalus atrox)

Abstract The effects of human disturbance on movements and concealment behavior of Western Diamondback Rattlesnakes (Crotalus atrox) were studied at the Arizona–Sonora Desert Museum near Tucson, Arizona. We predicted that C. atrox would move more frequently and greater distances, and show higher degrees of concealment in disturbed areas when compared to undisturbed areas. Twenty-five rattlesnakes were equipped with radio-transmitters between July 2005 and September 2011. During the active season, but excluding the mating season, C. atrox were less likely to move while in highly disturbed areas than when they were in undisturbed areas. During the mating season, however, C. atrox were significantly more likely to move while in highly disturbed areas than when they were in undisturbed areas. During the inactive season, disturbance had no significant effect on the probability of movement. In all seasons, C. atrox were more likely to be concealed in highly disturbed areas.

Reconnaissance in Sonora: Charles D. Poston’s 1854 Exploration of Mexico and the Gadsden Purchase. By C. Gilbert Storms.

Reconnaissance in Sonora: Charles D. Poston’s 1854 Exploration of Mexico and the Gadsden Purchase . By C. Gilbert Storms. (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2015. xi + 193 pp. Illustrations, maps, appendix, notes, bibliography, index. $40.00.) The movement of American adventurers and explorers, intent on knowledge and gain, characterized a good part of the early history of North America. During the first half of the nineteenth century, this activity focused on the trans-Mississippi West, including the Southwest, where filibusters journeyed into Spanish, then Mexican, Texas and, after the American victory over Mexico in 1848, northern Mexico. Charles Poston was an American filibuster who sought to take advantage of the anticipated U.S. purchase or annexation of disputed territory in what is today southern Arizona and northern Sonora. … lawsonr{at}bacone.edu

A Checklist and New Species ofEleodesEschscholtz (Coleoptera: Tenebrionidae) Pertaining to the SubgenusPromusLeconte, with a Key to United States Species

Abstract The tenebrionid genus Eleodes Eschscholtz, 1829 was monographed by Blaisdell in 1909. Blaisdell's monograph did not cover most of the continental Mexican species, and most of the Eleodes subgenera have not been revised since the time of that publication. The subgenus Promus LeConte, 1862 is herein reviewed. Eleodes compositus Casey, 1891, revised status, is removed from synonymy with Eleodes hispilabris (Say, 1824) and placed in the subgenus Promus. Moreover, Eleodes hepburni Champion, 1892 is moved from Promus to the subgenus Steneleodes Blaisdell, 1909. Eleodes subnitens sinuata Blaisdell, 1909 is placed as a junior synonym of Eleodes subnitens LeConte, 1851, new synonymy. Eleodes madrensis Johnston, new species, is described from Arizona and northern Sonora, Mexico. A checklist is given for all species currently assigned to Promus, and a key is presented for the eight species known to occur in the United States.

Petra Santa Cruz Stevens and the sexual and racial modalities of property relations in the nineteenth-century Arizona–Sonora borderlands

The 1890s were a period of tremendous social and political upheaval. The intimate nature of boom-bust economies and the end of the Indian wars influenced US–Mexico borderlands social life, forming the basis of this article. A 23 March 1893 murder-suicide attempt by ex-Congressman Hiram Stevens against his wife Petra Santa Cruz in the Arizona territory sets the stage for how larger socioeconomic shifts in racialized capitalist production influenced historical memory. In particular, analyzing Petra Santa Cruz Stevens’ life history in the context of capitalism provides a window for a reassessment of borderlands history as it is currently practiced, the ways in which material objects account for the affective and social labor of producing legible subjects, the ways in which sexual and racial modalities informed property relations of capital, and finally, a feminist critique of social history and national formation by shifting our attention to how borderlands negotiations of violence and history were, and continue to be, central to US history. I argue that the murder-suicide reordered systems of meaning, serving as a microeconomic index of racial capital and nation-state formation.

Iterative driver‐response dynamics of human‐environment interactions in the Arizona‐Sonora borderlands

In complex social‐ecological systems, human and physical processes mutually condition one another through co‐adaptation at multiple scales from the local to the global. For this paper we modified a driver‐response conceptual model of social‐ecological interactions by considering the degree to which each binary set of processes (human or physical) is simultaneously a driver and a response to global change. Processes that we understood to be mutually conditioned offered greater potential compared to solely social or ecological communities to adapt to demographic and economic change, on the one hand, and to climate, water resources, and ecosystems dynamics, on the other. By considering case material from the United States–Mexico border region, we characterized social‐ecological interactions along a continuum from those acting exclusively as drivers to others reacting to change primarily as responses. We considered water resources to integrate multiple global change processes including climate change and variability, ecosystem resilience, and human water demands for a variety of purposes. Thus, we examined in detail two watersheds in the Arizona–Sonora borderlands representing mutually conditioned social‐ecological systems. First, the Río Magdalena in Sonora represented an illustrative case of smallholder agriculture and rural livelihoods engaged in social‐ecological interaction that exhibited both driver and response elements centered on reflexive, low‐impact adaptive strategies. Second, in Ambos Nogales relying on the Santa Cruz River and its associated aquifers, urban growth, the equity of water access for human purposes, and environmental quality represented especially pressing challenges. Here, human impacts on ecosystems were the predominant drivers although there was growing concern for the medium‐ and longer‐term implications of climate change. Adaption planning in Ambos Nogales was centered on infrastructure‐based solutions including an inter‐basin water transfer connection with the Río Magdalena. Wastewater flows to riparian corridors posed a particular challenge for human‐environment interactions. Cross‐border collaboration represents an important opportunity for adaptation based on the mutually conditioned interactions presented here. We summarized the analysis of both cases by raising conceptual questions for further enquiry and for adaptation and planning that are generic for the borderlands and beyond.

Lieutenant Faison’s Account of the Geronimo Campaign

Introduction The Sky Islands region of southeastern Arizona and northeastern Sonora consists of 40 wooded mountain ranges scattered in a sea of desert scrub and arid grassland. To the west is the Sonoran Desert. To the east is the Chihuahuan Desert. To the north are the Arizona–New Mexico Mountains, and to the south is the Sierra Madre Occidental Range where elevations rise almost 10,000 feet from canyon floor to forested ridge. This “roughest portion of the continent,” in the words of General George Crook, was the setting of the Apache Wars—an American Indian–US Army conflict (1861–1886) unparalleled in its ferocity, physical demands, and unorthodox tactics. For a young lieutenant raised on North Carolina’s coastal plain and schooled in traditional warfare, Arizona in the 1880s was no ordinary place to embark on a military career. From this formative experience came this memoir by Lieutenant Samson L. Faison, which chronicles his eleven months of service in the Southwest during the Geronimo Campaign of 1885–1886. He wrote it in 1898 while serving at West Point as senior instructor of infantry tactics. It was never published.

Transboundary adaptive management to reduce climate-change vulnerability in the western U.S.–Mexico border region

Abstract Climate change, variability, shifting demands for freshwater, and allocation of scarce water among multiple human and ecosystem needs comprise a set of interlinked adaptation challenges. This paper addresses how organizations and stakeholders can build adaptive capacity and foster adaptive management in a complex but environmentally significant international transboundary region in order to better confront the impacts of global change. To strengthen adaptive capacity, integrated assessments address coupled natural and human drivers of, and responses to hydroclimatic variability, economic globalization, expanding urbanization, and related global-change pressures. However, such assessments have often presumed a degree of uniformity of institutional arrangements. Two allied aims of the paper are to (1) examine the complexity and heterogeneity of institutions in transboundary regions and (2) illustrate how scientists, managers, and other regional stakeholders use collaboration and integrated assessment to confront climate and water challenges. This paper's insights are based on a research initiative undertaken over more than a decade. Over this period, a binational, interdisciplinary team has conducted integrated-assessment research and established policy dialogue in the Arizona–Sonora section of the U.S.–Mexico border region. The initiative's suite of projects addresses multiple aspects of water security and have involved key U.S. and Mexican academic institutions that act as boundary organizations, bringing climate scientists together with public and private-sector stakeholders to strengthen adaptive-water-management capacity across national borders. The analysis demonstrates that transboundary adaptive management is significantly strengthened by: binationality and transborder collaboration; involvement of multiple institutions in both countries; understanding of climate information use by water-resources managers; development of easily accessible, easily understandable tools and information products; expansion of binational communities of practice and effectively addressing challenges to their functioning; and, above all, continuity of effort.

The Influence of Place Meanings on Conservation and Human Rights in the Arizona Sonora Borderlands

Conservation and human rights are currently threatened by direct and indirect effects of border enforcement practices on the US–Mexico border. Increased border enforcement in urban areas has pushed migrants into remote conservation areas where thousands have died. Migration, smuggling, border enforcement, and aid provisioning contribute to ecological degradation of protected areas on the border. In this study we explore the discursively created physical, social, and cultural dimensions of place among land management personnel and humanitarian aid volunteers who were attempting to address the socio-ecological crises wrought by border enforcement in the Altar Valley region of southern Arizona. Land managers described physical place as an eroding ecosystem whereas humanitarians described physical place as a fragmenting system. Land managers saw crime as the defining social process while humanitarians pointed to social injustice. Finally, land managers viewed uncertainty as the primary cultural meaning, but humanitarians described empathy as the primary cultural meaning. We describe how these differences explain counterproductive conflict between humanitarian and land management groups, how viable local conservation solutions can emerge from an understanding of place, and how challenges arise as these solutions are scaled up to regional and national level policy. We suggest that the concept of culturescape integrated with place allows for an analysis of discourse that is especially local, and can be used to understand and improve upon natural resource conflicts that stem from attachments to place.

How conservation and humanitarian groups respond to production of border security on the Arizona–Sonora border

US policies for securing the border with Mexico are driven by multiple political concerns, including the desire to control illegal trade and immigration in a way that conveys “border security” to a national audience. Highly visible border enforcement near urban centres and via the border fence has pushed migrants into far less visible and remote wilderness areas, driving both ecological degradation and a humanitarian crisis. This study employed ethnographic methods to explore how natural resource agency employees and humanitarian volunteers in Altar Valley Arizona perceived and responded to the production of border security. We found that both groups recognised human rights and environmental concerns, although they assigned different priorities and addressed them through conflicting means. As in other cases where consumers are separated from production practices, there was a general consensus among informants that it was important to raise the consciousness of the national audience about the negative externalities of producing border security.