By Jesus Vazquez / @Somoselmedio
The word “hostile” is an adjective that has its etymological roots in Latin hostilederived in turn from the enemy same expression that was used to refer to the public enemy who declared his animosity against a community or State. Thus, in contemporary times, we can use this adjective to refer to any aspect that is adverse or contrary to a certain situation, issue or person. Hostile Terrain 94 seeks to demonstrate that, for more than 3,200 migrants, the Arizona desert and border and immigration policies, mainly from the United States, have been adverse in the search for an already anachronistic American dream In a country where 11.4% of the population lives in extreme poverty, there are 13.7 million people at risk of losing their homes and more than half a million are destitute. This exhibition becomes an interactive and performative experience that takes us into the phenomenon of migration and provokes reflection when thinking about the thin bureaucratic line that separates and fosters inequalities due to the lack of a document.
But how can one understand the magnitude of three thousand two hundred dead people? Putting such a number in perspective is tricky work; we could think of the total capacity of the Metropolitan Theater in the heart of CDMX. Thinking about it this way can result in a “small” amount when compared to other cultural venues that reach a capacity of more than 10,000 people. We could also think of it as a number close to the average number of total deaths in Mexico per day in 2020, the year in which the pandemic caused by SARS CoV2 began.
At the end of the day, the numbers, always precise, but cold and succinct, distance us from a reality to which this exhibition directed by the Mexican-Filipino-American anthropologist Jason De León overwhelmingly returns us, as it literally provides Name those 3,200 victims of the hostile terrain that the Arizona desert has become. Therefore, the exhibition coordinated by the Undocumented Migration Project and the CDMX University of Communication gives us a different way of thinking about the magnitude of said number and being aware of its impact through an equal number of forensic labels filled out. by hand with the data of each of those people, and displayed on a large map of the US-Mexico border.
It should be noted that, with the granting of a name, the potentiality of more than three thousand two hundred lives that ceased to be such in the midst of the unbearable heat of 46 ° C, as well as the experience of the same number of families who lost a member in the immensity of the almost three hundred thousand kilometers of hostile terrain that unfolds north of the Rio Grande. By reviewing the cards, we can find data that informs us of the age, gender, cause of death, the conditions of the remains and the place where each of these people perished.
Thus, we have the possibility of imagining and thinking about the more than three thousand two hundred stories; from a two-year-old girl, to an older adult over 60. All starring victims, not only of the hostile terrain that the Arizona desert could represent, but also of that hostile terrain in which their home became and from which they had to flee, either alone because of the urgency or organized in a caravan to resist the violence that could await them along the way, either by their own means or by paying exorbitant amounts to a smuggler or a coyote who, in the end, also It is violated by that public enemy that little by little is harassing communities and regions.
This is where a first reflection fits in, which, personally, stems from my experience living this performance exhibition: hostility does not only come from the extreme conditions that the nature of a region presents for the human being who crosses it -because that is in human nature through more than 15,00 years of constant migrations through savannahs, glaciers, jungles and entire oceans-, but the cultural, political, economic and social conditions that are generated from the power relations that they make life impossible and produce and promote adverse conditions for life.
The exhibition is educational and offers visitors a series of tools that provoke reflection on migration and the representation of foreigners through QR codes. The exercise of compiling testimonies from family members who perished in the desert especially caught my attention. An experience that goes one step further to humanize those once frivolous numbers. Through the hashtag #BringThemBack on YouTube, the channel of Colibri Center for Human Rights provides a series of 15 videos of family members of missing migrants.
In this way we can know, through Diana’s story, who her brother is, Alejandro Marcelino Castro, a shy, friendly and cheerful man from the State of Guerrero who disappeared more than 14 years ago at the age of 33; or the search for César Sánchez López for two years by his daughter Fabiola, who narrates that she crossed the border in 2016 to give her family a better life; or the testimony of how Félix had contact with his brother Pablo Jacino Gómez for the last time on Sunday, July 29, 2018 and, two weeks later – on August 10 – he was found in the desert; or, finally, of Nancy Lucía Ganoza Córdova, who crossed the border in 2009 to be with her family living in the United States and was found on September 2, 2017.