BOOK REVIEW: The Land Of Open Graves by Jason De León

Hi everyone. Welcome back to Bibliophilia Book Reviews. Today I’m reviewing The Land of Open Graves by Jason De León.

In January, I read Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling by Jason De León. Winner of the National Book Award for Nonfiction 2024, this book is an anthropological study of human smuggling. Human smuggling, the author says, is not the same as human trafficking. Human trafficking happens against your will; you’re a victim of a crime that someone else is committing. Human smuggling, on the other hand, occurs when you pay (and are willing to pay) someone, including cartels and gangs that control the territory you are passing through, to take you to the border between the US and Mexico and help you cross it. Both of these actions are illegal, but one is against your will while the other is not.

Migration is a hot topic in current US-Latin American relations. Soldiers and Kings, however, doesn’t talk much about the migrants themselves. Instead, it focuses on the people helping those migrants get to the border and cross it: the coyotes, human smugglers, or guides, as they call themselves. The Land of Open Graves, on the other hand, does. It is an unforgiving and scathing critique of United States immigration policy, specifically the “Prevention through Deterrence” program implemented nationwide by Border Patrol in 1994. This strategy relies on rugged and desolate terrain to impede the flow of people from the south. “My argument is quite simple,” the author says, “The terrible things that this mass of migrating people experience en route are neither random nor senseless, but rather part of a strategic federal plan that has rarely been publicly illuminated and exposed for what it is: a killing machine that simultaneously uses and hides behind the viciousness of the Sonoran Desert. The Border Patrol disguises the impact of its current enforcement policy by mobilizing a combination of sterilized discourse, redirected blame, and “natural” environmental processes that erase evidence of what happens in the most remote part of Southern Arizona. The goal is to render invisible the innumerable consequences this sociopolitical phenomenon has for the lives and bodies of undocumented people.”

This book is hard to read, not because of its technical language and jargon but because of its topic. It doesn’t shy away from relating and showing through pictures the realities of death and violence in the desert.  And the author states it very clearly, “This book is about the violence and death that border crossers face on a daily basis as they attempt to enter the United States without authorization by walking across the vast Sonoran Desert of  Arizona.” And to show just how thorough the desert is in erasing this evidence, De León introduces us in Chapter 1 to the first migrant we’ll meet in this book: Name: Unknown. Age: Unknown. Country of Origin: Unknown. Cause of Death: Undetermined (partial skeletal remains). “This is the spot where I found the person,” Bob says. Bob, a member of the humanitarian group The Tucson Samaritans and longtime friend of the author, is the person who showed De León and his photographer Michael Wells where he found the scattered bones of a dead immigrant in the desert. “The sheriff department came out and took away what we could find, but it was getting dark and we didn’t have a lot of time to go over the entire area. It was mostly arm and leg bones and some pieces of clothing. I want to see if we can find the head. That would make it easier to identify the body. I’m sure there are still bones out here.” These were the bones of the second person that Bob had found in under a month. “He (Bob) called the police,” De León relates, “who sent two detectives out to remove what bones they could find. Bob says they spent five minutes poking around before they called it quits. It was too damn hot and the cops were unprepared and unmotivated to do a large-scale survey. Besides, searching for the bones of dead ‘illegals’ has never been a top priority for any law enforcement agency out here.”

The book continues with the stories of four other migrants: Memo and Lucho, who try to cross the desert several times; Maricela, whose body was found on July 2^nd, 2012, by the author and a  group of his students while conducting fieldwork at the time, and José Tacuri, a 15-year-old boy who disappeared on his way to New York in 2012-2013. Three technical terms stand out throughout the entire book: necropolitics, necroviolence, and ambiguous loss. Necropolitics is the killing in the name of sovereignty. That is, the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die. Border Patrol and US immigration policy do this, the author says, when “a fifteen-year-old kid walking down a Nogales, Mexico, street is shot in the back eight times by Border Patrol standing on the US side because they thought he was throwing rocks at them” or  when “the desert is used as a weapon; a tool of boundary enforcement and a strategic slayer of border crossers.” Necroviolence is violence performed and produced through the specific treatment of corpses that is perceived to be offensive, sacrilegious, or inhumane by the perpetuator, the victim or both. One of the most famous examples of necroviolence is found in The Iliad, when Achilles drags Hector’s lifeless body around Troy. Dead bodies, however, can also be used to send a message to the living, and this is what modern Mexican cartels have been doing for years with the corpses of their rivals. But the complete destruction of the corpse is the most complex and durable form of necroviolence, and this too is seen in the wars between Mexican cartels and their factions. The most famous and yet unresolved case in Mexico of this is that of the 43 students in Ayotzinapa, Guerrero, who vanished without a trace in 2014.

All the migrants talked about in this book—Unknown, Memo and Lucho, Maricela, and José Tacuri—are each an example of necropolitics, necroviolence, and ambiguous loss, respectively.

This book is the “culmination of six years of ethnographic, archeological, and forensic research on the social process of undocumented migration between Latin America and the United States that Jason De León conducted between 2009 and 2015.” Originally published in 2015, this book is nonetheless still relevant, ten years later, because undocumented immigration is one of the main points of contention between Mexico and the United States today.  

I highly recommend this book.