Like the Humane Borders database, Vistas de la Frontera relies on interaction with maps. The videos in Vistas de la Frontera all capture a specific place where a migrant body was recovered. As such, the specificity of the place is important in making visible where someone died and how the natural world is being used as boundary enforcement. Interactive maps provide both context and specificity. They simultaneously show how pervasive the problem is and how each specific location is important to the larger narrative of migrant deaths in the borderlands. By honoring each spot, Vistas de la Frontera highlights the role of the natural environment within border policy. Mediated through the screen, the spots cannot be felt physically, but they can be experienced through the inclusion of sound and movement. Each video shows the location after the death has occurred and how the surrounding area has persisted after that recovery. The wind still blows. Cars still pass. But what the users experience is layered, it is a representation of the contemporary conditions of the place and how each place is significant.
Part of what Vistas de la Frontera reveals is an invisible landscape, or “an unseen layer of usage, memory, and significance…superimposed upon the geographical surface and the two-dimensional map” (Ryden 40). This is possible by making each site into a “place” through “dramatization” or interaction and experience (Tuan 178). By interacting with each space, even via the screen, the user moves to recognize the importance of each place as significant. Each video moves the desert space from a blank space to an area marked by individual sites of memorial. Importantly, Customs and Border Patrol benefits from understandings of the border environment as blank and devoid of association as part of border policing. This allows CBP to disguise “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 parts of southern Arizona” (De León 4).
By making visible the histories and the violence that happened in each individual location, Vistas complicates the ways in which loss is hidden within the environment. Mediated by the screen, the invisible landscape is twofold – it is superimposed on to the environment itself, and it is no longer rooted in a specific physical location. By capturing specific sites, Vistas is about place, but accessing that place is possible from distant locations and multiple times. Seeing, hearing, and interacting with these places via screens allows users to grapple with immigration issues in new ways regardless of where they are located.
Given the silence that surround migrant deaths, mourning and memorials are essential sites of resistance to the continued violence unfolding in the borderlands.