What Vistas de la Frontera makes visible is a small portion of the deaths that have happened in Southern Arizona. The videos cannot account for all of the deaths nor the thousands of disappearances that may never have a resolution. The vastness of tragedy in the Sonoran Desert, and across the borderlands, is preventable. It is the deadly consequence of decisions made to remedy an immigration “problem” by deliberately placing people in danger. The refusal to account for migrant deaths is part of contemporary border policy that is increasingly moving toward more surveillance and militarized tactics.
Because all of the deaths in the desert are political, the act of publicly mourning them is more than an acknowledgment of human life, it is a demand for accountability. Seeing the places where migrants have died means that we should not forget those lost despite the escalation of immigration policy against border crossers. To know that someone died in a certain spot is to know about the systems that forced them into the desert. Just as Butler writes of the obituary, public mourning makes “a life worth noting, a life worth valuing and preserving, a life that qualifies for recognition” (Butler 34). Each life lost in the desert is a life worthy of remembrance and preservation. Making these sites visible and accessible demands an acknowledgement for the person who died as a consequence of border policy. Sitting with the discomfort and seeming dissonance of the videos invites users to consider what it means to die in the desert and the difficulty of moving through deadly landscapes. More than that, it asks users to grieve for a person they do not and cannot know. Rather than merely being a name in a database, the person memorialized in each video is part of the landscape the user is experiencing. Interacting with the place and the maps asks users to consider the intertwined nature of borders, the environment, and loss.
The structures of the state dominate the borderlands but mourning, particularly mourning in place, encourages users to question the violence of borders. Each video captures the contemporary realities of the borderlands and pushes against the reduction of migrant deaths to numbers. The videos ask us to mourn “for mourning’s sake, mourning at its most basic level, of human for human, grief without regard for classifying a life a grievable life, grief simply because it is life” (Auchter). When we mourn for those we do not know and demand acknowledgment for the violence being enacted in the name of sovereignty, we can collectively push against the practices that uphold that violence.
What has been lost in the desert can never be truly recovered, but it must be mourned. The reason we mourn is not merely a political action, it is a human one. Mourning is not merely the acknowledgement of death, but the feeling of loss that does not have to be located in the specifics of who someone was. We mourn for others because we are humans who have needlessly lost another human. Even if the deaths go unrecognized or ungrieved, there must be grief simply because there was life. Vistas de la Frontera is a small sampling of the violence unfolding in the borderlands. There are so many people who we have yet to grieve. There are so many places we have yet to see and experience. There are so many names we haven’t heard. There is still so much to mourn.