Backpack Biographies: Re-scaling Undocumented Migration in the US-Mexico Borderlands

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Archaeologies of Immigration and Refugee Resettlement" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Federal agencies and news media often report undocumented migration across the US-Mexico border in gross terms of hundreds of thousands to millions of crossings and apprehensions—a scalar project that then plays into broader political discourse about national belonging. In this paper we draw on research by the Undocumented Migration Project to develop an alternative scalar project through a discussion of the backpacks carried and discarded by migrants crossing the Sonoran Desert of southern Arizona. On a microscale, the biographies of these objects, including acts of personalization, techniques for repair, and traces of suffering, offer material testaments to the ethnographic accounts of migrants themselves. On a macroscale, the contemporary archaeological contexts of these objects, including time and place of deposition, associated artifacts, and quantities measured as a minimum number of individuals (MNI), reveal how individual practices accumulate into an increasingly deadly process of migration shaped by US border policies over the last two decades. Ultimately, an archaeology of backpacks aims to critique popular narratives of the US-Mexico borderlands by mediating between these scales, and by valorizing the material traces of undocumented migration as an historical process.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Archaeologies of Immigration and Refugee Resettlement   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23220