Understanding The Material And Spatial Strategies Of Border Crossers Through Water Bottles And Beverage Containers

Summary

Because of the clandestine and complex nature of undocumented migration in southern Arizona, many aspects of this social process have proven difficult to systematically analyze using ethnography alone. Using a combination of ethnographic and archaeological data collected between 2009 and 2014, this paper uses statistical analysis to further understand the relationships between artifacts associated with clandestine migration and the material and spatial strategies migrants employ to cross southern Arizona’s desert. Drawing on Singer and Massey’s theorizations regarding undocumented migration as a social process, this analysis considers how categorical and nominal data concerning water bottles, beverage containers, distance from border, and site types provide insights into the choices and the routinized patterns of movement, consumption and deposition that migrants make throughout this process. These insights are crucial in understanding the complex endeavor that is border crossing and in building a more nuanced narrative about this experience and landscape. 

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Crossing Borders and Erasing Boundaries: An Overview of the First Five Years of the Undocumented Migration Project   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2015

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Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 193