Walls and Footprints: Thinking Between Infrastructures and People on the Borderlands

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Praxis Makes Perfect: Celebrating the Academic Life and Times of Randy McGuire" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

On top of McGuire’s foundational work on archaeology of labor, class, and critical heritage, some of his most influential recent scholarship has been on archaeology of undocumented migration across the US/Mexico border. Drawing from my own work as part of the Undocumented Migration Project as well as more recent work on the archaeology of mining in the Sonoran Desert, I emphasize two parts of McGuire’s scholarship within this field. The first is an abiding interest in connecting contemporary phenomena with broader historical trends, while never losing sight of the very different stakes between the deep past and the present. The second is a productive turn towards the massive infrastructures of the present. Together, these trends have proved essential for the development of a contemporary archaeology that is valid and relevant and has proven very influential on my recent scholarship on the massive mining infrastructures of extraction and waste disposal in the Sonoran Desert. Drawing inspiration from McGuire’s recent and older work, I try to think about histories of labor and migration in landscapes filled with the massive infrastructures of the state and capital: not only border walls and roads and ball mills, but also toxic tailings.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Praxis Makes Perfect: Celebrating the Academic Life and Times of Randy McGuire

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 50316