A participatory art project
Hostile Terrain 94 @CU.
Scroll ↓
Hostile Terrain 94 is a project sponsored and organized by the Undocumented Migration Project, a non-profit research-art-education-media collective, directed by anthropologist Jason De León, to raise awareness of migrant death in the Sonoran Desert. The Sonoran desert is the landscape of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands between Arizona, U.S., and Sonora, Mexico.
This project at CU Boulder is supported by the Latin American Studies Center, the Departments of Anthropology and Sociology, the CU Art Museum, and the City of Boulder Arts and Culture Community Projects grant.
Between the 1990s and the present, thousands of known individuals have died in the Sonoran desert while migrating between the United States and Mexico.
These deaths are the result of a policy known as Prevention through Deterrence, a strategy the United States government adopted in 1994 to funnel migrants into more and more remote areas instead of crossing in densely populated urban areas. As a result, migrants traveling to enter the United States now cross through the most desolate and dangerous areas of the Sonoran desert. The United States government has, for all intents and purposes, transformed landscapes into a violent border deterrence strategy.
This project is looking to honor and remember lives that have been lost as a result of this policy by filling out geolocated tags that identify the remains of individuals who have died in the Sonoran desert.
The 3,200 tags, were installed at the CU Boulder Art Museum.