Object Lessons

Mediating Borders: Tropes and Spectacles

Visual-media campaigns are crucial racializing mechanisms that work to affirm public support for militarization. At the U.S.–Mexico border, independent and state-sponsored photographic campaigns have historically enforced and weaponized a “line in the sand” bordering logic that documents and glorifies acts of militarization while disparaging racialized supposed enemy threats. My focus on the visual trope of migrants’ objects is a contribution to better understanding the visuality, or the political relations of seeing and being seen, that structures public engagement with migration and the demands for immigration policy changes connected to border militarization.

Sarah Bassnett demonstrates how journalistic representations of Central American migrants often come from the same subscription news agencies, yielding a familiar set of visual tropes.12 She highlights the popularity of images depicting crowds en route to the southwestern U.S. border on foot or by train and their assembly formation, such as lines or encampments, once they reach the border. Regarding the visual treatment of migrant death, U.S. media norms favor “obscured, rather than graphically depicted . . . corpses of migrants.” Bassnett asserts that “by maintaining the status quo, the media avoids connecting either US or Mexican immigration policy with the violence perpetrated against migrants” and continues to shift the blame exclusively to drug cartels.13 In the present study, both paramilitary and humanitarian groups attempt to figure a systemic analysis through the visual trope of migrants’ belongings. The popularization of this trope has to do with the performative, often spectacular activation surrounding its circulation.

Media events made spectacular are strategic vectors for militarizing the U.S.–Mexico border. While not the first of its kind, one of the most publicized paramilitarized border media events in the years following 9/11 was the April 2005 kickoff of the Minuteman Project, when roughly 200 out of an expected 1,300 participants descended upon Tombstone, Arizona.14 In her study of the organization, Roxanne Lynn Doty combs through white supremacist websites directing users toward the Minuteman Project as early as 2002.15 It is little surprise, then, that cofounder Jim Gilchrist commented: “If I didn’t have the Internet, the Minuteman Project probably wouldn’t have happened.”16 This statement does not necessarily warrant a technologically determinist reading—digital recruitment was easier because of long-standing white supremacist networks already in place and well mobilized to circulate such an event. The nascent organization already had digital publics eagerly awaiting more concrete engagement.17 Volunteers, including many armed veterans, retired police officers, and ex–Border Patrol agents, monitored areas across Cochise County, where one-fifth of the 1.1 million apprehended people on the move were caught in 2005.18 The Minuteman stakeout had no statistical effect on the number of Border Patrol apprehensions in the area as compared to 2004, yet its spectacular mediation catapulted concerns about illegalized migration, the border wall, and armed civilian patrols onto the national stage.19 Many reporters with camera crews covered the event, even rivaling the number of participants, which informs Gilchrist’s analysis of the event: “We have already accomplished our goal a hundredfold in getting the media out here and getting the message out.”20 This view of the event’s relative success based on media coverage is symptomatic of a longer history of the linkage between mediation, militarization, and intimidation of people seeking entry into the United States.

The Minuteman Project echoes aspects of Operation Wetback, a 1954 INS mass-deportation strategy that included the production of a visual culture of intimidation through highly mediated events. Timothy J. Dunn illustrates the premeditated tactic of visual-media campaigns to catalyze apprehensions and deportations. The INS “carefully orchestrated a media and publicity campaign to intimidate undocumented Mexican immigrants into fleeing the US on their own, as the INS did not have sufficient personnel to conduct a comprehensive border sweep.”21 In both quantity and composition, the photographs that emerged from publicized deportation raids emphasized the figures of armed immigration officers and caged immigrants. As a media event, the photo documentation of raids and deportations were not just illustrative of actions unfolding in real time. They were planned in a way that counted on highly charged photographic opportunities and mass dissemination in order to project the illusion of ubiquity in INS presence and inevitability of deportation. S. Deborah Kang notes the intentional exaggeration in projecting the size and force of deportations.22 More than sixty thousand Mexican immigrants voluntarily returned to Mexico in the first month of the mediated spectacle of Operation Wetback.23 Such a popular photographic mediation aimed to aid and abet immigration policing helped enshrine Operation Wetback as the largest mass-deportation event in the history of the INS.

Leo R. Chavez demonstrates how the Minuteman Project must be viewed through the lens of what he calls the “Latino Threat Narrative.” This narrative is a prominent mode of perceiving Latinx people through disparaging popular mediations relying on unfounded stereotypes or a “social imaginary in which Latinos are ‘virtual characters’” such as “illegal aliens” and “highly fertile invaders” who are “unassimilable separatists bent on a reconquest of the US Southwest.”24 Through popular mediation, the cultural entrenchment of the Latino Threat results in “virtual lives” that are “generalized, iconic, and typified and are turned into statistical means. They are aggregate figures melded into cost-benefit analyses. They are no longer flesh-and-blood people; they exist as images.”25 Racialized suspicion and the virtual figure of the Latinx border crosser are both integral to and produced by militarized—or here, paramilitarized—border mediations.

The Mountain Minutemen and the Production of Borderveillance

Following the 2005 media event, infighting about extreme tactics and financial corruption within the Minuteman Project led to smaller groups splintering off. One such group, the Mountain Minutemen, continued to monitor the border in Cochise County and to work on the media production of an illegalized immigration crisis. In this section, I bring together visual artifacts from YouTube, the photo gallery posted on the Mountain Minuteman website, and a feature documentary on their organization to better understand the visual tactics worked through and preferred by amateur media producers. This approach of reading across differently structured media platforms offers insights about the kinds of responses evoked by their visual tactics, as well as the uptake, through reposting, of particularly poignant images and videos. This approach was also necessitated in part because the Mountain Minuteman website domain was no longer active as of July 2022. My ongoing research contains limited screenshots taken for reference purposes while the site was still accessible. In addition to these screenshots, I also used the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine to analyze their cultural production, however the photo gallery was not indexed in the Internet Archive. Whether the site becomes active again or not, I contend that it is still important to analyze the Mountain Minutemen’s web presence because of their influence on the visual trope of migrants’ objects.

One of the earliest videos was posted in October 2006, the same month that Google acquired the year-and-a-half-old site YouTube. Titled “Welcome to My Nightmare” and set to the eponymous Alice Cooper song, the thumbnail image depicts a cluster of backpacks and clothing on the ground, giving viewers a preview of the videographer’s immigration nightmare.26 The first image of the video, the only nonphotographic image, sets a paranoid tone by referencing the Mexican Reconquista myth contributing to Chavez’s idea of the Latino Threat. Bold black text reads “WHITES GET OUT! THIS IS ARE LAND!” over a silhouette of California labeled “Aztlan” and a machine gun. Although the bottom cites La Raza in a way that suggests authorship, this image was created by Aryan Nations.27 The next image is a high-angle shot of two freshly drained water bottles, evidenced by the discoloration of the dry ground and the photographer’s shoe in the frame. A quick, five-frame montage using special effect transitions previews what the bulk of the video shows: images of migrants’ objects. On-screen text states that the photos featured in the five-and-a-half-minute music video were taken in summer 2005 in Cochise County, and the rest of the video cycles through a slower pace and minimal dissolve transitions through documentation of migrants’ belongings found in the desert landscape. About a third of the photos depict people on the photographer’s patrolling “clean up crew,” collecting migrants’ objects and hanging them on barbed wire fencing or poles for makeshift effigies. Some pose with found backpacks or clothing in the style of trophy hunters with their prey and others show them emptying out water bottles. The visual hunting metaphor reverberates in the last thirty seconds as the videographer repeatedly fires his gun at the ground. In this scene, the music has stopped, and the video plays the diegetic sound of the bullets, first in fast succession, and then in distorted slow motion. In tracking the movements, footprints, and material artifacts of endurance left behind by migrants, paramilitary groups produced digital media that seemed to affirm the need for their presence and call for backup from their digital networks.

The kinds of material prioritized on the Mountain Minutemen website confirm the Minutemen’s idealized recruitment strategies. Their online photo gallery consisted of over five hundred uncaptioned images, about a third of which bear time and date stamps from 2012 to 2013. The majority of the image gallery depicted migrants’ found belongings and clumps of weathered fabric and plastics rendered as trash. Other motifs included desert flora and fauna, action shots of training drills, and machine-gun-wielding portraiture. These subjects of representation offer insights into the kinds of scenes and evidence the vigilantes accorded value. One implicit yet consistent subject of documentation is environmental destruction caused by migrants. The images of trash evidenced by the Mountain Minutemen strategically draw upon the display of a disparaged landscape to make an immediately accessible visual argument. These images register less of a concern regarding global warming than documentation of a disrespected supposed homeland. The amount of environmental impact created by people on the move along the U.S.–Mexico border lands and waters versus, say, pollution from militarized occupation is incomparable. Therefore, the visual strategies of Far-Right extremists rely on scale by accumulation and composition. The large number of comparable images in the archive produce the effect of a massive data set, while a variation in framing intimates narrative. For example, close-ups of migrants’ recognizable belongings help contextualize more ambiguous documentation of flattened, corroded plastic or synthetic cloth strewn about desert scrub. The juxtaposition of a single personal item complements images that seem to overflow with refuse in a way that assigns blame onto migrants for troves of litter. Instead of seizing drugs or weapons, which have been key to the Border Patrol’s public-facing mediation of migrant criminality, the Mountain Minutemen and other border vigilante groups rely on the landscape to convey moral outrage over the use and abuse of the border lands. It is an attempt to systematize, historicize, and make empirical their anti-immigrant rationale. In short, it is a turn to ecofascism to authorize and embolden their activity. I return to this idea toward the end of this article.

Corey Wascinski’s 2010 film The Minutemen Movie draws on four years of shooting with the Mountain Minutemen.28 Throughout the film, the vigilantes stage and manipulate migrants’ belongings and tracks in the sand to stand for unequivocal evidence. The Mountain Minutemen bring the film crew out to their patrol sections and strategically narrate their findings with much broader assessments of migrants’ supposed innate criminality, inferior moral compass, and general deviancy. According to their xenophobic interpretive framework, the evidence not only demonstrates migrants’ passage and a problem with the border wall’s failings but also stokes ethnic replacement and hostile takeover conspiracies.

In the film, a rancher drives the filmmaker out to an isolated area off a dirt road, narrating his suspicion of “fresh” migrants. As the ranger exits the truck, the camera moves behind the rancher and frames him moving toward the brush in a cowboy shot. A cut to the ground moves quickly over the sand and settles on his shadow cast over the tracks. “These are today’s. Okay?” The camera begins to follow him into the thicket of shrubs, then cuts to close-ups of objects strewn about the area. The film lingers over two crumpled cloths, a few flattened water bottles, and a small trash bag as the vigilante names objects not visible to the viewer, even as the camera is pointed in the area he gestures to: “Hats, backpacks, jackets, blankets, water bottles.” He quickly advances deeper into the brush and announces, “I want you to see this,” as he returns to the clearing. Holding up a black jacket with the number “13” on the back he says, “MS13 is a gang from, I believe they’re Guatemalans, might be El Salvador. But they’re the worst in the country right now as far as violence.” The camera zooms in on the jacket as soon as he mentions nationality and holds a tight shot on the number. He shifts his stance, and the camera zooms back out into a wide shot capturing him holding the jacket against the mountain range. Having made the anti-immigrant case using the jacket as an object lesson, the vigilante rancher collects his prop, tucking it under his arm. He turns back toward the truck, addressing the camera as he walks: “I’m living near the border. We have to constantly be on the lookout and aware of things around us because those things could include people.” In this final slippage between “things” and “people,” he cements the necessity of the migrants’ objects in his choreographed roadside diatribe. Without their evidentiary status, his detection demonstration bears no significance.

Throughout the sequence, he overprescribes each mark in the landscape with prior, nondiegetic information that shapes his zealous demonstration. The camera follows his lead and his gesturing without hesitation; it only lingers upon supposed evidence per his suggestion. The quick pacing, blocking out of evidence in framing, and angling his shadow over the sand prevent the viewer from forming a more careful consideration of the vigilante rancher’s claims. When more discarded items are verbally described than physically shown, the film quickly moves on, following his all-too-serendipitous find of the jacket. It is only in his longer postulation about this object that the camera slows down the pacing and takes time to zoom in and out. Instead of a critical distance, however, this handling helps substantiate his claims by compositionally turning to portraiture. Despite their constant narrative and even material stylization of the migrants’ traces in the borderlands, the vigilantes present the recording of migrants’ traces as empirical evidence. For the Minutemen, there is an overlap between the photographic documentation of migrants’ tracks or belongings and the representational fidelity of vigilantes’ ground truth.

This documentary, celebrated and advertised online by the Mountain Minutemen, becomes complicit in the same aesthetic methods as its subjects. The phenomenon of independent media corroborating the interests of border militarization is not new. In Fencing in Democracy, Miguel Díaz-Barriga and Margaret E. Dorsey chronicle photojournalist accounts of the borderlands in National Geographic and Time from 2007 to 2008, noting the ways in which photojournalists contribute to a mass-mediated argument for increased border militarization by reproducing the perspective of U.S. state interests and agents in their photographs and captions.29 In their view, many photojournalist accounts dismiss the opportunity for social and topographic contextualization of the often-spectacularized border wall in these magazines, reducing the coverage instead to “rust, dust, and death.”30 Racialization and militarization work hand in hand to signify an alternative reality in which “only lawbreakers and law enforcement move in the borderlands, and those who uphold the law are the only ones who rightly belong.”31 This representational strategy is not isolated; they draw connections between the oversimplified narrative of capturing illegalized migrants in television news programming and border security reality shows such as Homeland Security USA and Border Wars.

For Camilla Fojas, the photo essays critiqued by Díaz-Barriga and Dorsey and shows like Border Wars can be understood through a larger border security imaginary expressed and popularized through “borderveillant media.” In borderveillant media, representational and narrative approaches exemplify the remediation of the western genre given how they play out classical chase and showdown scenarios within a moralizing framework. Drone perspectives, forensics, and depictions of surveillance networks reenergize the familiar genre in which the “drama of the state in practice, expos[es] its logic and operational structure and mak[es] it appealing for its humane dimensions.”32 Borderveillant media are collaborations between state and corporate interests, narrowing the window for compassionate or empathetic representations of migrants. Indeed, Fojas catalogs how borderveillant media exclusively depict migrants through the illegality of their crossing or supposed involvement with trafficking.33 This limited perspective has consequences for how viewers incorporate borderveillant media into their everyday lives. Fojas charts a consistent pedagogical throughline in borderveillant spectatorship and describes how they “acculturate public audiences to visual codes that ground the mood of suspicion and anxiety in practical scenarios that justify the violence of immigration policy, often masquerading as humanitarianism, and to garner public support.”34 In the next section, I explore the risks of humanitarian media potentially naturalizing visual codes of border militarization through the visual trope of migrants’ objects.

Humanitarian Visuality: Border Angels and Migrant Aid Organizations

A new type of border humanitarian effort emerged in response to the needless death toll of PTD. Migrant aid groups such as Border Angels, founded in 1986, began to focus on water distribution in remote desert areas. Nonprofits such as Humane Borders (2000), Tucson Samaritans (2002), and, among many others, No More Deaths/No Más Muertes (2004) organized specifically around migrant triage and food- and water-supply distribution. In addition to their fieldwork providing lifesaving resources, these migrant aid organizations seek to raise awareness about migrant suffering through media campaigns that prominently feature the visual trope of migrants’ objects.

The founder of Border Angels, Enrique Morones, cites a pivotal meeting with Ethel Kennedy in the organization’s history, noting how she impressed upon him the importance of media coverage to humanitarian work.35 It is worth noting that this chance encounter was at a Los Angeles event in honor of Rodney King, whose parsed video documentation and subsequent media coverage problematically fueled indignation with and against him.36 Following media-savvy humanitarian models such as Doctors Without Borders, the majority of humanitarian border-aid nongovernmental organizations produce media that captivate viewers by offering them an immersive, privileged point of view from which to see the problem through a personal, empathetic perspective.37 Importantly, the mediation must also suggest an immediate, direct-action stop or ameliorate suffering.

As one of the oldest humanitarian aid groups devoted to the welfare of migrants crossing into the United States, Border Angels shifted from site-specific relief aid in North County San Diego to services along and across the entire U.S.–Mexico border. In 2020 alone, volunteers with their water-drop program distributed 1,200 gallons of water.38 While other nonprofits also conduct the same kind of volunteer supply distribution in remote border zones, Border Angels’ history and early pivot toward this service in the wake of PTD make their promotional media important inflection points of humanitarian border-aid services at large.

On January 1, 2021, Border Angels posted a video entitled “Love Has No Borders” on its Facebook page.39 The four-minute video promoting water drops begins with a voiceover by the program’s codirector James Cordero saying, “No one wants to flee their home,” over a panning shot of hillside desert scrub. The film cuts to a close-up overhead shot of faded, crumpled clothing in the sand as the narrator continues: “People want to be where they’re from. People have pride where they’re from.” The camera lingers on a contorted, sun-bleached shoe with no laces and the voiceover states, “Due to these circumstances people have to leave, people have to migrate. And that’s where we come in.” The narrator begins to describe the history of water drops and the knowledge about the desert heat and terrain that facilitates Border Angels’ lifesaving tactics. An aerial drone perspective of volunteers walking through a canyon begins another sequence demonstrating the physical demands and material resources donated by Border Angel volunteers. The drone shot implies a surveillant gaze, but this is quickly modified in the next shot by depicting the same volunteers at a different angle. Shot from the waist, the volunteers’ brightly colored hiking gear contrasts against the landscape colors and formations. Building off the close-ups of migrants’ belongings at the beginning of the video, these shots attempt to amplify the difficulty of movement and survival across this terrain.

A brief montage of the volunteers’ prep for a water drop includes shots of their walkie-talkies, backpacks with supply and collection crates, and hiking boots. After verbally establishing the rationale and methods for locating remote, hidden outposts where people on the move have paused on their journeys, the volunteers examine the belongings left behind. Empty water bottles, canned food, socks, string, bags, pants, jackets, and blankets are laid out, examined, photographed, and in some cases collected by volunteers before new water and food supplies are deposited. The camera starts to spend more time on a motif shown in shorter duration earlier in the film: handwritten messages on water bottles. Volunteers describe the importance of conveying written support to people on the move as longer shots of volunteers inscribing messages are interspersed with shots of found pants, jackets, shoes, and backpacks they lay out.

Throughout the short promotional video, the visual trope of migrants’ belongings poses a palatable and pathos-rich substitution for migrants themselves. The imaginative figuration of their suffering through the roughly contoured landscape is replaced by the video’s favor of the well-equipped, physically agile volunteers moving with relative ease. Visually speaking, the difference between the volunteers’ expedition and the imagined surreptitious traversing of migrants across the arid, complicated landscape begins to blur as the volunteers explain route planning and draw on the found objects to speak for migrant experiences. The risk of visibility for people on the move is obscured in order to render visible the water-drop volunteers’ work. Compositionally speaking, it is impossible not to recall similar scenes in nativist digital media.

Contextualized within its own institutional framework, the video accomplishes a moving introduction to the dangerous conditions of illegalized border crossing in the desert. By framing water drops as a “moral responsibility” and providing topographic context to viewers unfamiliar with desert borderlands, the video offers practical, social-justice-oriented information on migration through the desert. However, the video taps into more troubling and complicated implications regarding the kinds of images and narrative frameworks required to make the precarity of clandestine migration visible for a broad audience. For instance, how is the drone perspective used in this video distinguished from the aerial surveillance of Border Patrol? Is this video another type of borderveillant media? Throughout the video, the visual trope of migrants’ objects affirms the work of the volunteers. Since the narration frames migration ahistorically, is this affirmation at the cost of obscuring histories of militarization, particularly PTD?

It will soon be thirty years since the implementation of PTD; the tactic neither stands alone in a long history of border militarization nor fully explains migrants’ death and suffering through remote areas of the borderlands. PTD does, however, account for a paradigm-shifting mode of controlling the border and disappearing migrants. In visual culture, PTD changed the mise-en-scène of the stories and debates around clandestine border crossing. Across films, television, news outlets, and social media platforms, anti-immigrant cultural producers have relied on the Latino Threat Narrative to attribute this change in location—from ports of entry to rural desert areas—to an essentialized and racialized sense of migrant criminality. In doing so, supposedly deviant migrants and smugglers take the blame for the alleged problems of immigration, rather than the concert of broken policies, militarization tactics, and the state’s rampant disregard for migrant life despite its role in dispossession, as well as political and economic instability in other countries. In this way, PTD has become naturalized in popular culture. Out of this context, it is especially important for humanitarian organizations using the visual trope of migrants’ objects to identify PTD as a tactic employed to change the image of border control and as a strategy imposed to cut short the life chances of people on the move.

In the wake of humanitarian efforts and mediation following PTD, the difficult question is whether the trope of migrants’ belongings can exceed the purposes of sustaining the status quo or success of humanitarian institutions. Can the visual trope of migrants’ objects indict the naturalization of PTD? In this Facebook video, the depiction of migrants’ objects supports the Border Angels’ educational and recruitment needs, providing evidence for the necessity of water drops. To the benefit of more palatable viewing, migrants’ objects connote enough duress to make the argument that the U.S.–Mexico border perpetrates human rights abuses without actually showing the gruesome and ordinary violence people on the move are subjected to on an everyday basis. The personalization of objects, whether traditionally associated with age, gender, religion, or country of origin, for example, provides both an ideal projection of empathy and anonymity. Viewers can, in other words, make an empathic, identificatory relationship based on individual connections and take in the scale of structural violence through the diversity of the object’s marked demographics.

I want to be clear that my attention to the ramifications of these murky ethical undertones does not fault Border Angels or similar organizations drawing upon the trope of migrants’ found objects. It would be unfair to expect any video to both encapsulate the horrors of PTD and the lifesaving work their water drops do in ways that inspire direct action from viewers. A visual panacea doesn’t exist. Furthermore, border-aid groups are already working within established generic conventions of humanitarian media and inherit a visual protocol for calibrated affective responses. What I want to draw attention to here is how the use of the visual trope of migrants’ objects further absents migrants from narrative and political agency within the immigration industrial complex. Following Pooja Rangan’s study of humanitarian documentary, what “new vistas of relationality” might be possible beyond the unequal, prescriptive belonging made possible through humanitarian visuality?40

Given that humanitarian media historically rely on visual discourses of othering bound up in white savior complexes, not picturing migrants might seem like a wholesale alternative to bring attention to migrant suffering in a progressive manner. People on the move are, after all, increasingly subject to complex state-surveillance networks and have long built networks of survival based on creatively evading institutional gazes in order to access work and resources and to maintain family and community bonds without risking deportation. Undocumented activists have also flipped the script on the clandestine status quo of life under such dire consequences of being seen and surveyed, carefully constructing forms of visibility mobilized toward specific political ends.41 Humanitarian media employing the visual trope of migrants’ objects, however, do not fully operate within these community-based protocols of when and how to be seen by particular institutions or populations. Rather, their publicly didactic and institutionally affirming representational methods reinforce foundational humanitarian persuasion to be recognized as human and therefore in need of rights and protection.

In my focus on the ecological interests espoused by both parties, I also aim to show how the unintended overlaps between humanitarian ways of seeing and anti-immigrant media tactics fortify the racialization of migrants ultimately in the interest of militarized solutions. This co-construction benefiting the hardening of borders might be seen as a function of what Catherine Besteman defines as militarized global apartheid: “an emergent new world order in which race and mobility feature as primary variables for which heightened security and militarization are the answer.”42 Besteman characterizes the convenient, reinforcing mechanisms of imperial projects among states, extrastate alliances, and corporations through “borrow[ed] security language,” “techniques,” and “technologies” that produce militarized global apartheid.43 Seen in this light, the visual trope of migrants’ belongings functions as a technique, technology, and security language. Per Besteman’s multiscalar analysis, the implications of what this visual trope can do exceed the border context. The capacities of this visual trope can easily be adapted and applied to other minoritized populations: supposed visual evidence of urban decay attributed to historically redlined communities, for example, can affect local policy around policing and city resources.44

The Border Angels video relies upon the idea that its volunteers perform crisis triage and that their concentration on such immediate, climate-specific conditions is the most strategic form of aid. Miriam Ticktin explains that “while humanitarianism is often understood as driven by emotions—compassion, empathy, benevolence, pity—it in fact relies on a very narrow emotional constellation, and this in turn constrains our responses.”45 The historical mode of humanitarianism “provides little room to feel and recognize the value of particular lives (versus life in general), or to mourn particular deaths (versus suffering in general), and little impetus to animate political change.”46 The visual trope of migrants’ belongings offers indexical traces of their passage at the cost of further submitting them to the biopolitical project of PTD. I do not suggest that images of migrants enduring harms associated with the journey are necessary, but instead I note how migrants’ representational value is in their absence. The time spent visually lingering over migrants’ belongings and the thick verbal descriptions of their trek by volunteers belies migrants’ participation in the video. As a result, mediations drawing upon this trope further silence and submit migrants to a code of acceptable appearance suitable to the historical humanitarian demands of innocence, emergency, and compassion.

As a humanitarian organization, Border Angels inherits an institutional visual grammar that prioritizes a broad educational and moral denominator in imagined viewership, as well as fundraising. Humanitarian mediation has been professionalized into strategic forms of address across different fields. Perhaps best known for its attempt to photographically render humanity in an essentialized manner, Edward Steichen’s 1955 The Family of Man exhibition and book were produced in collaboration with the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Roland Barthes famously critiques the exhibition’s ahistorical premise and perpetuation of a “magically produced” “unity” at the heart of humanism’s selective values.47 Against Barthes’s better judgment, The Family of Man would strongly influence photojournalism and photo agencies such as Magnum, which produced and circulated images of human suffering according to universalized themes rather than specific political unrest or forms of dispossession. By the 1980s, the introduction of photography prizes for humanitarian images established lauded images of suffering framed appropriate to humanitarianism’s own terms.48

The visual standardization of appropriate forms of suffering—how shocking, gruesome, or specific—informed mass-mediated humanitarian events. Existing since the 1950s, but popularized in the 1980s, the telethon as a humanitarian media event relied upon careful calculations of images that would spark philanthropic action.49 These flashpoints are important factors of the industry specialization and professional development of humanitarian media and mediated humanitarianism. Lucia Hulsether calls capitalist humanitarianism “a pervasive and understudied expression of neoliberal institutionality,” which remains “socially and psychologically tethered to capitalism as an existential plausibility structure.”50 While the Border Angels and other border humanitarian groups are not driven by profit, Hulsether’s analysis is generative in thinking about their history and institutionalized media tactics. She examines how entrepreneurial missionaries, historically aligned with militarized interventions, use history “as a springboard to remediate its consequences,” with “history signifying either a repository of bad relations to overcome or subterranean possibilities to retrieve.”51 Certainly, PTD has created a bad relation between the state and people on the move to overcome; however, Border Angels and other border humanitarian groups are increasingly retrieving the environment as a possible victim of immigration history.

“Trash Is Trash”

A smaller, yet no less significant, part of the Border Angels video emphasizes trash collection by the volunteers during their supply drops. This angle into illegalized migration widens their consciousness-raising to include ecological consequences. Elsewhere in Border Angels’ media, their organizational statistics tout that volunteers collected half a ton of trash in 2020.52 The video addresses trash pickup as an additional benefit of environmentally minded volunteers who have learned to value the landscape through which migrants pass. This shifted focus, however, transforms the migrants’ discarded objects from life-sustaining materials to pollution. This ecological focus has garnered further attention from influential environmental organizations such as the Sierra Club.

In the June 2021 Sierra Club Desert Report, James Cordero published a short article entitled “Another Presence on the Mexican Border,” which promoted the Border Angels’ trash pickup.53 The piece praises the dogged persistence of Border Angels volunteers despite drastic weather conditions and explains how the water-drop experiences gave way to “develop[ing] a relationship, an unsigned agreement. We take care of the land. We value the land. We have become one with the land.” Rather than an additional green perk to providing migrants sustenance, the volunteer work becomes a lauded form of environmental cleanup first and foremost. By the end of 2021, the article claims that Border Angels volunteers will have collected over 2,500 pounds of trash.54 Cordero concludes:

The trash that we haul out or recycle knows no discrimination. Trash is trash. While our primary goal is on removing the used/unused supplies and containers that we have left out, we also remove what we call “artifacts,” or items that once belonged to migrants that crossed into the United States. We find backpacks, shoes, clothing, food/drink packaging, and personal trinkets to name a few. We also clean up broken targets/ shell casings from recreational shooters, apprehension gloves, fast food cups/wrappers, other trash Border Patrol agents discard, trash that border fence construction crews and their private security leaves behind, mylar balloons that once escaped from someone’s grasp. . . . We know what is natural and not natural to the environment. . . . We are just people who love the earth and want to protect and care for it.55

The naming of Border Patrol agents, construction workers, and security workers as culpable pollutants is a step forward in illustrating the infrastructural consequences of the expansion of the border wall and securitized immigrant detection in the desert as a historical result of PTD. However, this point is dulled by the inclusion of commonplace and recreational detritus. The article continues to distance the crux of Border Angels’ work from humanitarian aid for migrants in favor of a separate, rather than intersectional, environmental analysis. Migrants get lumped in with the policing actors of the immigration industrial complex as careless pollutants of land beloved by the volunteers. To the detriment of an immigrant justice consciousness-raising project, the victimhood of the environment supersedes the human rights abuses engendered by immigration policies. This slippage creates an opportunity for anti-immigrant groups to exploit. Indeed, I will discuss shortly how Far-Right extremist groups draw upon the notion of migrants desecrating the borderlands to forward an ecofascist agenda.

The interpretive breadth of photographed migrant belongings can produce radically different readings about the need for and effects of the U.S.–Mexico border. Rangan’s suggestion that “mediation [is] an ethically fraught but dialectically generative process at the heart of the humanitarian encounter” helpfully frames this project’s desire to assess the visual complicity of humanitarian border nonprofits while not discounting or dismissing their lifesaving practices.56 The rise of the migrants’ belongings visual trope across diverse ideological media environments threatens a naturalization of PTD and an erasure of plural migrant subjectivities. Even when accompanied by historical and political determinants regarding border policies, the overreliance of the forensically photographed object once belonging to a migrant risks not only standing in for a particular migrant but also performing an idealized version of the migrant’s story and voice.

The photographic index of a migrant’s trace is more readily suitable for visual appropriation than either the particularities of a singular migrant or the abstract rendering of immigration politics. The indictment that forced migration through borderland deserts was a calculated form of genocidal violence loses ground to a sanitized imaginative exercise. As migrant aid organizations garnered more press using these images in seemingly self-evidentiary ways, so too did their xenophobic adversaries. Looking to theories of photography, the potential to produce an affective, pro-immigrant rights resonance from this trope might rest in an acknowledgment of the limits of photography. Rather than replacing migrants themselves, the ambiguity of the trope might best signal the failure of documentation, however well-intentioned, to produce results on its own. Forwarding David Green and Joanna Lowry’s assessment of conceptual photography, I posit that the “very emptiness” of the trope of migrants’ objects “must preoccupy us, that very sense that something, indeed, is missing.”57 Humanitarian and other pro-migrant rights projects might use this trope as a way to convey “a sense of indeterminacy around the framing of the image, a sense that this frame is not so much a delimitation of a semiotic space, but more an arbitrary event, a performance, a gesture that points to the scene and in doing so points to our inability to read it.”58 The assumptions about readability in the Border Angels’ use of the trope supplement their outreach, but Far-Right extremists present the trope’s readability as empirical evidence that necessitates their vigilantism.

Ecofascist Futures

The defense of a perceived “native” American homeland rests upon notions of racial purity. Ecofascism is a white nationalist mode of perception. Scholars of ecology trace the first use of the term to nineteenth-century Germany and chart its popularization into the twentieth century, when it became inextricably linked with nationalism, racism, and xenophobia.59 The connection between the well-being of certain groups of people and the lands that they violently claim supports overpopulation discourse and the limitation of migrant mobility.60 In governances of climate security and cultures of Far-Right extremism, the historical perception of border landscapes—rendered as violated or disturbed by migrants—amplifies ecofascist rationales.

The rhetorical maneuvering within the Mountain Minutemen’s video and photo archives is emblematic of a larger constituency of Far-Right extremist organizations, but it is also the source of recent high-stakes trafficking of misinformation. Individual images featured on their dated online photo archive have been circulated without proper provenance and in this decontextualization, they have taken on the presentation of reportage. In 2019, images originally posted by a Minutemen splinter group in 2007 went viral, accompanied by the accusation that liberal media sources were willfully ignoring the environmental impact of illegalized immigration in the borderlands.61 The narrative force and evidentiary status willed into these images of polluted border zones have resuscitated the call for a physical border wall.

In April 2021, Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich sued the Biden administration over the federal mandates to halt border wall construction and end stipulations that asylum seekers remain in Mexico while awaiting court hearings, citing that the changes skipped mandatory environmental reviews for infrastructural projects. The press releases and news coverage of the Arizona lawsuit showed the visual trope of migrants’ objects and littered border landscapes. Brnovich claimed that “each border crosser leaves behind 6 to 8 pounds of trash in the desert” and lambasted the ways in which “the Biden administration’s immigration policies are causing a humanitarian, public safety, and environmental crisis at our border.”62 Following ecofascist logic, migrants are simultaneously conveyed as pollutants, excess population, and polluters of the borderlands. In February 2022, U.S. District Court Judge Dominic W. Lanza threw out the case, citing Brnovich’s failure to factually support the link between border wall construction and the National Environmental Policy Act. Regardless of the lawsuit’s dismissal, however, the suit formalizes the political thrust for a resuscitated demand for a physical, continuous border wall based on ecofascist pretenses. Even more, this political grandstanding formalizes a method of misreading signs of survival and artifacts of endurance along the border.

Today, the intersection of ecofascism and humanitarianism is once again attracting Far-Right extremists to produce media events at the border using the visual trope of migrants’ objects. Newer digital features such as live broadcasting have increased the urgency and, in an age of supposed fake news, indexical value of picturing migrants’ objects, as in the case of Virginia congressional hopeful Kimberly Lowe, who Facebook livestreamed from the Texas–Tamaulipas border in January 2022.63 Fueled by QAnon conspiracy theories about child trafficking at the National Butterfly Center nearby, her video incorporates the evidentiary status and persuasive appeal of migrants’ objects as litter to collapse the segmented wall mise-en-scène, raced, gendered, and sexualized moral panics, and media coverups. The visit ended in her physically attacking the Butterfly Center’s director, Marianna Treviño Wright, in an attempt to produce livestreamed evidence of the conspiracy.64 Reminiscent of post-9/11 paramilitary media spectacles, the political performance and digital distribution of documenting migrants’ belongings along supposedly insecure gaps in the border fence is once again a campaign strategy.

Toward Artifacts of Endurance

Last summer, I visited the Molina Family Latino Gallery, which previews much of what will be displayed—and how—in the forthcoming Smithsonian Museum of the American Latino. Here, I encountered a mini display from Jason De León’s Undocumented Migration Project, which features a sneaker, a backpack, and an MP3 player found during his team’s archaeological work in the Sonoran Desert. The backpack, shoes, and music player are spotlighted in a glass case under the wall text “Dangerous Journeys,” which balances the speculative with the known: “They belonged to unknown, undocumented migrants, some of whom may have died. They would have faced dangers including robbery, sexual assault, and death in the desert.” Providing a counter to the ways of using migrants’ objects discussed in this piece, De León’s work thoughtfully considers artifacts alongside action; his work with the Undocumented Migration Project and community partners directly affects the families of people on the move by connecting them with answers about their disappeared loved ones. I began this essay by stating that I do not call for a full stop of representing migrants’ belongings, and I conclude with an example of their use toward more robust, albeit institutionally limited, critique of the conditions of forced migration.65 In the gallery, I experienced a memorializing function at work with these artifacts of endurance, nestled among more vibrant immigrant success stories, such as a Carolina Hererra dress and a Latinx graduation stole and cap emblazoned with flowers and butterflies. In this museal context, these objects are stylized into artifacts of endurance—material belongings of clandestine people on the move that affectively index physical, personal, and institutional duress. As object lessons on militarized practices and migrants’ determination against all odds, these artifacts of endurance critique migrants’ tolls of belonging in the United States.

Diana Flores Ruíz is assistant professor in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Washington, where her research and teaching focus on race and media in the United States. She is at work on her book project “Apprehension through Representation: Image Capture of the U.S.–Mexico Border,” which analyzes the historical role of visual border technologies in ongoing projects of anti-immigrant violence. Her writing appears in Film Quarterly, the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, and The Matter of Photography in the Americas (Stanford University Press, 2018), among other venues.