Lacey Schauwecker, PhD, is a scholar and educator who works as a Learning and Development Specialist for the USC Shoah Foundation.
This is the source
Jason De León’s Undocumented Migration Project and Valeria Luiselli’s
Investigating methods for counter-mapping and proposing a more multi-sensory practice.
The field of digital humanities defines itself by a capacity for interrogating and
innovating the traditional humanities. More than a mere transference from material to
analog to digital, this field claims to function as a subversive force
with its own
creations and challenges differences can leverage traditional assumptions so they become visible and hence
available for rethinking
become visible
for it then to be available for rethinking.
Multiple digital humanities scholars have acknowledged the field’s difficulty in defying
such visual hegemony or, stated otherwise, interrogating and innovating vision as itself
historically dominant.
Observing that the digital humanities is today overwhelmingly visual,
Sari Altschuler
and David Weimer claim this imbalance to have inadvertently exacerbated a tendency to
privilege sight as the sense through which knowledge is accessible
According to Clancy Wilmott, digital mapping has upended the assumption that ‘the map’
is a static representational object
the map
now commonly functions less as an object and more
as a dynamic, interactive process. Such functionality is inevitably transformational, if
not exactly subversive, prompting the skeptical attention of humanities and digital
humanities scholars alike. In
how the process of digital mapping and map-making alters the way we perceive and engage with the geographies that surround us
new spatial practices and spatial imaginings.
In this article, I engage debates on critical cartography with particular attention to
how digital mapping influences humans’ understandings of landscape, as well as
themselves. Specifically, I investigate the subversive potential of digital mapping the
Sonoran Desert in the context of an ongoing U.S.-Mexico border crisis, where hegemonic
practices of seeing, knowing, and surveilling continue to shore up colonization and its
violent legacy. As U.S. border militarization implicates, and intentionally disappears,
multitudes of humans and nonhumans each year, questions of mapping preoccupy government
agencies, international corporations, on-the-ground activists, and interdisciplinary
scholars alike. In what follows, I join multiple humanities and digital humanities
scholars in thinking about the possibility of mapping the unmappable, including that
which remains invisible by design. Additionally, I ask, How might such counter-mapping
facilitate a rethinking of the U.S.-Mexico border crisis, beyond anthropocentrism?
To address these questions, I first provide historical and theoretical background on the necessity, as well as difficulty, of mapping and counter-mapping this region. Next, I analyze two well-known examples of counter-mapping, namely Jason De León’s Undocumented Migration Project and Valeria Luiselli’s
I focus on the Arizona-Sonora region of the U.S.-Mexico border: home to Apache, Hopi,
Maricopa, Mayo, Pima, Navajo, Yaqui, Hohokam, and Tohono O’odham peoples, as well as
exceptionally biodiverse mountain regions known as sky islands.Border Patrol Strategic Plan of 1994 and
Beyond,
which heightened the militarization of the border through increasingly brutal
uses of land and surveillance technology. Since its implementation, such policy has
resulted in 7,000 to 8,000 migrants dying while crossing Southern Arizona
Currently, the only map on the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s website is that of
its Border Wall System,
depicted in Figure 1.
Looking at this digital ArcGIS map with a thick, but noticeably partial, line along the
U.S.-Mexico border, viewers can click on highlighted parts of the line for more
information about ongoing wall construction and associated photos border security
need to look elsewhere for
data on drone technology, scope stations, and ArcGIS live monitoring software. Knowledge
of this largely invisible surveillance system exposes border wall-building as mere
spectacle, for DHS policy is not designed to prevent migration per se, but rather to
ensure its profitability. Instead of stopping migrants from crossing at all, for
example, Prevention Through Deterrence intentionally pushes migrants out into the remote
and dangerous desert, where they are more likely to die or, alternatively, to be
apprehended, detained, and eventually deported. On its website, however, DHS
misrepresents itself as benign, wall-building protector, and the Sonoran Desert as
brutal murderer.
Given the high stakes of mapping in this and other areas of conflict, scholars and
activists have employed varied practices of counter-mapping. Coined by sociologist Nancy
Peluso, the term counter-mapping
refers to processes in which communities appropriate
and repurpose institutional techniques of map-making in order to create alternatives to
hegemonic representations making visible
as a principal source of knowledge.
Like Hayles, Tazzioli here implies that she intends to rethink the very concepts to which she appeals, including visibility and mapping. Noting the humanities and digital humanities’ dominant reliance on visual and textual methods, multiple scholars have recently turned to sound and listening as part of a heretofore neglected epistemology. For example, Mary Caton Lingold, Darren Mueller, and Whitney Trettien, editors of
flexible modularityof digital data to both understand and reverse this history
As I will elaborate in my study of counter-mapping the U.S.-Mexico border crisis,
undoing this separation of senses can also challenge the historical division of
nation-states and species. For while much discussion of counter-mapping emphasizes the
visualization of space, and even De León claims his work to foster alternative forms of
understanding, visualizing, and producing
I read his work
as especially important for the ways in which it sets up a rethinking of the Sonoran
Desert as a space of invisible and indiscriminate violence. In
The similarities between Jason De León’s
sonoroas sonorous and highlights the double meaning of
sonorous desertas referencing both a desert full of sound and a desert devoid of sound. This title also appears to riff on El Desierto de Sonora, the Spanish translation of the Sonoran Desert, but
Prevention Through Deterrencepolicy, part of the aforementioned
As De León’s title indicates, this terrain is truly a land of open graves. Yet, the
desert’s intense heat, strong wind, and flash floods quickly decompose and disperse
migrant bodies, making finding and identifying them still difficult. De León, both an
archaeologist and anthropologist by training, started the Undocumented Migration
Project in 2009 in order to better understand the causes, as well as physical
experiences, of undocumented border crossing sideways glances
that foster new ways of thinking about border crossings and the routinized pain and
suffering that accompany them
(17). These sideways glances, a concept originally
proposed by Slavoj Žižek in
In
on a legacy of humanitarian work in Southern Arizona done by organizations such as Coalición de Derechos Humanos, No More Deaths, and Tucson Samaritans, all concerned with upholding human rights and human dignity throughout the borderlands
The deaths that migrants experience in the Sonoran Desert areanything but dignified.That is the point
naturalprocesses of dying and decaying in the desert are actually
political facts representative of the value placed on the lives and deaths of undocumented people
These claims are noteworthy for their simultaneous reliance upon and rejection of
Enlightenment-based practices of seeing, knowing, and valorizing the human. For while De
León does privilege visual and material evidence, he also stubbornly casts his glance
askew of the very subjectivity, or indeed humanity, associated with such epistemology.
This move corresponds with Elizabeth Anker’s critique of how Enlightenment-based notions
of the human body and mind still inform dominant notions of humanitarianism and human
rights activism. As she observes, these discourses predicate human dignity on corporeal
integrity; for an individual to be a human worthy of rights, they must first have a body
that is whole, autonomous, and self-enclosed
decorporealized,
for it negates core dimensions of embodied
experience, including vulnerability
and decay
When De León foregrounds migrants’ partially decayed corpses as
he likewise acknowledges and critiques hegemonic
standards of human rights subjectivity. Making visible a commonly overlooked reality,
his photos are graphic reminders of the human body’s limits: the very limits that leave
it susceptible to both violence troubling human-nonhuman binaries
structural agency
both commits and conceals violence in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands.
According to De León’s counter-mapping research with the Undocumented Migration Project,
such structural agency involves the dehumanization of humans, as well as the
humanization, or denaturalization,
of nonhumans such as the Arizona desert. Prevention
Through Deterrence, which is just one policy, for example, involves human,
technological, geographical, animal, mineral, and meteorological actants. Drawing on
Michel Callon and John Law’s theory of hybrid collectif,
which identifies agency as a
property that emerges from the interaction of various heterogeneous actants, De León
refers to this combination of human and nonhuman agents involved in the U.S.-Mexico
border crisis as the Sonoran Desert hybrid collectif.
To fully account for this
collectif, De León stresses the need to abandon dualist thinking, including that which
relies on simplistic human-nonhuman binaries. On one hand, he wants to expose how the
U.S. Department of Homeland Security can draw on the agency of animals and other
nonhumans to do its dirty work while simultaneously absolving itself of any blame
connected to migrant injuries or loss of life
In his counter-mapping work, De León often draws on data from the Arizona OpenGIS Initiative for Deceased Migrants map, which is represented here in Figure 2 and is the result of an ongoing partnership between the Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner and Humane Borders, Inc.
A counter-map in its own right, this map challenges hegemonic representations of the
U.S.-Mexico border crisis by repurposing geographic information system (GIS) software
similar to that which DHS uses in conjunction with remote sensors, lookout towers, and
agent-carried GPS units natural
As a viewer who repurposes these GIS tools and information once more, De León foregrounds not only human victims’ suffering, but also the hybrid collectif implicated in it. In
Especially in cases where migrant corpses have decomposed to the point of complete
destruction, discarded belongings function as the only clues to one’s demise out in the
remote desert. Therefore, De León and his co-authors view these scales of analysis
as
able to let the suffering of migrants ‘speak’ in different ways
: ways that expose
humans’ victimization and the desert’s weaponization simultaneously
When counter-mapping, De León is forthright about the seemingly paradoxical attempt to
use spatial data and spatial analysis to critique and undermine spatial data and spatial
analysis
For this reason, I am most interested in where and how De León also repurposes the
master’s tools beyond the point of easy recognition. Though he views his counter-maps as
able to let the suffering of migrants speak,
he claims they also contain their own
silences and elisions
critical to countering the scalar projects, including maps, that
obscure decades of migrant suffering at the hands of PTD [Prevention Through Deterrence]
policies along the US- Mexico border
speak,
as they further
expose the ways in which migrants have been intentionally disappeared, both in life and
death.
At the same time, such silences remain absolute insofar as they represent absence: the
absence of a body, testimony, identifiable human subject. Throughout the humanities and
digital humanities, multiple scholars continue to grapple with how to account for such
absence, which is endemic to archives about systemic violence and erasure. Thinking
specifically about the archive of American slavery, Lauren Klein notes how the silences
of slaves expose a true
archive that encompasses impossibility,
including the
impossibility of knowing what is observable to the status of fact,
Klein values the archive
as a tool for exposing the limits of our knowledge, limits that even digital methods
such as data visualization fail to surpass
Contrary to De León’s appeal to visual and material evidence in the form of migrant bodies and their belongings, Luiselli’s
slowly build an archive,and extend her focus on the child refugee crisis to
the southern borderlands,the book becomes about her process of trying to connect multiple ideas, images, voices, and lack thereof into a new project.
Explaining the archival nature of this novel, Luiselli distinguishes its textual,
musical, visual, and audio-visual
references as central voices in the conversation
that the book sustains with the past
thinking through makingis key to finding new ways of
interrogating archival silence
While
As aforementioned, this map functions as a counter-map insofar as it charts deaths that
have been both caused, and erased, by policies such as Prevention Through Deterrence.
Yet, Luiselli cues a reading of this map as also inevitably exclusionary and, in this
sense, complicit with invisibility. Noting how maps can make visible what is usually
unseen,
the mother-protagonist nevertheless concludes that To map is to include as
much as to exclude
An exile feels that the state of exile is a constant, special sensitivity to sound
undocumentedthus takes on multiple meanings, including unmapped, unseen, and yet still potentially audible.
Auditory studies of the U.S.-Mexico border are far less abundant than visual ones, yet
multiple artists, activists, and scholars have likewise observed this area’s sonic
dimensions to be uniquely boundless. In an analysis of how composer Guillermo Galindo
turns objects found along the U.S.-Mexico border, including the border wall itself, into
musical instruments, culture and music scholar Josh Kun observes sound to be more
permeable than sight. Noting how we can readily hear the border’s other side, even
without full vision, Kun states, What walls and fences are meant to divide, sounds can
move through and resonate across. What looks monumental to the eye sounds unmonumental
to the ear. There are no borders for vibrations
For this reason, multiple humanities and digital humanities scholars frame listening as
an acquired, not default, sense. As Jonathan Sterne explains, listening is a technique
that connotes practice, virtuosity, and the possibility of failure and accident […] It
is a learned skill
chasing ghosts and echoes
removaland another through
deportation,both the mother-protagonist and her husband necessarily take a spectral approach to sound.
According to Ana María Ochoa Gautier, the spectrality of sound
refers to that which
remains inaudible, at least to humans, as excesses of the acoustic
According to the wife, her husband claims his project to be an inventory of echoes
acoustemologist
trained in soundscaping,
the husband follows the work of R. Murray
Schafer and shares his interest in acoustic ecology as the study of sounds in
relationship to life and society
the general acoustic environment of a society
the general,or universal, as neglectful of sound’s multivalent, and highly contextual, meanings
sound studies’ de facto founder,his influential work treats sound as a stable object with predictable effects on a
generalized perceptual consciousness,rather than a multivalent field that varies with individual, social, and environmental diversity
trying to capture their [the Apaches’] past presence in the world, and making it audible, despite their current absence
Instead of presuming presence, she is inclined to chart and interrogate it. Thinking of
her husband’s inventory as a form of sound-mapping, therefore, she imagines that each
echo temporarily illuminate[s] an area of a map, a soundscape, in which Geronimo once
was
clean narrative sequence
We haven’t understood how
space and time exist now, how we really experience them
As such, her mode of listening closely corresponds with Nicole Brittingham Furlonge’s
aural literacy,
which she claims to entail listening as an artistic, civic, and
interpretive practice that emerges from a place of wonder, curiosity, and
demands an aural sensory
engagement
in which readers think with their ears
about historical constructions of
racial difference.epistemic site
for questioning historical hierarchies and identities
beautiful things falling apart
Attune to the very lack of visual and material evidence concerning migrants, the
mother-protagonist instead listens for additional unknowns, mostly in the form of other
historical instances of disappearance. Hearing spectral sounds of the Apache, missing
border crossers, and surrounding desert landscape all at once, she observes the chaos
of history repeated, over and over, reenacted, reinterpreted, the world, its fucked-up
heart palpitating underneath us [...] And in the middle of it all, tribes, families,
people, all beautiful things falling apart, debris, dust, erasure
one single catastrophein constant risk of oblivion, especially under the pressure of
what we call progress
reenactmentsand
reinterpretationsof loss: the loss, yes, of child migrants but also the indigenous populations that preceded them and likewise endangered wildlife that accompany them. Elsewhere elaborating that
perhaps my children’s voices were like those bird songs that my husband helped Steven Feld record once, which function as echoes of people who have passed away,she effectively collapses human-nonhuman binaries
perhaps.In doing so, she shows the practice of
aural literacy,or interdisciplinary listening without knowing, to function as a viable mode of counter-mapping against categorical understandings of time, space, and subject.
Thus far, I have examined a variety of visual, sonic, textual, and digital counter-maps.
While De León and Luiselli make use of the Arizona OpenGIS Initiative for Deceased
Migrants map, which plots migrant deaths against the Sonoran Desert in order to expose
the violence that policies such as Prevention Through Deterrence attempt to conceal,
neither of them replicate this map’s digital interface or related humanitarian
maneuvers. Rather than try to restore migrant victims’ visibility and voice, either in
life or death, De León and Luiselli take more reflexive approaches to witnessing.
Questioning their own use of sight and sound while consulting visual, material, and
sonic evidence, these scholars practice sideways
seeing and spectral listening, both
of which serve to witness the complexity of this U.S.-Mexico border crisis. Such
complexity, as De León and Luiselli illustrate, is largely due to the involvement of
human and nonhuman, as well as present and absent, agents. Since this border violence
also implicates settler colonialism and imperialism, as well as the hegemony of
visuality and human rights politics, it requires multiple, novel ways of knowing,
including of mapping.
Accordingly, De León and Luiselli counter-map this crisis in ways that decenter the
human, both as sensate being and liberal human rights subject. Building off of the
counter-mapping possibilities evident in De León and Luiselli’s work, I now tap into the
rethinking
traditional
assumptions and practices, including those of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security
and human rights activism alike
Informed by Luiselli and De León, as well as other interdisciplinary cartographers and my own fieldwork in Southern Arizona, I have initiated a pilot project for counter-mapping the U.S.-Mexico border crisis as both a humanitarian crisis and a crisis of humanitarianism, or the centering and privileging of human victimhood. To be clear, my project is far from the first digital counter-mapping project about this crisis. Yet, many of these projects are principally visual and anthropocentric in nature. In addition to the aforementioned Arizona OpenGIS Initiative for Deceased Migrants map,
peels back layers of culpability behind the humanitarian crisis of 2018and exposes otherwise overlooked agents in the border crisis, such as the amount of ICE contracts awarded per congressional district. These cartographers also note the inevitably
impreciseand
contingentnature of data visualizations, including maps, but do not detail their exclusions
Though humanitarian maps about the U.S.-Mexico border crisis tend to exclude data on
nonhuman victims, land and wildlife studies of this region do often make some mention of
disappeared migrants. In a recent joint press release from the Center for Biological
Diversity, Sierra Club, and Sky Island Alliance, Tucson-based environmental activists
critique border militarization as detrimental to all local communities, including
transitory ones. Protesting border wall construction for further impeding the natural
migrations of people and wildlife that are essential to healthy diversity,
these
activists called for an immediate halt to such construction
While much research and activism along the border is multi-sensory insofar as it utilizes sight and sound, as well as other senses, to document ongoing violence and resistance, I contend that crossing senses can further decenter the human in this border crisis. In
post-humanist analysisthat is ecological, not anthropocentric, in nature
to think beyond the boundary of the human, beyond ‘anthropos’ or ‘ethnos’
While multiple scholars have considered the possibility of witnessing beyond the human
using an anthropological or philosophical approach, I here adopt a digital humanities
approach, with a particular focus on pedagogy and practice.
a reeducation of our senses — a bodily retraining that can help listeners learn to become more open to the connections among sensory modes, environments, and materials
multimodal,practice of listening that involves thinking critically about the experience of sound, which she understands to be a
contextual […] sonic event
multimodalimplies that there are discrete modes of knowing and being, for example, Ceraso recognizes such separation of the senses to be historically and culturally learned.
In turn, her practices of multimodal listening and digital sound mapping involve
attending to the ways senses interact with, and even subvert, each other in creating an
embodied experience of place. More than simply listen
with their ears, Ceraso’s
students record the time of day and weather conditions of their audio recordings; look
for visual and tactile proof of sonic vibrations; write textual descriptions of
fieldwork experiences; and reflect on the limits of a digital interface such as
Soundcities reeducation of our senses
is not just a newfound attunement to the
complex connections among humans’ own sensory modes, but also among those modes and
surrounding environments
and materials.
Such attunement, according to Ceraso,
challenges visual approaches to knowing, ear-centric
approaches to listening, and, in
my evaluation, also anthropocentric approaches to the humanities, including related
humanitarian concerns
Informed by Ceraso, Luiselli, and De León, as well as the interdisciplinary scholars
mentioned throughout this article and my own fieldwork in Southern Arizona, I have
created a digital counter-map that decenters humans as the sole victims of the
U.S.-Mexico border crisis. In this ArcGIS project, accessible here and represented in Figure 5, I combine
sonic, visual, and literary evidence, sometimes together, at the same geotag, and
sometimes apart. Such evidence, or proof of existence, includes descriptions of deceased
migrants’ body condition,
audio recordings of animals, photos of desert landscapes,
outlines of endangered species ranges and border walls, and excerpts from multiple
texts, including De León’s
I first recognized the need for this counter-mapping methodology in March of 2019, while
co-leading a university trip to Southern Arizona called awareness.
To expose students to the complexities of the
U.S.-Mexico border crisis, this trip included meetings with various on-the-ground
actors, including border residents, patrol agents, activists, and unauthorized day
laborers. Depending on the actors’ differing interests, they referenced maps
foregrounding border wall construction, military checkpoints, humanitarian aid stations,
or, most commonly, the discovery of human remains. Throughout this trip, we saw at least
three versions of Humane Borders’
Like Ceraso, I wanted to put my students into a collaborative, even conversational,
interaction with their surroundings. What did they hear as they took photos of
Normandy-style vehicle barriers, Cottonwood trees, and a horizon often dotted with at
least one memorial cross? How might this hearing change if they simultaneously recalled
Luiselli’s onomatopoeic depiction of desert dust-clouds appearing and disappearing as
Shrrrrrr, sssssssss, hsssssss, sss, hhhhh,
or Jason De León’s graphic description of a
mummified migrant corpse with a face replaced by a stone-colored ghoul stuck in
mid-scream
? And what if they could digitally return to this location months later to
hear the nocturnal chirp of a Whippoorwill that escaped their notice while they were
previously there in person? To begin investigating these questions, I consulted the
Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities (IDAH) at Indiana University Bloomington about
multimedia map tools. A group of faculty, graduate students, and staff who specialize in
digital methods, IDAH recommended Esri’s ArcGIS Online and ArcGIS Survey 123 for their
institutional availability and ease of use.
Yet, while Esri is the industry standard for commercial Geographic Information Systems
(GIS) software, its open partnerships with numerous private and public agencies,
including the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, initially give me pause. As the
software that connects DHS’ vast system of remote sensors, lookout towers, drones, and
other agent-carried GPS technologies, ArcGIS both facilitates and maximizes security
enforcement along the U.S.-Mexico border the master’s tools
by
uploading various online resources into a map titled
The first resource was the open source data from the Arizona OpenGIS Initiative for
Deceased Migrants, from which I selected unidentified
remains and created color-coded
survey points based on the body condition
upon discovery. Such anonymity, along with
conditions that range from fully fleshed
to skeletonizaton w/ mummification
to
complete skeletonization w/ bone degradation,
emphasize the postmortem dehumanization
of these human corpses. Especially in death, migrant bodies become indistinguishable
from the landscape that both witnesses and facilitates their gradual decomposition. To
further challenge human-nonhuman binaries, I next searched online for digital sounds and
images representing the natural environment implicated in the U.S.-Mexico border crisis.
This search yielded multiple relevant materials, including those from Sky Island
Alliance’s Border Wildlife Study, Charles Bogert’s
While I was pleased with the variety of visual and auditory resources available online, an essential part of producing my counter-map was field photography and sound recording. When initially conceptualizing this project, I was set to lead additional
During these respective visits, I camped, hiked, and recorded what I encountered. With the continued support of IDAH, I was able to borrow their Sony IC recorder for short audio samples. While relatively basic, and prone to picking up wind sounds, this recorder still captures the spectrality that interests me most about soundscapes. Like the mother-protagonist in Luiselli’s
Joining Sterne, as well as Furlonge and Ceraso, in conceptualizing listening as a
learned skill,
I see the purpose of this counter-map to be practice: that is, the
interminable practice of witnessing human bodies, as well as human-made maps, as in
dynamic relation with environments that both includes and exceeds them. Against
simplistic representations of the Sonoran Desert as hostile terrain rife with
humanitarian crisis,
sideways glancesin which map visitors think critically about this landscape, its history, and their sensory relationship to it all.
Given the continued disappearances and deaths of migrants crossing the Sonoran Desert,
as well as the expedited construction of a new border wall system through wildlife
corridors including the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument and Madrean Sky Island
Region and, structural violence in this region clearly affects humans and nonhumans
alike. The Lesser Long-nosed Bat, one of many animals endangered by the habitat loss
resulting from border crossing and militarization, migrates among various locations
throughout Mexico and Southern Arizona, including the aforementioned wildlife corridors.
it bouncing back even stronger and longer, Geronimo, eronimo, onimo, onimo
Had I not added a photo, represented in Figure 6, to this same geotag on the map, it
would be hard to hear the audio recording as also documenting hoodoos, or rock spires,
standing en masse. Had I not added the audio recording to this same geotag, however, map
visitors likely would miss the uncanny experience of not knowing all they are witnessing
or, stated otherwise, all that is present, absent, and spectral here. Given Echo
Canyon’s location along Lesser Long-nosed Bat migratory routes, for example, my
recording could include ultrasonic echoes of last night’s echolocation calls.
Technically, the chance of this happening is very low, if non-existent. Imaginatively,
however, this chance is nevertheless enough to be politically and ethically relevant.
For knowing the possibility of
Just as De León claims that people have to be decentered in the agency equation
of
this crisis, I maintain that humans ought to be decentered from witnessing practices,
including mapping. Yet, such decentering is admittedly difficult, especially given the
anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism also prominent in sound studies. According to
Deborah Kapchan, sound studies is still asking the key question of, And how might
attention to sound and affect produce a body unfettered by the dualisms of the
Enlightenment — mind/body, nature/culture, man/woman, human/animal, spirit/material?
interrogation
of our own hearing, as well as our access to nonhuman hearing,
including that of animals, land, and technology hear
anything at all? When an exhausted migrant falls to the desert floor, delirious from
extreme dehydration, do the dirt, rocks, and nearby creatures even take notice? And when
an ultrasonic recorder makes bat echolocation audible to humans, who, in fact, is doing
the hearing? For Sterne, refraining from idealizing human and nonhuman hearing opens up
new sets of questions about knowledge, subjectivity, and politics, namely politics that
involve hearing the hearing of others,
or at least trying
Following the Lesser Long-nosed Bat’s migratory route southward, towards Mexico, on my ArcGIS map, I include a likewise multivalent audio recording from Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, which houses Tohono O’odham burial sites and other endangered animals such as the Sonoran Pronghorn and Quitobaquito Pupfish. Upon first listen of this recording, audible here, one may vaguely hear bird chirps, footsteps, a trickle of water, and some kind of traffic. Only the expert ear would be able to identify the specific sound of steamrollers cruising along Highway 85, having just left the site of border wall construction near Lukeville, Arizona, where they likely aided the hasty removal of local flora and fauna. Similarly, only the expert ear would be able to identify the specificities of a morning birdsong medley recorded from inside a nearby camping tent, audible here. The point of this map, however, is not to train the expert ear, or even engage strictly ear-centric modes of listening. Rather, the point is to get map visitors thinking about what the human, including the human with digital technology, can and cannot witness in the Arizona desert: a landscape layered with historical, political, and environmental significance.
Like De León and Luiselli, I use this map to show that restoring the sight and sound, or voice and visibility, of human victims is insufficient to addressing the U.S.-Mexico border crisis. Rather than replace one mode of witnessing with another, however, this map models and facilitates a multi-modal, interdisciplinary interrogation of witnessing. As visitors navigate through images of landscapes, sounds of wildlife, and textual excerpts about local violence, they continually confront the challenge of comprehension, or understanding in an inclusive and absolute sense. Instead of providing easy or exhaustive answers, this digital counter-map invites participants into the ongoing question of hearing what the Sonoran Desert hears, as assassin, witness, and victim. Such inquiry is both orienting and disorienting, as it prompts viewers to engage the sensory and epistemological limits inherent to humanhood. Engaging these limits, however, also draws witnesses into closer, more attentive connection with the nonhuman ecosystems that both envelop and elude them.
Chances are that map visitors will never actually answer the complex question of hearing what the desert hears, yet asking it reminds them that such unknowns are also in crisis, and also worth protecting. As the Prevention Through Deterrence policy and other border militarization efforts remain in full effect, it is especially important to remember that the U.S.-Mexico border crisis necessitates epistemological and social, not just political, paradigm shifts. Indeed, it requires a decentering of visuality and anthropocentrism simultaneously, wherein witnesses recognize humanitarian and ecological issues as interrelated. As I have shown, this counter-mapping project contributes to such decentering by offering a practice of crossing the senses, leaning into disorientation, and collapsing human-nonhuman binaries. This practice is difficult and interminable, yet digital humanities pedagogies and projects like those I have demonstrated here also render it accessible, interactive, and impactful. At stake in such projects are not just “a reeducation of our senses” but also a reconfiguration of the world: a world that can better protect humans and nonhumans alike, together.
The research presented here greatly benefitted from the guidance and support of the Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities (IDAH) at Indiana University Bloomington. Thanks are due to their talented staff and scholars.