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 [Hayles 2012]. Distinguishing digital humanities as not better or worse, but different, from its predecessor, N. Katherine Hayles states that such “differences can leverage traditional assumptions so they become visible and hence available for rethinking” [Hayles 2012]. Yet, this very assertion demonstrates one of the field’s central challenges, for Hayles here replicates an age-old assumption that something must first “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” [Altschuler 2020]. Such privileging largely results from the Scientific Revolution and subsequent Age of Enlightenment. With the development of seeing and printing technologies in the 15th and 16th centuries, visual mapping and charting assumed central roles in understanding the world on small and large scales. In Hypercities: Thick Mapping in the Digital Humanities, Todd Samuel Presner, David Shepard, Yoh Kawano note such mapping to have been critically involved in the establishment and expansion of European nation-states, including colonial conquest [Presner 2014]. Yet while mapping never has been, and never will be, a neutral representation of knowledge, many scholars celebrate the shift to digital mapping as a potentially more multi-sensory and malleable practice.

According to Clancy Wilmott, digital mapping has upended “the assumption that ‘the map’ is a static representational object” [Cooper 2016]. More than artifactual maps made with permanent ink and parchment, “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 Literary Mapping in the Digital Age, David Cooper, Christopher Donaldson, and Patricia Murrieta-Flores emphasize the need to evaluate “how the process of digital mapping and map-making alters the way we perceive and engage with the geographies that surround us” [Cooper 2016]. Such evaluation interrogates what digital mapping reveals, conceals, and remains unable to convey, perhaps facilitating “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 Lost Children Archive. After investigating the ways in which De León and Luiselli privilege visual and sonic counter-mapping, respectively, I model a more multi-sensory counter-mapping practice. Though this practice remains far from perfect, I argue that such digital counter-mapping crosses sight and sound in ways that challenge historical divisions among humans and nonhumans. Accordingly, it decenters humans as the sole, and most important, victims of the U.S.-Mexico border crisis.

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.[1] Throughout the arrival of Spanish missionaries in the early 18th century, the Mexican-American War (1846-47), the Gadsden Purchase (1854), and the Apache Wars (1849-1924), indigenous and colonial settler populations violently negotiated and renegotiated control of these borderlands. After the annexation of U.S. territories including Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and Southern California from Mexico in the mid-1800s, migration northward was incentivized or illegalized depending on the U.S.’ political and economic need.[2] Still, enforcement remained relatively lax until the “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 [Colibrí 2020][3]. By design, many of these deaths remain unidentifiable, if not altogether invisible. In turn, mapping practices in this area now indicate not just who wins the war and owns the land, but what life remains in this undeclared killing zone.

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 [U.S. Customs 2020]. However, those interested in other forms of “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 [Peluso 1995]. Anthropologist Jason De León, who has studied migration and violence in Southern Arizona since 2009, draws on fellow migration scholar Martina Tazzioli’s elaboration of counter-mapping as having two specific purposes of 1) making visible the effects of authority and 2) challenging the very possibility of mapping these effects [Tazzioli 2015]. This definition is notable for exhibiting a tension similar to that of digital humanities insofar as it simultaneously relies on and resists “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 Digital Sound Studies, wonder what forms of knowledge and embodied experience are going unheard in the digital turn [Lingold 2018]. Turning to sound as an under-utilized mode of study within digital humanities, this collection challenges not just the hierarchization of senses, but also their very separation. Since this separation emerged over time, as part of Enlightenment thinking, sound studies scholars such as Jonathan Sterne and Michael J. Kramer claim we can use the “flexible modularity” of digital data to both understand and reverse this history [Lingold 2018].

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 space,” 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 Lost Children Archive, a novel that also studies migration and disappearance in Southern Arizona, Valeria Luiselli furthers such rethinking by privileging sound as a mode of knowledge with counter-mapping capabilities. Reading these scholars’ work together exposes the stakes of counter-mapping to be not simply a rethinking of sight and sound as they relate to space, but also as they relate to the humans and nonhumans traversing such space. In other words, the stakes are ways of witnessing the U.S.-Mexico border crisis that decenter visuality and anthropocentrism simultaneously.

The similarities between Jason De León’s The Land of Open Graves (2015), his first book about the Undocumented Migration Project, and Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive (2019) become more obvious upon considering the latter’s translated title, El Desierto Sonoro (2020).[4] Both books are about the Arizona desert, and principally the Sonoran Desert, which is a biodiverse region covering large parts of the Southwestern United States and Northwestern Mexico. More specifically, these books are about the many thousands of migrants that have attempted to cross this dangerous landscape, especially since the Department of Homeland Security’s implementation of its “Prevention Through Deterrence” policy, part of the aforementioned “Border Patrol Strategic Plan of 1994 and Beyond.” Entailing heightened militarization and surveillance in urban sections of the border such as San Diego, California and Nogales, Arizona, this policy intentionally pushes traveling migrants into rural areas that increase their chances of turning themselves in, getting lost, or dying. Since the early 2000s, the Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner has reported doing upwards of 150 autopsies on undocumented border corpses annually [Continued 2013]. Furthermore, Dr. Gregory Hess, Pima County’s current Chief Medical Examiner, estimates that these self-disclosed numbers likely represent just 1/3 of actual migrant deaths in this area [Hess 2019].

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 [De León 2015]. Using ethnographic, archaeological, forensic, and visual anthropological methods to collect evidence of such crossing, De León distinguishes his interdisciplinary work as taking “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 Violence: Six Sideways Reflections, entail zooming out beyond a mere focus on the human subjects of violence in order to think more broadly and critically about the structural causes of such violence [De León 2015]. For De León, this means witnessing what remains otherwise overlooked, including the socioeconomic factors that cause migrants to leave their homelands, as well as those that have made their journey increasingly dangerous.

In The Land of Open Graves, such witnessing involves both narrating and counter-mapping in ways that put pressure on hegemonic forms of documentation, principally those of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, but sometimes also those of fellow human rights activists. Acknowledging the graphic nature of his work, for example, De León recounts instances in which critics have claimed his photos of decayed migrant corpses to rob their subjects of human dignity. His refusal to instead make migrant bodies visible as whole and uninjured is striking for its refusal to rehumanize such victims, as many human rights archives and organizations profess to do.[5] In his words, “The deaths that migrants experience in the Sonoran Desert are anything but dignified. That is the point” [De León 2015, emphasis added]. For De León, such dehumanization, both in life and in death, is the precise point of policies including Prevention Through Deterrence. Identifying such decomposition as a form of structural, postmortem violence, he elaborates that the seeming “natural” processes of dying and decaying in the desert are actually “political facts representative of the value placed on the lives and deaths of undocumented people” [De León 2015].

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” [Anker 2012]. This is because, according to Enlightenment-based liberalism, only this type of body meets related ideals, such as reason, conscience, and freedom. Yet Anker points out that this idealized human body and subject is paradoxically “decorporealized,” for it negates core dimensions of embodied experience, including “vulnerability” and “decay” [Anker 2012].

When De León foregrounds migrants’ partially decayed corpses as “anything but dignified,” 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 and ignorance. If bodies are not whole, they also cannot see whole pictures, or know whole stories. Yet, denying these limits in the name of human dignity is one way humans separate themselves as physically and mentally superior to other animals [Anker 2012]. In this sense, De León’s images challenge visuality and anthropocentrism simultaneously, serving his noted interest in “troubling human-nonhuman binaries” [De León 2015]. Furthermore, they help show how “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” [De León 2015]. Yet, on the other hand, he is careful of falling back into an anthropocentrism that myopically frames humans as the only perpetrators, as well as victims, involved in this complex crime scene.

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 [De León 2016].[6] For DHS, these technologies provide immediate information on suspected migrant activity in remote areas that appear otherwise unsurveilled, or simply “natural” [De León 2016]. In contrast, the Deceased Migrants map implements GIS software with the mission of raising awareness about the entirely unnatural quantity of migrant deaths in the Arizona desert and, when possible, also identifying the deceased so that remains may be returned to families. Accordingly, the map charts the locations of found corpses, as well as related information such as postmortem interval, body condition, cause of death and — if identifiable — name, sex, and age [Arizona OpenGIS]. A dynamic digital map with numerous search functions, it also allows searches by migrant name, land corridor, and year of death.

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 “Scales of Suffering in the US-Mexico Borderlands,” an article published after The Land of Open Graves and with anthropologist co-authors Cameron Gokee and Haeden Stewart, De León plots migrant deaths and belongings against multiple representations of the Sonoran Desert, specifically the Nogales-Sasabe corridor. The Undocumented Migration Project’s expansive archive of discarded objects includes intimate items such as bibles, love letters, and photos, as well as practical items such as backpacks, water bottles, and shoes. Here, De León specifically plots aid-related artifacts against geography models, showing how the use of bandages, anti-infectives, and analgesics corresponds to changing contours of the terrain. Figure 3 depicts a map of aid-related artifacts and associated land covers documented in the Nogales-Sasabe corridor by the Undocumented Migration Project from 2009-2013 [Gokee 2020].

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 [Gokee 2020].

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” [De León 2016]. While DHS employs private mapping and analytics software, such as Esri’s ArcGIS, De León draws from the Arizona OpenGIS Initiative for Deceased Migrants map, which uses open source software to make data readily available. Yet, this information on migrants’ deaths could simultaneously serve as valuable data on the efficacy of border enforcement, and how to strengthen it. Given this possibility, De León elsewhere notes a resistance to publishing such data and touches on a central debate in digital humanities about the possibility of dismantling the master’s house with the master’s tools [De León 2016]. Analyzing the risks of using GIS software that produces data, as well as money, for ethically dubious companies, Safiya Noble advises the public to stay vigilant of how such software further entrenches them in the very systems they may be critiquing [Noble 2011]. Since Noble also notes how these same GIS technologies often help improve communities, she urges critical yet creative applications. Yet, I contend that part of De León’s conundrum is his maps’ reliance on not just the same GIS tools, but also the same visual media and human categories, that are readily recognizable to DHS.

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” [Gokee 2020]. Here, De León notably switches from framing his work as predominantly visual to also vocal in order to point out how it is only partially revelatory. Yet, he elaborates on his maps’ incapacity to represent everything in every way as “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” [Gokee 2020]. In this sense, such silences are part of his maps’ functionality, not flaws. In fact, they also “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 [Klein 2013]. Against Enlightenment-based epistemological biases that elevate “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 [Klein 2013]. In failing, however, they force us to think about other ways of seeing and knowing, such as speaking and listening. While De León’s work briefly mentions these possibilities, I now turn to Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive as a counter-mapping model that instead privileges the auditory. Such an approach, I argue, enables her to further challenge epistemological biases and human/nonhuman binaries.

Contrary to De León’s appeal to visual and material evidence in the form of migrant bodies and their belongings, Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive centralizes a lack of such evidence. Or, rather, the uncertainty of all evidence. The mother-protagonist, a radio journalist by profession, is never quite sure of what she sees or hears, making her story largely about the impossibility of narration, as well as traditional mapping. At first, she helps record child migrants’ oral testimonies in the New York immigration court, where she volunteers as a translator [Luiselli 2019a]. But when her husband insists on going westward to record auditory echoes of the Apache, who were disappeared in the Sonoran Desert long before the current U.S.-Mexico border crisis, she begins adjusting her own work to be able to accompany him. As she proceeds to research, “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” [Luiselli 2019a]. In addition to history, Lost Children Archive engages the fields of law, anthropology, cartography, and acoustics, among others. As a result, one can read Luiselli’s book as a specific type of interdisciplinary archive: a sound map. Encouraging interdisciplinarity and experimentation within archival studies, Marlene Marnoff claims that “thinking through making” is key to finding new ways of “interrogating archival silence” [Foscarini 2016]. In Lost Children Archive, the mother-protagonist specifically practices a thinking through listening and mapping, as she continually tries to chart the sounds and spaces that both envelop and elude her. Lacking a visual and digital interface, such counter-mapping requires readers to likewise navigate the Sonoran Desert through her ears, a methodology that often conflates present and absent, as well as human and nonhuman, subjects.

While Lost Children Archive does publish images of multiple visual, and in this sense hegemonic, maps, it also consistently calls such maps into question. For example, the mother-protagonist’s archive includes a version of the very Arizona OpenGIS Initiative for Deceased Migrants map that De León draws upon. Depicted in Figure 4, this particular version charts migrant deaths against the Sonoran Desert, as well as the distance they likely had walked each day after crossing the border, in order to warn potential border crossers of the perilous journey.

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” [Luiselli 2019a]. More than associate excluded remains with invisibility, however, she connects them specifically to sound. A section of the book titled “Undocumented,” for example, begins with the epigraph, “An exile feels that the state of exile is a constant, special sensitivity to sound” [Luiselli 2019a]. In the context of the U.S.-Mexico border crisis, “undocumented” thus 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” [Misrach 2016]. Here, Kun touches on the material and immaterial nature of sound, for such vibrations only become audible, even amplified, through the very objects they contact. This makes containing sound very difficult, as even ostensible silence often involves resonant vibrations. In auditory encounter, something usually escapes, perceived or unperceived. Given this unmonumental medium and sense’s historic subordination to sight as form of knowledge, however, such sound often fails to adequately capture human ears, let alone imaginations.

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” [Sterne 2003]. For the mother-protagonist in Lost Children Archive, listening evolves from simply hearing sound, namely that of migrants’ oral testimonies, to sonically counter-mapping a landscape of unbounded phenomena. During a moment of revelation, she realizes that both her and her husband’s research projects entail “chasing ghosts and echoes” [Luiselli 2019a]. Her husband’s ghosts and echoes are those of the last Apache leaders, including Chief Cochise, Geronimo, and the Chiricahuas. As the final indigenous Americans to surrender to settler-colonists and their Indian Removal Act, which forced remaining tribes onto federal reservations, these people were exiled from their own homeland just like many migrant refugees and deportees. The mother-protagonist draws this parallel most closely as she watches a plane of child refugees head back to their ostensible homeland, yet only by departing from the land of their probable ancestors, as well as current family (191). Because migrant and indigenous populations have been effectively disappeared, one through “removal” and 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” [Steingo 2019]. Another sense in which sound is boundless, for example, involves the fact that it reverberates well beyond human hearing, including in acoustic and ultrasonic forms. If a bat chirps or cactus falls in the Sonoran Desert and no human hears it, it still does make a sound. Furthermore, that sound may interact with and turn into other sounds, commonly called echoes. In Lost Children Archive, both the husband and wife appeal to echoes as a trope for spectral listening to that which they both can and cannot hear. However, only the wife practices such listening as a dynamic and disorienting mode of counter-mapping. For her, such counter-mapping entails contextualizing sounds, as well as related ideas, against hegemonic maps of time, space, and subjects as singular and absolute.

According to the wife, her husband claims his project to be an “inventory of echoes” [Luiselli 2019a]. Yet, he never elaborates more than that, since his understanding of sound as self-evident affords him a rather literal definition of echoes. An “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” [Schafer 1977]. For Schafer, as well as Lost Children Archive’s husband, the bulk of this study entails recording, naming, and cataloging sounds in an effort to capture, and thereby understand, “the general acoustic environment of a society” [Schafer 1977]. While most sound scholars recognize Schafer as pivotal in establishing sound as another way of knowing, they also criticize his presumptuous appeal to “the general,” or universal, as neglectful of sound’s multivalent, and highly contextual, meanings [Novak 2015].[7] Similarly, the wife assesses her husband’s work as crudely matter-of-fact. For him, bird chirps, arroyo babbles, snake rattles, wind gusts, etc. heard in the present are, inevitably and indubitably, reverberations of sound waves from foregone times and peoples. Given the mother-protagonist’s attention to uncertainty and exclusion, however, she interprets his inventory of echoes as “trying to capture their [the Apaches’] past presence in the world, and making it audible, despite their current absence” [Luiselli 2019a, emphasis added].

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” [Luiselli 2019a]. Here, the wife crosses sight and sound in conceptualizing an illuminative echo, one that appears and disappears simultaneously. Using the spectrality of sound to trace the spectrality of removed populations makes sense to this cartographer, especially as she refuses to organize her own recorded material into a “clean narrative sequence” [Luiselli 2019a]. As she states, “We haven’t understood how space and time exist now, how we really experience them” [Luiselli 2019a]. In her evaluation, archivists such as her husband often fail to acknowledge the way all hearing, including all recording, is contextual: that is, it takes place in a particular time and space, neither of which are entirely singular or absolute. Situating all recording as a type of echo, Mark M. Smith similarly emphasizes the need to think of both as simultaneously historical and ahistorical. Rather than capture sounds from the past exactly as they were, recordings and echoes reproduce sounds from the past in the present, inevitably altering them [Novak 2015]. For the wife in Lost Children Archive, this means that sounds, as well as the times and spaces in which they reverberate, take on multiple, ever-changing meanings. They are dynamic and, for this very reason, also disorienting.

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 not knowing” [Furlonge 2018]. Drawing from a multimedia archive of work by black authors and artists, Furlonge examines how literary texts can shift reading from a strictly visual practice to one that “demands an aural sensory engagement” in which readers “think with their ears” about historical constructions of racial difference.[8] Although, or perhaps because, literary texts are technically silent, they can guide readers in hearing and thinking about sound in innovative ways, including as an “epistemic site” for questioning historical hierarchies and identities [Furlonge 2018]. Acknowledging the close connection between how we know and who we understand humans to be, or not be, Lost Children Archive’s mother-protagonist likewise listens from a position of inquiry. Instead of distinguishing and labeling sounds, for example, she hears them together as a collective victim of history, or what she calls “beautiful things falling apart” [Luiselli 2019a] .

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” [Luiselli 2019a]. This description is highly reminiscent of philosopher Walter Benjamin’s “Angel of History,” which recognizes the past, present, and future as “one single catastrophe” in constant risk of oblivion, especially under the pressure of “what we call progress” [Benjamin 2007]. Like this angel, and more critically than her husband, Luiselli’s mother-protagonist thus hears bird chirps, arroyo babbles, snake rattles, wind gusts, etc. as “reenactments” and “reinterpretations” of 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 [Luiselli 2019a]. Yet, she maintains her uncertainty, as well as curiosity, through her insistent use of “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.

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.