Abstract:

This dissertation offers an ethnographic analysis of contemporary struggles over life, death, and authority in the Arizona-Sonora region of the United States-Mexico border. Drawing on over 30 months of multi-sited field research (2002-2007), it examines the politics surrounding the death of unauthorized migrants in the Sonoran Desert. In tracing interven-tion efforts aimed at protecting the border from unauthorized migration and unauthorized migrants from the effects of extreme desert exposure, this project explores how and why their bodies and stories are deployed in the contestation and articulation of power over people and space.

This ethnographic take on the management of migrant death and trauma conceptualizes a politics of life that reimagines the relationship between authority, legitimacy, and right. By examining how migrants' bodies and their stories frame and are framed by what I label "deliberate neglect," this study contributes to the scholarship on violence by articulating the conditions that turn arrests into rescues, migrants into mere bodies, and rescuers into outlaws. In so doing, the dissertation offers a fresh and timely perspective on U.S.-Mexico border dynamics, and contributes to the theorization of power and its manifestations on bodies and life across spatial and social relations. As anxieties over the management of territories and human mobility continue to set preemptive global agendas and produce "acceptable" exceptions to physical, legal, and sociopolitical protection, this examination of the tensions between border safety and border security expands our understanding of the politics of policing, vulnerability, and exclusion at work today.