Summary and Study Guide of The Land Of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail

€ 2,75

The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail is a 2015 work of nonfiction and the winner of four awards, including the J.J. Staley Book Prize in 2018. Drawing on his expertise in anthropology, ethnography and archeology, author Jason De León, Executive Director of the Undocumented Migration Project and current Professor of Anthropology and Chicano/a Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, critiques the federal border enforcement policy known as Prevention Through Deterrence.

From the outset of his book, De León argues that Prevention Through Deterrence, the policy that claims to use the “‘inhospitable”’ conditions of the Sonora Desert, between Arizona and Mexico, as a means of preventing illegal immigration, has in actuality “set the stage for the desert to become the new ‘victimizer’ of border transgressors” (34; 35). De León states that the policy, which has been in effect since the mid-1990s, uses nature as a foil to disguise the “hybrid collectif of deterrence” that incorporates the federal government’s own responsibility for migrant deaths (60).