Meet Alvaro Enciso, the Artist Placing Crosses in Sonoran Desert to Memorialize Migrant Deaths
AUGUST 21, 2019
More than 3,000 human remains have been found in the Sonoran Desert, most of them of migrants fleeing their home countries to embark on an uncertain and perilous journey to the United States. On a recent visit to the Arizona borderlands, Democracy Now! accompanied Tucson-based artist Alvaro Enciso into the desert at the site where he placed four unique markers to honor four immigrants killed in a car accident years ago as they fled from Border Patrol. In the past five years, Enciso, who is originally from Colombia, has built and installed over 900 crosses across the treacherous Sonoran Desert in Arizona as part of his ongoing project Where Dreams Die. Rather than religious symbols, Enciso views his crosses as markings that visibilize deaths that are often ignored. This is part of Democracy Now!’s ongoing series, “Death and Resistance at the U.S.-Mexico Border.”
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Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: The bodies and bones of more than 3,000 people, nearly all migrants, have been found since 2001 in the treacherous Sonoran Desert in Arizona. Recent changes to asylum proceedings under the Trump administration have diverted more migrants to deadly portions of the U.S.-Mexico border, including the treacherous Arizona desert.
In June, the body of a 6-year-old Sikh girl from India was found in a remote area of the Sonoran Desert, just one mile north from the U.S.-Mexico border in the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. She was later identified as Gurupreet Kaur. Kaur’s death was the second recorded migrant child fatality in the Arizona border this year. She’s one of thousands of people whose remains have been found in the desert. Summer months are often the deadliest. The week of Kaur’s death, the extreme heat reached a temperature of 108 degrees. Gurupreet had crossed the border with her mother and 8-year-old sister in an attempt to reunite with her father, who had been in the United States since 2013 and was seeking asylum. She died of heat stroke after she became separated from her mother, who was desperately searching for water.
Days after Gurupreet’s death, the Sikh community in Tucson, Arizona, held a memorial for her. They also reached out to local artist Alvaro Enciso and asked him to create a special marking with an ancient Sikh symbol to honor her and make visible the exact area where the little girl lost her life. Alvaro Enciso has built over 900 unique crosses. Every week, he drives and hikes to the exact locations in the desert where the migrants’ remains have been found, and places a cross there to honor their lives and make visible the deaths, that are so often ignored.
More:
https://www.democracynow.org/2019/8/21/alvaro_enciso_unique_crosses_sonoran_desert