Late last spring, I stood alongside the steel bollard panels of the US–Mexico border wall and thought about the dead.
I’d joined about thirty others who had driven down to the frontier from Tucson, Arizona, early that morning, then crossed into Sasabe, Mexico, on foot. In the shadow of the nine-metre-high barrier, an Indigenous Mayo woman named Maria Padilla smudged our group with burning sage and tobacco. Then she slowly unspooled a string knotted with 160 prayer ties. Each pinch of tobacco entwined in red cloth represented a set of migrant remains recovered from the Sonoran Desert in the past year, along with a blue tie to represent the sky, a yellow one for the sun, and a white for the bodies that haven’t yet been found.
