On both sides of the carnival mirror, extreme order attempts to process the human disorder produced by inhumane borders. They become a carnival mirror for border enforcement: migrants are captured and processed, their belongings discarded //after the migrants themselves have been passed along-discarded-those belongings are recaptured and processed into photographs. Migrants and bureaucracy co-exist in these photographs and that gives their careful ordering a particular resonance. immigration bureaucracy that took those objects.

In them, we see not only objects belonging to migrants but also the hand of U.S. Without dismissing that hope, I’d like to focus our attention on what comes clear in Kiefer’s photographs precisely because of what makes his work different from the trash-focused projects invoked above: Kiefer’s photographs memorialize the detritus of migration after detention. These artists, activists, and commentators all share, however, a sense that making trash visible in new forms and contexts will alter perspectives, making public the human stakes of migration. I am acutely aware of my privilege in completing this quilt as it is starkly juxtaposed with the migrant stories conveyed through the clothing.” Kiefer, too, acknowledges this when he notes that the apparent brightness of his work has occasioned negative comparisons with the work of photographers like John Moore whose pictures draw more explicit attention to the politics of migration and feature the faces and stories of migrants themselves. As Sonia Arellano, who studies and participates in the Migrant Quilt Project, explains, “My sewing machine has a thin layer of desert dirt on it from piecing the jeans together. Making art from these objects left behind has an inevitable political and ethical valance. Artists Valarie James and Antonia Gallegos, likewise, have used things left behind by migrants to make monuments to the people who made the crossing. The group Los Desconocidos has started the Migrant Quilt Project that makes quilts to memorialize migrant deaths using clothing left behind in the desert. Border Patrol has been known to destroy them). On the other side, activist groups such as Humane Borders leave caches of water in the Sonoran Desert to provide life-saving liquid for migrants and activist programmers designed an app to help migrants find those caches (the U.S. Hana Masri, who studies the rhetorics of migration, puts it succinctly: in these arguments, “Border ‘trash’ thus serves to both render migrant lives disposable and evidence that disposability by representing migrant death.” Anti-immigrant groups circulate pictures of trash-strewn canyons to assert that migration does symbolic and material damage. Environmental agencies, like the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality, raise concerns about the effect that clothing, plastic, and other materials have on the fragile desert environment. Tom Kiefer, the photographer for these pictures, is not the first to take pause at the sediments of migration. Treated as human trash to be dumped south of the border, their abandoned belongings testify to their precarious status.

Customs and Border Protection officers, they are brought to processing centers and relieved of their personal effects-anything deemed extraneous or dangerous. Every day, people risk their lives to save their lives, to earn a living, to make a life. If they are caught by U.S. In the middle of it all, I am writing about photographs of things taken from migrants apprehended in the desert north of the Rio Grande.Įvery day, people walk north across land that- pace Manifest Destiny-should never have belonged to the United States in the first place. This afternoon, I’m reading about a national budget that cuts anti-poverty programs and environmental protections in order to find enough money to build a wall along the Rio Grande. border at the Rio Grande, claiming the Mexican territory lying north and west of it.

That war’s primary purpose (and most recognizable outcome) was to establish the U.S. I spent this morning reading first-hand accounts of the 1846-48 Mexican War.

Trash it pictures