LOS ANGELES — A toothbrush? Your wallet? What would you put in a backpack if you were leaving your home for a new life in another country? That is what UCLA anthropologist Jason De León has been studying.
“I got the idea around 2009 to take the tools of archeology, to go out into the desert and to recover artifacts and to see whether or not these things could teach us about the social process of migration.”
And so, he did, collecting thousands of objects, everything from water bottles, to clothes and backpacks, even the tires the border patrol uses to smooth out the sand, so they can follow migrants’ footprints.
These items, along with first-person pictures and videos, are now the centerpiece of an exhibition three years in the making at LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes called Hostile Terrain ‘94: The Undocumented Migration Project.
The museum gave Spectrum News 1 a sneak peek as the exhibition was coming together.
“This is the quintessential American experience as a country of immigrants,” De León said.
For years, De León, Executive Director of the Undocumented Migration Project and the Colibrí Center for Human Rights, has been going out to the desert not just to collect the objects left behind by immigrants, but also their stories and, at times, DNA to give families closure.
“We are really trying to raise awareness about the fact that it’s not just that thousands of migrants have died in the Arizona desert, but also the fact that thousands of people have disappeared and families are desperately looking for their loved ones,” De León said.
That reality will be front and center at the exhibition, where toe tags (which are placed around a person’s toe to identify them after death) will be pinned on a wall-high map of the Arizona-Mexico border. Each toe tag tells the story of a real immigrant who is missing or died in the desert.
“This is where they’ll be acknowledged,” said Karen Crews Hendon, LA Plaza’s senior curator, pointing at the wall where the map will be displayed. “We are here to tell stories, to tell untold stories. That is our mission.”
Perla Torres, family network director of Colibrí Center for Human Rights, has collected many of the families’ stories herself.
“We are able to now share and educate through this power of memory and this power of love," Torres said.
And to educate, says De León, “this not just for Latinos, this isn’t just for Latinx folks, this is for all of us and it’s important for us to understand the history that makes up the fabric of this country.”
The exhibition is now open to the public and goes through July 9, 2023. LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes is in downtown LA at 501 North Main Street. Admission to the museum is free. For more information you can visit lapca.org.