Abstract
In this article, we ask how traces of political violence in the Atacama Desert and in the Sonoran Desert are created and how they are (or are not) transformed into archives. The political violence we study is of different types and takes place in different periods: state violence under the civil–military dictatorship (1973-1990) in the Atacama; violence as a product of migratory policies (from 1994 to the present) of the US–Mexican border in the Sonoran Desert in Arizona; and, mass death and disappearance as the product of successive governments’ “war on drugs” (from 2006 to the present) in Sonora, Mexico. This article is based on our academic ethnographic work and volunteering with grassroots organizations. In these three arid spaces, we met different groups: family members and activists searching for political prisoners disappeared in the 1970s by the Pinochet regime; activists searching for migrants, dead or alive, lost in the Sonoran Desert in Arizona; and families digging in the earth, unearthing clandestine graves and hoping one day to find the remains of their loved ones. We argue that these different search practices create traces when these groups uncover what the perpetrators wanted to hide. These processes that create traces, then create archives when the situated and lived experience of searching and tracing is translated into artifacts that can be detached from their context and acquire multiple uses outside their place of production.
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Notes
Each author conducted the fieldwork separately in differents projects: Paola Díaz in the Sonoran Desert and Rodrigo Suárez in the Atacama Desert. However, we both participated in the interdisciplinary Human Rights Program of Chile’s Alberto Hurtado University. This article provided an opportunity to combine our findings through meetings, conversations, reading and joint writing, thus establishing links between the sites.
Using a non-radical version of Barad’s (2003) notion of material-discursive practices, we understand traces as a relationship (of material and discursive practices) between the search for murdered, killed or disappeared human beings in the desert, carried out by relatives and activists, and the effects of the desert, as a natural-material environment, on the remains and their searchers. They are mostly women but also include men seeking disappeared loved ones.
Chile is divided administratively into 16 regions. Tocopilla and Calama are located in the Antofagasta Region. Tocopilla is on the coast, 187.7 km in a straight line from the regional capital (Antofagasta), while Calama is 218.7 km east of Antofagasta near the Andes Mountains.
The city of Tucson is located in the Sonoran Desert in the state of Arizona, 90 km in a straight line from the border with Mexico. Hermosillo is the capital of the state of Sonora in northern Mexico, 287 km from the US border.
The Caravana de la Muerte was the name given to a Chilean army convoy that, between September 30 and October 22, 1973, traveled the country, taking detainees out of prisons and killing them. It executed 104 people.
An organization for the defense of human rights that operated under the auspices of the Chilean Catholic Church.
Soledad Muñoz is a Chilean-Canadian artist. See www.soledadmunoz.com.
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Diaz, P., Suarez, R. Scouring the desert: political violence traceability in the Americas. Arch Sci (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-023-09432-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-023-09432-8