Date of Project
5-4-2023
Document Type
Honors Thesis
School Name
College of Arts and Sciences
Department
Sociology
Major Advisor
Dr. Frank Hutchins
Second Advisor
Dr. Lee Remington
Abstract
The same nation that champions itself as a cultural “melting pot” is the very same that allows thousands of migrant bodies to rot in the heat of the United States-Mexico borderlands. It is through the sociopolitical debasement of immigrants to “bare life bodies” that thousands are made invisible and erased through their deaths, with little recognition or accountability taken on behalf of government institutions. Hiding behind the conveniently harsh desert terrain to mask any sense of culpability, the United States government exercises a sort of invisible hand over immigrant lives that is reinforced through harmful policy, Border Patrol’s “bare life” surveillance, and even armed civilian militias at the border. This ethnographic study of invisibility and erasure as it pertains to immigrant populations exposes how power and politics intersect to make certain groups invisible. What follows is an analysis of immigrant deaths in the borderlands through the binary of invisibility/visibility. This (in)visibility is constructed and navigated by immigrant activists, artists, medical examiners, Border Patrol agents, and humanitarian organizations, exposing the “necroviolence” inflicted upon undocumented border crossers—a population that is left by sovereign nations to die, decay, and disappear.
Recommended Citation
Planicka, Haley, "A Constant Presence of Absence: The Construction of (In)visibility and Immigrant Deaths in the Borderlands" (2023). Undergraduate Theses. 125.
https://scholarworks.bellarmine.edu/ugrad_theses/125