WHEN OUR BODIES DISAPPEAR:

Border militarization, migrant caravans, and one family’s fight to be seen in a country making them vanish

My book WHEN OUR BODIES DISAPPEAR (forthcoming 2027) is a work of public anthropology that focuses on a discrete, anti-immigration pact between the US and Mexico known as the Southern Border Program (Programa Frontera Sur).

It follows the journey of one migrant family, the Castros, as they flee their home country of Honduras and attempt to remake their lives in Mexico. Through their singular journey, a larger story of migration below the US border is told: under the Southern Border Program, hundreds of thousands of migrants have become stuck in Mexico, with little recourse to work, social resources, or any means of legalizing themselves.

Totally by accident, a kind of “Mexican Dream” has opened up in Mexico, one that has emerged specifically because it’s American counterpart is now foreclosed to the vast majority of the world’s poor. With the Castro family, we glimpse exactly what this new integration—this new Mexican Dream—might look like, and what is to be done in order to arrive there.

In the process, I trace: how the Southern Border Program has become the 21st century blueprint for wealthy countries to externalize their borders around the world; the dismantling of 20th century international asylum law; the cultural and political history of how the Program was able to take root so successfully in Mexico; how migrant bodies are being changed both materially and symbolically by the Program; and how migrants organize caravans to demand certain rights that the state would otherwise deny them.

For more information on my anthropological work, please visit my academic profile.