Dr. Ageeth Sluis, our Latin American Historian, is sponsoring an interactive exhibit at the Irwin Library to raise awareness of the immigrant lives lost while crossing the US-Mexico border through the Sonoran Desert in Arizona between the mid-1990s and 2019. This exhibit comes from the work of the Undocumented Migration Project, which began as anthropological research into migration patterns and turned into a recovery project of human remains. This exhibit is a memorial to those lives lost and is now on display in the common area to the right of the Irwin Library entrance.
With a focus on this specific geographic location, approximately 3,200 written toe tags to represent the immigrants. This illustrates the danger that exists at the US/Mexico border and the persistence of the immigrants despite knowing their lives are at stake. The project will expand their search to the Texas wilderness.
This exhibit was Fall 2021