Johannes 1

Daniela Johannes
Spanish and Portuguese
The University of Arizona
Cartographic imaginaries: Border and borderless politics of transborderism in the Sonoran Desert.

The present paper offers a comparative analysis of two objectual sources of cartography
coming from different auto-declared pro-migrant agencies. They have been designed in different
political and poetico-rhetorical instances but both appear as forms of interpellation of Border
sovereignty discourses, independently of their actual interlocutors. Two maps of the Sonoran
Border made by the non-profit organization Humane Borders will be put in contrast with the
Transborder Immigrant Tool (TIT), a device developed by an artist-based group led by Micha
Crdenas. The formers have been shaped out to estimate the rate of death by causes of the natural
elements in the desert, despite the sources of hydration distributed throughout the northern
border of the Desert by the same organization. These maps are to be seen as the perpetuation of
the denigrated migrants image and its presumable constitution as virus and contagion, in other
words, as disposable and excludable. On the other hand, TIT claims to be a safety-net device that
enables a GPS system in old cellphones and intends to navigate immigrants to the US side of the
border. This form of cartography resource takes the border map out of its discursive, bi-
dimensional fixation and embodies it into a tool-at-hand and into a body as tool, as counter-fixity
weapon, initiating instead a viral politics.
The crossing of the border will be considered through the two representations mentioned
above as the transgression of a biopolitical development of society as a whole, its territory and
the regulation principles of its population. This form of penetration as invasion on the part of the
migrant serves to an anti-immigration consciousness to actually promote death of other races
Johannes 2
and others in a broader context, as a means of defense of life. In this sense, militarized, as well as
civil patrols that secure the border are imagined to do a favor to the rest of the citizenship. In
Foucauldian (2003) terms, they spread out the belief that society must be defended against the
biological threats posed by the other race that we as society are despite ourselves. This essay
thus interrogates the hegemonic representational status of the migrant (that non-subjective horde-
like entity that crosses the territorial Southern border of the US by foot) in relation to a
biopolitical State racism and to the governmentality of a population, which correspondingly
reproduces it and pushes to purge Otherness in order to conserve the imaginary integrity of
society.
Both maps emitted by Humane Borders (fig. 1 and fig. 2) are interrelated and can be seen
as complementary to each other. Water and death, obvious oxymoron, are a figure of speech on
these maps. The socio-spatial arrangement in which these two elements are combined shows a
cultural landscape, which is at the same time a producer and a product of a culture in which
human agency is enacted. Water and death in all their natural conception are seen indeed as
artifacts, acculturated through human action and used to invoke meaning in an image.
First, referring water, the maps express a contradiction in its rhetoric use: its scarcity
implies indeed its abundance. Blue flags representing points of hydration are as spread out and
abundant as death, represented by red dots. The resource of water, as found in the desert
environment depicted, can only be conceived through the means of control, a copyright owned
by the organizations of humanitarian aid. The right to supply water in a landscape primarily
exempt from it turns the distribution of water into an act of power and knowledge. In this
context, a certain population is appealed through this map knowledge; it is spatially moved as if
it were human cattle, herded towards the source, to calm the instinct of thirst. While the Border
Johannes 3
Patrol adjudicates itself the title of migrants rescue (Cornellius, 2001) they work in alliance
to save the life of border crossers presumably minimizing their general risk. Maps of death and
water evidently make them visible and accountable through their location. It not only makes
them mappable, but tacitly punishable, deportable and ultimately killable. This knowledge,
shared by the two institutions makes the migrant population a legible text, thus, controllable in
their most human conditions, life and death. If water is popularly known as life, the control
of water, from the images to the material instinct, inevitably becomes the control of life and
livelihood. It is in this way that the maps evidence how the control of the most vital resource is a
powerful political position, which mirrors the deadly condition of the human to control the lives
of the population.
Figure 1 localizes the recorded migrant deaths in the region of the Sonoran Desert drawn
as an accumulation of red dots that seem to advance in the figure from the geographical border
upwards in the map and disappear right before urban regions. Merged with such multitude, blue
flags depict water stations set up by Humane Borders Organization in collaboration with Border
Patrol. Read in conjunction with the former, the other map (Figure 2) adds to this complexity a
written text that names the territory in a timely way: Un da caminando, Dos das
caminando, Tres das caminando. Each denomination corresponds to a circular radio, drawn
one over the other, north of the border line, like a time clock that announces in a delimited length
of terrain the quick pass of a short life time. The cartographic imaginary transforms time in space
and gives it a limited trend. The blocks of space are imbued with what Foucault (1986) sensed as
the time in heterotopies, a time that differs from our temporal conception, for they are most
often linked to slices in time-which is to say that they open onto what might be termed, for the
Johannes 4
sake of symmetry, heterochronies (5)
1
. The limited space given to a final countdown in the
maps denotes the capacity of heterochronies to accumulate time in history. Crossing the border is
a process that never ends in that it is never really crossed for the accounts of the map. This time
clock functions as a sort of perpetual and indefinite accumulation of time in an immobile place
(26), as in a painted landscape, in which time never stops building up in history, but space never
stops topping its own summit.
At the footnote of the page it is underlined: Informacin para migrantes and then it
offers the hegemonic reading of the text map: Pasar la frontera caminando por el desierto es
peligroso y puede terminar en la muerte, To cross the border is dangerous and can end up in
death(my translation). The legend in Spanish, but spread throughout US governmental
organizations is fast in assuming in its message an implicit reader: the explicit embodiment of
the red points of death in the map, namely, the migrant, who ironically does not have direct
access to it. It is clear though that one can only identify the migrants life with the fatal destiny.
The ubiquity of the migrants presence in the map aesthetics its own inadequacy to the context it
depicts, and its subjectivity and capacity of agency is practically nulled, as it is equaled to its
death. As a result, a human crossing the desert becomes matter out of place.
In these maps the desert location is found a priori defined by dangerousness of landscape,
a life threatening power, which eliminates the possibility of co-habitance with human life. The
transgression of the border in this sense, becomes the transgression of nature, and moreover, the
natural, human instinct of life. This way, death is the result of migrants stubbornness, the
failed attempt to cross the most ethical boundaries, materialized in the US territorial border.

1
Foucault in his essay Of other spaces talks about cemeteries as the heterotopic spaces, or
spaces that are understood only in relation to other spaces, but at the same time subvert the
latters. The heterotopia, he says, is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces,
several sites that are themselves incompatible (25).
Johannes 5
Matter out of place, on the other hand, has been related to culturally specific meanings of dirt
(Mary Douglas, 1966) and thus it always depends on a perspective of things (North-South), a
social and political ordering. The demarcation of boundaries as desert-specific, delimits the
boundary between the appropriate and the inappropriate. If the presence of undocumented
migrants in the US is seen as inappropriate, the mortal features of such landscape give the
appropriateness of its death. Sara Hill (2006) notes how the image of the migrant is gradually
shown by the media as the human pollution penetrating the borders of the nation: . . . in short
the border environment implicitly threatened to expand its elastic boundaries northward and in so
doing transport its inherently tainted, degraded conditions deep into mainstream and mainland
America (780).
Besides the widely spread image of the immigrant as dirty and contaminating
referred by Hill, there is an interesting correlation appeared in the maps that connotes the border
as cemetery, an infectious and contagious focus of death for the living. Cemeteries were indeed
installed with hygiene intentions, as a metaphor of the borderline between the known and
unknown, a heterotopia where the mysteries of life coincide with the mysteries of death
(Foucault, 1979). On the images analyzed what comes forth is an erupted border, a map that
becomes a rash with red dots of death, a diagnosed infected body. Breaking the order of city
living with the meaning of death, the Sonora Desert border, depicted as a cemetery, is the
inversion of the power of sovereignty; it neutralizes state power, colluding it with the power of
life nature. In other respect, Foucault explains that cemeteries actually started to be localized at
the border of the cities in the nineteenth century, considering death as infectious: in correlation
with individualization of death and the bourgeois appropriation of the cemetery, there arises an
Johannes 6
obsession with death as an illness. The death, it is supposed, brings illness to the living, and it
is the presence and proximity of the death . . .that propagates death itself (25).
No wonder how National Security language has adopted medical-like language to refer
the militarization of the border contention. The border is created as a body to be operated in its
double sense: to be conducted tactic activities on and to be performed a surgical work in
circumscribing otherness. Accordingly, Operation Gatekeeper and Operation Hold the line
by Border Patrol intelligence have been key points in the background of the actual map of the
border. In Humane Border maps in particular, as well as a trajectory for the ascension of the
desert landscape as border, it may be useful for the understanding of how the iconography of
such representations has become a natural architecture of enmity at these venues. The US
Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) had initiated the Southwest Border Enforcement
Strategy back in the 1994, aiming for the prevention through deterrence, a strategy that
attempted to make it so difficult and so costly to enter the USA illegally that fewer individuals
even try (INS 1996, 3). Both operative projects above mentioned were intended to shift traffic
away from traditional urban routes to areas that according to INS are more remote and
difficult to cross (3). In this policy context and as a consequence of the extreme environmental
conditions in these isolated areas is that the organization of Humane Borders has depicted the
rate of death in the Sonoran Desert border as an ascendant curve since 2001 (the year that war on
terror became a relevant issue for obvious reasons). The INS efforts to restrict the entry of
unauthorized migrants have created, from the late 90s and throughout the years, a landscape of
fear, an unmistakable landscape of death. Besides the fences, walls, spotlights, Border Patrol
forces, INS checkpoints etc. (second border for Mike Davis 2000) this landscape becomes
significantly perilous when plastered with maps that caution migrant interlocutors not to risk a
Johannes 7
potentially life-threatening journey across such an arduous landscape. They simply summarize a
visual double discourse that INS operations have stark as the juxtaposition of two levels of
signification when talking about danger: the danger of the exterior, a natural gatekeeper of the
border and the danger from the exterior, embodied in the figure of immigration as a north wide
beast-like horde in the wilderness. In other terms, these images represent the ability of the state
to manage and mold a national landscape as a constant state of exception. Exceptional or
marginal for the nation wholeness and susceptible to law exceptions. As the border radiates
infection, as a virus, it must be kept at bay. The remoteness, inhabitation of the Sonoran desert
functions as the perfect scenario for the spread out of the viral terror.
The obvious militarization of immigration policies has blurred the line between what
belongs to internal security and what belongs to external security of defense. This is how the
reading/seeing of victimization of the border crossing subjects goes back to the attacks of 9/11, a
second prologue in territorial security. Migrants deaths are put to collapse with the suicidal
feature of terrorism. If the previous suicidal criminal risks the own life for the sake of inflicting
damage to others, the crossing of the border as a life risk-taking act also participates on the same
group of connotation. As the attackers body of the 9/11 is literally read as weapon, its bodys
disintegration is inseparable from that of the victims bodies. If read figuratively (as in figures
and in metaphor), death of the suicidal bomber, as well as the migrants death, comes to signify
the disintegration of another bodily integrity, that of the nation. The image of the migrant has
been reconstructed in the 2000s as an odd correlate of the terror imagination, an image that
stems from State racism. The migrant subject transgressing the human instinct of life performs to
the eyes of population an attack to the body of us. It is an image that has a mediatic
background (Hill, 2005) and that produces a feared life threat to those who witness it. It is not
Johannes 8
fortuitous that 2001s events enforced the relevance of the border as territory, even though the
attacks didnt actually cross any territorial boundary. What is highlighted instead is a kind of
danger that signifies the idea of illegal migrants crossing-and dying by own will- in the national
desert. (McDorman) If attempting against the own life is an unnatural drive derived from the
crossing of the border, nature would be put to fight on the side of the biopolitical intent of the
state to keep the natural order on national territory. The generation of risk at the border is a
double-edged weapon that, through risking life of others, produces internal risks as means of
security. If crossing the geopolitical border-without the required documentation- is a life-in
itself-threatening attempt, it means as well a threat to the ability of the State to manage life. For
Foucault (2003) this is how a biopolitical State operates, with racism as its main mechanism of
power. Biopolitics is a politics that is organized by and for the control and regulation of life. It
is informed by a discourse on life that is about life as much as it appears, strategically, to belong
to life itself, as if it were a natural sacred, invulnerable value, the power can be exercised in
such a way that it is capable of suppressing life itself. And therefore, to suppress life itself
insofar as it is the power that guarantees life (253). This is to say that a biopolitical crossing or
damaging invasion on the part of the migrant serves the state in its anti-immigration policies to
actually promote life as a means of defense. The Other in this sense will be killed in a way that is
allowed to die to promote the health and well being of the nationhood. In order to decide
which lives to save (make live) and which ones to dispose (let to die) racism is introduced as
a sort of tool for arbitrary selection (which is thought to be a kind of natural selection). Racism
would allow the power of killing as the justification for preserving life, racism makes it possible
to establish a relationship between my life and the death of other that is not military . . . but a
biological-type relationship (255)
Johannes 9
On the other hand, life of national population has to be in risk to enable that sovereign
power to be adjudicated the right over life. When people choose a sovereign power they are
choosing it to control their own death, forced by threat or need (241). According to Foucault,
the sovereign power -enabled by the will of population- is simply and crudely the power to kill.
He puts it this way: Sovereign powers effect on life is exercised only when the sovereign can
kill . . . it is at the moment when the sovereign can kill that he exercises his right over life (240).
The expansion of security agents, walls, technologies of vigilance-financed by the largest budget
for border security ever contemplated by the Congress- retake a disciplinary mechanism of the
sovereign that conclude on a mechanism of controlling population. In this power transition, the
territorial logic of the 90s acts in a terror-driven logic.
Horror in this case then is constructed by metaphors of the vital, which are metaphors of
the viral; it is bound up with everyday vitality, from the conservancy of the population as human
species (control of life itself) to the inviolability of the nations skin. The sovereigns prerogative
to revoke life of its subjects in order to guarantee them to live (or live well) conforms an efficient
economy of health as economy of death, in which life is understood as default. Life on this side
of the border is lived as the reverse of others death, thus, life is there to be taken and death of
others is a latent presence that guaranties it. Foucault explains: The fact that the other dies does
not mean simply that I live in the sense that his death guarantees my safety; the death of the
other, the death of the bad race, or the inferior race (or the degenerate or the abnormal) is
something that will make life in general healthier: healthier and purer (255). This way, the
migrant as the transgressor and a threat to the power of the sovereign, as viral and synonym of
unhealthy is not a specific subject or subjectivity, but it is considered as a factor for the bad
Johannes 10
race, within many other marginalities at stake. I will retake this point further with TIT in
relation to the concept of transborder as transreal.
Gradual border enforcement shifts in securitization from the early 2000s have
transformed the perception of cartographies of the US nation, in which the mentality of
homeland has demanded the imperative for borderland security. Considering cartographies
as imaginary imagery is recognizing that territory is not only out there as a neutral text, but
instead is made up by shapes imposed over it. Moreover, these shapes are ideated by power
discourses and given the ideological and institutional practices, which inform each other, through
which spatio-temporal models of identity-difference are created. The expansive outdoors held in
map discourse is not innocent or inoffensive as in the word nature. Contrarily, it comes from
the construction of sovereignty, which is built upon the base of violence. It is in this way that
cartographies are in fact violent cartographies (Shapiro, 1997), historically developed,
socially embedded interpretations of identity and space that constitute the frames within which
enmities give rise to war-as-policy (ix). This way, the pieces of cartography made by Humane
Borders and TIT are part of a bigger picture in these geographies of enmities of the US. The
desert area and its consequences, considered natural for the human is part of a sovereign
mapping discourse of securitization, one that has involved forces, institutions and agencies that
move bodies into violent encounters and that it has implied the identification of foreign bodies to
be dangerous in the association with historical antagonisms or, according to Pratt (1992), with
contact zones
2
. On the other hand, the Border Patrol efforts of border operations to extirpate

2
A contact zone understood as combat zone. Pratt defines it as The space of colonial
encounters, the space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into
contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion,
radical inequality, and intricable conflict (6)

Johannes 11
focuses of exterior penetration have succeeded to move points of entrance desert-ward, intending
to make the Other more territorializable, as well as terrorizable.
If the events of 2001 established a landmark on anti-terrorist measures, the answer that
the state gave to the unexpected terrorist threat-that of the volatile suicide attack- was to
rapidly force terror down to earth. A clear delineation of the border in the map means an effort to
concrete and delimitate the vastness of danger, gain knowledge over it, overpower it. The
urgency to territorialize the terror that threatens from outside is intimately bound up with the
anxieties of the viral unpredictable agency. Likewise, the inability to localize and predict viruses
creates a viral affect, a feeling of impotency; not knowing where the threat comes from as
terrorism, creates a viral affect, which urges the massive population of the nation to reactivate
the racist biopolitical Sovereign as a means of security. As Clough and Puar (2012) define it If
the virus can invoke anxieties about trespassing borders, the containment of contagion or failure
thereof, the viral can instigate a panic around measure or measuring that takes us beyond human
perception, consciousness, and cognition to the incalculable or the yet-to-be-calculated (15).
This mysterious threat, which hides in the great outdoors is itself a mythical mystery and
incommensurability of death. Death itself, in contrast with life itself, cannot be managed by
power because death exceeds its reachability. Foucault sees it beyond the reach of power, the
moment when individual escapes all power, falls back on himself and retreats, so to speak, into
his own privacy. Power no longer recognizes death. Power literally ignores death (248) Beyond
the threat of death and the ability to kill, the biopolitic State loses its power. If the danger is not
territorizable (knowledgable and to the reach of the sovereign) it is not terrorizable and thus it is
out of reach of control. The outdoors where the US Border has landed and been mapped defines


Johannes 12
the separation of the Global North from the Global South and is a creation that reifies a
landscape of fear in service of such power. It is defined by a social relationship that conceives it
as a foreign, desolated other space.
In contrast with this discourse, though, the naturalness of any specific outdoors can be
seen- from the perspective of a post-metaphysical theory- as speculative. Object-Oriented
Philosophy (OOP) has tried to develop comprehension of reality in a dehumanized way, where
human and non-human actors create relations and new realities and must be treated
symmetrically or democratically (Latour, 1999). Objects, in this way, exceed our knowledge and
further, causes are not any more understood as physical causes, as they are in the maps. A split
of nature from culture, they argue, has served a modern western ethnocentric narrative to expose
nature as natural and laws as lawful, even if they deploy a constant state of exception. On the
contrary, the possibilities of relationship are so ample that nature no longer needs to be thought-
or governed- by human power. Quentin Meillasoux in After Finitude (2006) announces that it is
possible to recover a Great outdoors, as she refers to the utterly foreign territory that exists
and subsists by itself independently of the relation of the human to it. As she puts it, there is no
reason for anything to be or remain thus and so rather than otherwise . . . Everything could
actually collapse: from trees to stars, from stars to laws, from physical laws to logical laws; and
this not be by virtue of some superior law whereby everything is destined to perish, but by virtue
of the absence of any superior law capable of preserving anything, no matter what from
perishing (53) The Great Outdoors reconsiders death as the same type of non-apprehendable as
any other thing, thus it disclaims the power over death that the State takes up and that population
permits. On the other hand, by rising everything, including nature and culture, human and non-
human things, material and ethereal to the same level of agency, the Great Outdoors where
Johannes 13
everything is held, redeems the anxiety of unexpectedness. There is no necessity of events or
laws to be governed, everything is just chaotic becoming-that is to say, a becoming governed by
no necessity whatsoever (226).
If OOP brakes with ethnocentrism there is still one obstacle to sort about the democracy
of objects and avoidance of the human: it lacks political investment. It risks to seeing everything
in an a-cultural way, which can easily unaware the inequalities that already inhabit the World.
Issues of gender, race and class can pass unnoticed. In the context of object-approach to reality,
Micha Crdenas has proposed the transreal, a concept that stems from philosophical interest in
realism in that it is speculative and avoids ethnocentrism, but installs a politics of being. For her
reality is opened through creative political imagination. As Zach Blas says in the introduction to
her book, if we want to think and live reality, change reality, embody it, fight exploitation and
violence and discover its astounding, incredible multiple dimensions, then participating in the
aesthetic and political construction of making realities that are human and beyond is a promising
and empowering practice that can make life livable (16) Crdenas with the Transreal contests
the biopolitical violence concerning all the bad race, starting from her own body, to the body
of all racialized, genderized and classified otherness of that society that must be defended,
within which the migrant is one. It intends to multiple and mixed realities through three main
operations: reality construction, transreal performativity and transreal technologies, which I will
attempt to analyze in reference to the Transborder Immigrant Tool.
The Transborder Immigrant tool by the Electronic Disturbance Theatre Collective,
leaded by Micha Crdenas, is an attempt to unbalance the subjacent metaphysics that underlies
the division map-human. Its political drive lies in the capacity of the tool to revert hierarchies of
power over knowledge. From the bi-dimensional nature of the map to the multidimensional
Johannes 14
access to a virtual GPS, the migrant is confronted with the materiality of its own
subjectivity/objectivity, as the transborder tool is designed to interact with the body in all stages
of territorial border crossing. First, it puts in play the relation of the body with territory as Great
Outdoors and contests the geopolitical imaginaries of landscape, which has drawn migrants (or
any marginality) as already dead to society. Second, it creates a relation to the representation in
GPS format, which also depicts the points of hydration and Border Patrols rescue, but doesnt
assume a pre-design path to follow. It doesnt assume that the migrant walks towards its
supposed salvation, but instead it just equips the person with cartographic information. It is in
sum a tool that puts the person who crosses on awareness of what has been created, knowing that
points of water are also points of patrolling and are also points of death. Finally, it connects the
walking creative human to an object to walk with; the relation to the object itself sensitizes the
correlation between human and human-made. It reinforces the fact that the human body is
disarticulable, as well as the hand can disregard any object. If other maps, including Humane
Borders ones, recreate conditioned reflects of racist force to a cartographic imaginary, the
Transborder contests it by allowing contesting reflects on the part of the migrant subject. The
migrant relates to the TIT as a tool of cartography that can be or not be necessary to a vernacular
human action, walking in the desert, but also relates to a tool that has deliberately kept from its
original function, being a phone, to become something else and that generates incommensurable
relations in the world. Besides the navigational utility of TIT, it has also been installed on a
module that throws poetry along the way. Verses of encouragement would appear after certain
amount of hours, days, or weeks. In Crdenas words, it is a gesture that provides poetic
sustenance, to enact a space of hospitality and to welcome the traveler into a new space (2). In
the measure that the traveler walks into hostile environment of the desert, the tool counteracts the
Johannes 15
countdown clock of death with the addition of new realities. The heterochrony of the desert calls
for a temporally triggered poetic intervention that reflects on the time of crossing as a time of re-
creating, of becoming durational performance, where tool and hand and will conflate. The tool
or equipment functions or executes its specific being in a way that escapes full apprehension by
the human, even had been created by human, even serving humanity. The projection of utility
and even the projection of inutility (an outdated cellphone is projected as trash) are dis-attached
from the object itself and instead it becomes plain speculation, a tool being (Harman, 2002). In
the same way, the person crossing the border becomes something else to the extent that walks
with the tool that new space of being.
Crossing the border is an attempt of a body, in relation with the Great Outdoors to
transit to a new space, a transnational space. Addressing transgender phenomena, Stryker,
Currah and Moore in their introduction to a WQS issue (2008) open up the transit or transition
action to crossing of all types of borders, a call not to identify, consolidate, or stabilize a
category or class of people, things, or phenomena that could be denominated trans, as if certain
concrete somethings could be characterized as crossers, while everything else could be
characterized by boundedness and fixity (11). Following this precept, Micha Crdenas
conceives the trans in the word transborder as well as in transgender, as a crossing imbued in
hope and bravery to find a better life that cannot be otherwise, in spite of the violence inflicted
over this sole process, but also in political resistance to this violence. In a way, as she says, this
hope is a hope of the unknown. The premise revitalizes a viral politics in regard to the
foreigner subject, whose unknowledge is not its foreign capacity but a stage of recreating of
the self and also a call to un-know the hegemonic Knowledges, which have fixed unequal reality
as the one and only attainable category. The migrant in its travel is faced with the unknown for it
Johannes 16
is inevitable faced with the Great Outdoors; for what the resistant body of the migrant is going to
be is a speculation that doesnt have other option that recreate itself over and over to live in
eternal transition; for there is no more real governance over the life or death of his or her persona
in the unlawful terrain that emerges from illegal crossing; and because the day the migrant dies,
in the border or having crossed it is itself a crude response to biopolitics of racism. Calling
attention to the migrant as a trans-defined subject repositions subjectivity in the violent
cartographies. A given for dead mass is this way a given for transformed.

Fig 1.
Johannes 17
Figure 2
Johannes 18

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