Presented here is a collection of photographs of a desert landscape. Tire tracks carve into and cross-hatch the desert floor, churning up the sand and stones. The horizon is punctuated in the foreground by cacti and by mountains in the distance. Not a lifeless surface, but rather densely populated by shrubs and trees—an arboreal desert. The images are around eye level, taken by someone standing at the various haphazard crossroads and pointing their camera in the direction of the digressing trails. Some of the tracks lead roughly straight into the horizon, disappearing into the brush, while others curve round and out of the side of the frame. A few seem to have been made with only one or two passes of a motorized vehicle, with the rest so trafficked that there is no way to know how often the same path is taken. In the latter instance, one can observe crushed, dead, or dying vegetation in the wake of the tires. The askew horizon line and sun spots suggest that the photographer is more concerned with documenting, capturing evidence of an event, than with the composition of the image. In one photograph, the slightest edge of a rearview mirror belies the photographer’s position: they themselves sit in a vehicle, snapping at least one of the shots out the driver side window. On the bottom right of each photograph is a time-stamp, together stretching across the morning of October 16, 2014. The intervals between each photograph—taken at 07:54, 11:21, 11:40, 12:07, 12:11, 12:17—suggests varying distances and a process of travelling from one site to the next. 

             I received this small archive of photographs in a cache of documents sent to me by the US Fish and Wildlife Services, in response to Freedom of Information Act request FWS-2020-00498. While the request pertained to the activity of Border Patrol agents, I submitted the request directly to land managers within the Department of the Interior in order to collect insight into US Border Control vehicle incursions across the 860,010 acres of the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, whose 56-mile long southern boundary abuts the US-Mexico border in southwest Arizona. This region is perhaps preeminent in the decades-long global turn of governments towards practices of harnessing topography and the elements to do the violent work of border securitization. It is also perhaps the most loudly pronounced in the way that the environment was intentionally subsumed into the architecture of 1990s immigration policy. The area is neatly characterized in the 1994 Southwest Border Enforcement Strategy as “hostile terrain, less suited for crossing and more suited for [border] enforcement,” and thus identified by the strategy’s designers as the appropriate place to forcefully shift migration routes via a process of militarizing Southwest border cities.

             The photographs document six instances of off-road incursions, and were taken by Cabeza Prieta Refuge staff in a small act of counter-surveillance between government agencies. FOIA FWS-2020-00498 also includes repeated instances of the refuge manager insisting that the incursions must be mitigated, recorded in meeting minutes and correspondence spanning the past decade.  “Several events have come to my attention this week that I find troubling…” one terse letter begins, sent in 2011 from the refuge manager to the nearby Well Station Border Patrol. The manager goes on to describe a diesel spill and the presence of heavy construction equipment and vehicles on roads within a protected wilderness area. He ends the letter with an invitation to review the 2006 Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, U. S. Department of the Interior, and U.S. Department of Agriculture, which establishes a shared commitment to a “spirit of cooperation” and communication between agencies in regards to efforts of border security, conservation, and land management. Ultimately, however, border security trumps conservation, and on the single word “exigent” within the MOU hinges ultimate discretionary powers on the part of individual Border Patrol agents. The continued violations evince the state’s approach to border enforcement these past thirty plus years: the shortest path, and at any cost—an accumulation of reactionary policies, destructive projects, and wanton divergences that culminate in the bulldozing of mountains to build an inane and incomplete wall across the desert, which was once itself the intended barrier, or the separating of children from their parents at the border with no established systems to reunite them.

             On a scorching day in July of 2019, while accompanying a volunteer search-and-rescue group on Cabeza Prieta, I strain to listen to a faint and low hum in the distance, and watch a trail of fine dust get kicked up and then dissipate slowly. The sound of the Utility Terrain Vehicle (UTV) fades as a Border Patrol agent races across the craggy valley that we have spent the past five hours traversing on foot. “To control a space you need to create differentiation in speed of movement,” says Eyal Weizman. Members of the group, who call themselves the Armadillos, lie in patches of sparse shade and sip warm water after carefully combing over the thorny desert floor of Cabeza Prieta’s Growler Valley. There is still a mile-long uphill trek out of the valley to reach the vehicles we’ve parked behind a locked gate. A Border Patrol pick-up truck then descends down the hill we dread climbing and pulls over beside our group to check permits and parking passes. He asks if everyone is fine to walk out, and the leader of the group explains that one of the Armadillos is spent, and could use a lift out of the valley. The request is denied, and the agent drives back up and out of view. It is 43ºC, and we have spent the morning searching for a missing man, whose disappearance was reported directly to the Armadillos by the man’s family. Instead, we find the remains of at least four others that have long been lost. This is a regular occurrence for the volunteers who search for those who have gone missing while crossing the border through the desert. It can take weeks to successfully walk across the Cabeza Prieta and the active military range north of it, before reaching the highway—Interstate-8. Unknown thousands have been slowed enough to die in the desert since the 90s. They did not vanish into thin air, but finding their remains is contingent on elements both natural and designed: monsoons carry bones to even more remote areas, permitting processes and limited access to Refuge roads or the bombing range hinder volunteer efforts, the criminalization of aid workers operates as a scare tactic.

             Here, the Sonoran Desert elongates the international borderline between the United States and Mexico into an expansive space used to deter, slow, or fatally halt the movement of individuals traveling across the border outside of state-sanctioned channels. The routes through the Sonoran Desert in southwest Arizona traverse federally managed land, such as Cabeza Prieta, the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, the Barry M Goldwater Range, and the Tohono O’odham Nation. The region is densely layered with the activities and intentions of various actors: Indigenous communities such as the Hia-Ced, Akimel, and Tohono O’odham, whose ancestors are buried on the land and cultural practices continue to occur on and with the land; the endangered pronghorn sheep, ocelots, jaguars, and long-horn bats; government agencies including US Fish and Wildlife Service, National Park Service, and Border Patrol; humanitarian organizations and search groups such as No More Deaths, the Ajo Samaritans, the Armadillos and Aguilas del Desierto; environmental and cultural organizations such as the Center for Biological Diversity, the Sierra Club, and International Sonoran Desert Alliance. Meanwhile, the overlapping cartographic boundaries of land designations, counties, and Border Patrol sectors project rigid lines over diverse mountainous desert habitats. Perforating those rigid lines is the latticework of tens of thousands of miles of jeep tracks, with disputed claims over the culprit responsible. The photographs are testaments to the ways that this desert has become subsumed into the United States’ border security apparatus, a vast assemblage of architecture, infrastructure, surveillance technology, personnel, and ideology that dictates who belongs where, how one is authorized to arrive, and if they should be allowed to survive or left to die.

             The adverse effects of off-road vehicles on desert ecosystems has been documented since at least the 1970s, when recreational off-road vehicles such as motorcycles and “dune-buggies'' proliferated across the American Southwest. Soil disruption caused by these vehicles is known to destroy vegetation leading to rapid erosion, redirect water flows from rare rainfall, and reduce the ability of the soil to absorb the sparse rainfall needed to sustain the ecosystem. The desert floor, whose soil took centuries to develop, is not likely to recover from one pass of an off-road vehicle. Meanwhile, there are over 8,000 miles of tire tracks scratched across Cabeza Prieta’s surface, inscriptions of speed and unmitigated access. While some are attributable to cross-border drug smuggling activity, many are the result of unauthorized incursions by Border Patrol deviating from authorized roadways in trucks and UTVs. The politics of speed are stark here, with certain groups forced to travel across the border on foot at a pace that is slow by design, “a sign and reproducer of their vulnerability, of their socio-economic, geographic, and political ecological marginalization,” writes Joseph Nevins; meanwhile, Border Patrol has at its disposal a fleet of trucks, UTVs, horses, and helicopters—an array of vehicles that can be read as “irreducible and mobile sites of power” as described by William Walters, who asks us to consider the mythopoetics of the road alongside the mediascape of what he terms “viapolitics” (Heller, et al. 2022). The field of viapolitics opens space to more closely consider the assemblage of modes of travel that define cross-border travel. The mediascape is of particular note here, where Custom and Border protection’s diverse fleet not only serves its function of allowing Border Patrol to access, survey, and control both the linear and vertical planes of the Southwest border, but also remakes agents in the image of contemporary cowboys, lone rangers in hot pursuit on horseback or four-wheeler, a classic American figure laying claim to the wild frontier in perpetuity. 

             The desert of the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge inspires densely layered perceptions and spatial imaginaries. It is the gaps and tensions between these conceptions that I seek to draw out here across a spatiotemporal framework. Contained within the photo-documents of treads on the desert floor are infinite time scales; from the ever-urgent pace of a “crisis” to the geologic time of soil disruption and centuries-long recovery. There is also a vast gap between “fragile ecosystem” and “hostile terrain,” with the former conception suggesting the need for management plans and protections, and the latter promoting the weaponization of pre-existing environmental conditions against specific groups of people.

             The military vision for the area is of “hostile terrain,” which pits a smooth space of strategy against the mountainous materiality of the borderlands. It is not readily apparent what exactly was meant when the Prevention Through Deterrence authors described the area as more suited for enforcement, but one might wonder if the false perception of this particular desert as flat and homogeneous space pervaded the premise of the strategy. For instance, the defunct billion-dollar Boeing project known as SBInet, a fever dream of surveillance technology intended to virtually monitor the entire Arizona-Sonora border, failed to fully account for the natural environment in its implementation. Israeli technology overcame such obstacles, and Integrated Fixed Towers designed by Israel’s Elbit Systems can now detect a moving person from nine miles aways. The pursuit of technological solutions at the border continues under President Joseph Biden. 

             Cabeza Prieta also evokes the colonial-historical premise of terra incognita in the early Spanish and early American settler narratives, an untouched and unknown land with little to offer beyond supposed Indigenous subjects to convert, copper to be mined, and a harsh path between more productive lands. Then, in 1939 the ensuing settler-colonial United States government issued Executive Order 8038 establishing the Refuge “for the conservation and development of natural wildlife resources,” primarily to protect the desert bighorn sheep whose numbers had plummeted as a consequence of settler activity. From this follows the current day conservationist perspective that recognizes rich biodiversity and the fragile ecosystem that makes the Sonoran Desert particular, in contrast to the generalized desolate void of the distant public imagination (while often relying on human-nature dichotomies and blame-game narratives surrounding ecological harm). 

             Extending beyond contemporary cartographies and linear histories, local indigenous traditions identify sacred sites within and beyond Cabeza Prieta as the shelters of gods and monsters—not an imaginary space of a historical event, but a living narrative rooted in the land. In addition to its spiritual and cultural significance, the arid land so easily dismissed as inhospitable once sustained entire communities. There are no longer people living on Cabeza Prieta. In the records of invaders and settlers, the region was understood as generally barren and hostile to life, notable only for the challenges it posed to crossing in order to access the Pacific coast by way of the infamous Camino Del Diablo. Yet, as historian and living descendent David Martinez has retraced, the colonial archives make some references to the indeginous Hia-Ced O’odham (In-the-Sand People), who have been called by many names: Hia Tatk Ku:mdam (Sand Root Crushers), S-o:bmakam (Apache-like, or nomads), or O’otkol Ha-Ku’adam (Zebra-tailed Lizard Eaters). For centuries they travelled across wide swaths of the Sonoran, appearing in the reports and journals of Spanish explorers, Jesuit priests, and then American settlers from the 17th century onward. Their struggles for recognition continue today, and their members presently stand trial for praying in the face of border wall construction on sacred sites. 

             O’odham perspectives of land and nature far exceed the narrow vision of United States conservation and border securitization policies. The criminalization of Indiginous land defenders for trespassing on O’odham land now controlled by the federal government makes these schisms starkly apparent, as does the limited scope of Environmental Assessments used to identify the potential environmental harm of border security infrastructure. An ongoing collaboration between Tohono O’odham elder Orphelia Rivas and researchers and architects Caitlin Blanchfield and Nina Valerie Kolowratnik has sought to articulate how this document's structure and scope fail to capture the true extent of the towers’ impact on O’odham spiritual and cultural practices, including the psychological impacts of living under constant surveillance, the hindrances of needing permits and documentation to move across ancestral lands, and the damage and disruption caused by extensive infrastructural interventions such as the addition or widening of access roads for tower construction. 

             Historically, O’odham practices of free movement across a vast arid landscape—for ceremony, trade, hunting and gathering—was inscrutable to the Spanish colonists and missionaries who repeatedly described the Hia-Ced O’odham as poor and hungry, or worse, as extinct. Yet extensive efforts have been made to dispute the settler claims that the Hia-Ced O’odham lived on nothing: they sustained themselves on shellfish from the Gulf of California, big game like the pronghorn sheep, and countless other foraged goods provided by the desert and its distant shores. The Hia-Ced O’odham’s historic movements across this land far predated the concept of national borders, yet when President Woodrow Wilson parceled the area for recognized tribes in the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act, the Hia-Ced O’odham remained illegible in their nomadism and thus undeserving of a land claim.

             Indigenous scholar Daniel Wildcat writes the “road ought to be the ultimate metaphor for Western civilization and modernity, for it is an ideological abstraction,…in the mind’s eye of “progressive” thinking “civilized” folks, there are no savannas, forests, canyons, mountains to be respected in building this road called “progress”; nor are there peoples living in these ecosystems that account for much—except as materials or resources for the road builders.” The off-road incursions documented in this collection of photographs challenge any notion of the road as a symbol of progress. They imprint the ground with the timestamp of “emergency,” an enduring post-911 state with little vision of the future beyond a ceaseless series of “crises” at the border. The photographs operate as pieces of evidence, not only between government agencies with conflicting missions, but also of the ways that the region has been redefined by the designation of cross-border travel as criminal behavior and the ensuing build-up of surveillance and militarization in response to these supposed crimes. And while the spectacle of the border continues, the illegibility of free movement persists, drawing our attention to a sense of absence in each of the photographs. It might be assumed that each incursion, if truly created in the course of “exigent circumstances,” is the marker of the pursuit, apprehension, and deportation of someone found walking unauthorized across the Cabeza Prieta—a moment of intensity and violence hardly contained by the archive.

Presented here is a collection of photographs of a desert landscape. Tire tracks carve into and cross-hatch the desert floor, churning up the sand and stones. The horizon is punctuated in the foreground by cacti and by mountains in the distance. Not a lifeless surface, but rather densely populated by shrubs and trees—an arboreal desert. The images are around eye level, taken by someone standing at the various haphazard crossroads and pointing their camera in the direction of the digressing trails. Some of the tracks lead roughly straight into the horizon, disappearing into the brush, while others curve round and out of the side of the frame. A few seem to have been made with only one or two passes of a motorized vehicle, with the rest so trafficked that there is no way to know how often the same path is taken. In the latter instance, one can observe crushed, dead, or dying vegetation in the wake of the tires. The askew horizon line and sun spots suggest that the photographer is more concerned with documenting, capturing evidence of an event, than with the composition of the image. In one photograph, the slightest edge of a rearview mirror belies the photographer’s position: they themselves sit in a vehicle, snapping at least one of the shots out the driver side window. On the bottom right of each photograph is a time-stamp, together stretching across the morning of October 16, 2014. The intervals between each photograph—taken at 07:54, 11:21, 11:40, 12:07, 12:11, 12:17—suggests varying distances and a process of travelling from one site to the next. 

             I received this small archive of photographs in a cache of documents sent to me by the US Fish and Wildlife Services, in response to Freedom of Information Act request FWS-2020-00498. While the request pertained to the activity of Border Patrol agents, I submitted the request directly to land managers within the Department of the Interior in order to collect insight into US Border Control vehicle incursions across the 860,010 acres of the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, whose 56-mile long southern boundary abuts the US-Mexico border in southwest Arizona. This region is perhaps preeminent in the decades-long global turn of governments towards practices of harnessing topography and the elements to do the violent work of border securitization. It is also perhaps the most loudly pronounced in the way that the environment was intentionally subsumed into the architecture of 1990s immigration policy. The area is neatly characterized in the 1994 Southwest Border Enforcement Strategy as “hostile terrain, less suited for crossing and more suited for [border] enforcement,” and thus identified by the strategy’s designers as the appropriate place to forcefully shift migration routes via a process of militarizing Southwest border cities.

             The photographs document six instances of off-road incursions, and were taken by Cabeza Prieta Refuge staff in a small act of counter-surveillance between government agencies. FOIA FWS-2020-00498 also includes repeated instances of the refuge manager insisting that the incursions must be mitigated, recorded in meeting minutes and correspondence spanning the past decade.  “Several events have come to my attention this week that I find troubling…” one terse letter begins, sent in 2011 from the refuge manager to the nearby Well Station Border Patrol. The manager goes on to describe a diesel spill and the presence of heavy construction equipment and vehicles on roads within a protected wilderness area. He ends the letter with an invitation to review the 2006 Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, U. S. Department of the Interior, and U.S. Department of Agriculture, which establishes a shared commitment to a “spirit of cooperation” and communication between agencies in regards to efforts of border security, conservation, and land management. Ultimately, however, border security trumps conservation, and on the single word “exigent” within the MOU hinges ultimate discretionary powers on the part of individual Border Patrol agents. The continued violations evince the state’s approach to border enforcement these past thirty plus years: the shortest path, and at any cost—an accumulation of reactionary policies, destructive projects, and wanton divergences that culminate in the bulldozing of mountains to build an inane and incomplete wall across the desert, which was once itself the intended barrier, or the separating of children from their parents at the border with no established systems to reunite them.

             On a scorching day in July of 2019, while accompanying a volunteer search-and-rescue group on Cabeza Prieta, I strain to listen to a faint and low hum in the distance, and watch a trail of fine dust get kicked up and then dissipate slowly. The sound of the Utility Terrain Vehicle (UTV) fades as a Border Patrol agent races across the craggy valley that we have spent the past five hours traversing on foot. “To control a space you need to create differentiation in speed of movement,” says Eyal Weizman. Members of the group, who call themselves the Armadillos, lie in patches of sparse shade and sip warm water after carefully combing over the thorny desert floor of Cabeza Prieta’s Growler Valley. There is still a mile-long uphill trek out of the valley to reach the vehicles we’ve parked behind a locked gate. A Border Patrol pick-up truck then descends down the hill we dread climbing and pulls over beside our group to check permits and parking passes. He asks if everyone is fine to walk out, and the leader of the group explains that one of the Armadillos is spent, and could use a lift out of the valley. The request is denied, and the agent drives back up and out of view. It is 43ºC, and we have spent the morning searching for a missing man, whose disappearance was reported directly to the Armadillos by the man’s family. Instead, we find the remains of at least four others that have long been lost. This is a regular occurrence for the volunteers who search for those who have gone missing while crossing the border through the desert. It can take weeks to successfully walk across the Cabeza Prieta and the active military range north of it, before reaching the highway—Interstate-8. Unknown thousands have been slowed enough to die in the desert since the 90s. They did not vanish into thin air, but finding their remains is contingent on elements both natural and designed: monsoons carry bones to even more remote areas, permitting processes and limited access to Refuge roads or the bombing range hinder volunteer efforts, the criminalization of aid workers operates as a scare tactic.

             Here, the Sonoran Desert elongates the international borderline between the United States and Mexico into an expansive space used to deter, slow, or fatally halt the movement of individuals traveling across the border outside of state-sanctioned channels. The routes through the Sonoran Desert in southwest Arizona traverse federally managed land, such as Cabeza Prieta, the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, the Barry M Goldwater Range, and the Tohono O’odham Nation. The region is densely layered with the activities and intentions of various actors: Indigenous communities such as the Hia-Ced, Akimel, and Tohono O’odham, whose ancestors are buried on the land and cultural practices continue to occur on and with the land; the endangered pronghorn sheep, ocelots, jaguars, and long-horn bats; government agencies including US Fish and Wildlife Service, National Park Service, and Border Patrol; humanitarian organizations and search groups such as No More Deaths, the Ajo Samaritans, the Armadillos and Aguilas del Desierto; environmental and cultural organizations such as the Center for Biological Diversity, the Sierra Club, and International Sonoran Desert Alliance. Meanwhile, the overlapping cartographic boundaries of land designations, counties, and Border Patrol sectors project rigid lines over diverse mountainous desert habitats. Perforating those rigid lines is the latticework of tens of thousands of miles of jeep tracks, with disputed claims over the culprit responsible. The photographs are testaments to the ways that this desert has become subsumed into the United States’ border security apparatus, a vast assemblage of architecture, infrastructure, surveillance technology, personnel, and ideology that dictates who belongs where, how one is authorized to arrive, and if they should be allowed to survive or left to die.

             The adverse effects of off-road vehicles on desert ecosystems has been documented since at least the 1970s, when recreational off-road vehicles such as motorcycles and “dune-buggies'' proliferated across the American Southwest. Soil disruption caused by these vehicles is known to destroy vegetation leading to rapid erosion, redirect water flows from rare rainfall, and reduce the ability of the soil to absorb the sparse rainfall needed to sustain the ecosystem. The desert floor, whose soil took centuries to develop, is not likely to recover from one pass of an off-road vehicle. Meanwhile, there are over 8,000 miles of tire tracks scratched across Cabeza Prieta’s surface, inscriptions of speed and unmitigated access. While some are attributable to cross-border drug smuggling activity, many are the result of unauthorized incursions by Border Patrol deviating from authorized roadways in trucks and UTVs. The politics of speed are stark here, with certain groups forced to travel across the border on foot at a pace that is slow by design, “a sign and reproducer of their vulnerability, of their socio-economic, geographic, and political ecological marginalization,” writes Joseph Nevins; meanwhile, Border Patrol has at its disposal a fleet of trucks, UTVs, horses, and helicopters—an array of vehicles that can be read as “irreducible and mobile sites of power” as described by William Walters, who asks us to consider the mythopoetics of the road alongside the mediascape of what he terms “viapolitics” (Heller, et al. 2022). The field of viapolitics opens space to more closely consider the assemblage of modes of travel that define cross-border travel. The mediascape is of particular note here, where Custom and Border protection’s diverse fleet not only serves its function of allowing Border Patrol to access, survey, and control both the linear and vertical planes of the Southwest border, but also remakes agents in the image of contemporary cowboys, lone rangers in hot pursuit on horseback or four-wheeler, a classic American figure laying claim to the wild frontier in perpetuity. 

             The desert of the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge inspires densely layered perceptions and spatial imaginaries. It is the gaps and tensions between these conceptions that I seek to draw out here across a spatiotemporal framework. Contained within the photo-documents of treads on the desert floor are infinite time scales; from the ever-urgent pace of a “crisis” to the geologic time of soil disruption and centuries-long recovery. There is also a vast gap between “fragile ecosystem” and “hostile terrain,” with the former conception suggesting the need for management plans and protections, and the latter promoting the weaponization of pre-existing environmental conditions against specific groups of people.

             The military vision for the area is of “hostile terrain,” which pits a smooth space of strategy against the mountainous materiality of the borderlands. It is not readily apparent what exactly was meant when the Prevention Through Deterrence authors described the area as more suited for enforcement, but one might wonder if the false perception of this particular desert as flat and homogeneous space pervaded the premise of the strategy. For instance, the defunct billion-dollar Boeing project known as SBInet, a fever dream of surveillance technology intended to virtually monitor the entire Arizona-Sonora border, failed to fully account for the natural environment in its implementation. Israeli technology overcame such obstacles, and Integrated Fixed Towers designed by Israel’s Elbit Systems can now detect a moving person from nine miles aways. The pursuit of technological solutions at the border continues under President Joseph Biden. 

             Cabeza Prieta also evokes the colonial-historical premise of terra incognita in the early Spanish and early American settler narratives, an untouched and unknown land with little to offer beyond supposed Indigenous subjects to convert, copper to be mined, and a harsh path between more productive lands. Then, in 1939 the ensuing settler-colonial United States government issued Executive Order 8038 establishing the Refuge “for the conservation and development of natural wildlife resources,” primarily to protect the desert bighorn sheep whose numbers had plummeted as a consequence of settler activity. From this follows the current day conservationist perspective that recognizes rich biodiversity and the fragile ecosystem that makes the Sonoran Desert particular, in contrast to the generalized desolate void of the distant public imagination (while often relying on human-nature dichotomies and blame-game narratives surrounding ecological harm). 

             Extending beyond contemporary cartographies and linear histories, local indigenous traditions identify sacred sites within and beyond Cabeza Prieta as the shelters of gods and monsters—not an imaginary space of a historical event, but a living narrative rooted in the land. In addition to its spiritual and cultural significance, the arid land so easily dismissed as inhospitable once sustained entire communities. There are no longer people living on Cabeza Prieta. In the records of invaders and settlers, the region was understood as generally barren and hostile to life, notable only for the challenges it posed to crossing in order to access the Pacific coast by way of the infamous Camino Del Diablo. Yet, as historian and living descendent David Martinez has retraced, the colonial archives make some references to the indeginous Hia-Ced O’odham (In-the-Sand People), who have been called by many names: Hia Tatk Ku:mdam (Sand Root Crushers), S-o:bmakam (Apache-like, or nomads), or O’otkol Ha-Ku’adam (Zebra-tailed Lizard Eaters). For centuries they travelled across wide swaths of the Sonoran, appearing in the reports and journals of Spanish explorers, Jesuit priests, and then American settlers from the 17th century onward. Their struggles for recognition continue today, and their members presently stand trial for praying in the face of border wall construction on sacred sites. 

             O’odham perspectives of land and nature far exceed the narrow vision of United States conservation and border securitization policies. The criminalization of Indiginous land defenders for trespassing on O’odham land now controlled by the federal government makes these schisms starkly apparent, as does the limited scope of Environmental Assessments used to identify the potential environmental harm of border security infrastructure. An ongoing collaboration between Tohono O’odham elder Orphelia Rivas and researchers and architects Caitlin Blanchfield and Nina Valerie Kolowratnik has sought to articulate how this document's structure and scope fail to capture the true extent of the towers’ impact on O’odham spiritual and cultural practices, including the psychological impacts of living under constant surveillance, the hindrances of needing permits and documentation to move across ancestral lands, and the damage and disruption caused by extensive infrastructural interventions such as the addition or widening of access roads for tower construction. 

             Historically, O’odham practices of free movement across a vast arid landscape—for ceremony, trade, hunting and gathering—was inscrutable to the Spanish colonists and missionaries who repeatedly described the Hia-Ced O’odham as poor and hungry, or worse, as extinct. Yet extensive efforts have been made to dispute the settler claims that the Hia-Ced O’odham lived on nothing: they sustained themselves on shellfish from the Gulf of California, big game like the pronghorn sheep, and countless other foraged goods provided by the desert and its distant shores. The Hia-Ced O’odham’s historic movements across this land far predated the concept of national borders, yet when President Woodrow Wilson parceled the area for recognized tribes in the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act, the Hia-Ced O’odham remained illegible in their nomadism and thus undeserving of a land claim.

             Indigenous scholar Daniel Wildcat writes the “road ought to be the ultimate metaphor for Western civilization and modernity, for it is an ideological abstraction,…in the mind’s eye of “progressive” thinking “civilized” folks, there are no savannas, forests, canyons, mountains to be respected in building this road called “progress”; nor are there peoples living in these ecosystems that account for much—except as materials or resources for the road builders.” The off-road incursions documented in this collection of photographs challenge any notion of the road as a symbol of progress. They imprint the ground with the timestamp of “emergency,” an enduring post-911 state with little vision of the future beyond a ceaseless series of “crises” at the border. The photographs operate as pieces of evidence, not only between government agencies with conflicting missions, but also of the ways that the region has been redefined by the designation of cross-border travel as criminal behavior and the ensuing build-up of surveillance and militarization in response to these supposed crimes. And while the spectacle of the border continues, the illegibility of free movement persists, drawing our attention to a sense of absence in each of the photographs. It might be assumed that each incursion, if truly created in the course of “exigent circumstances,” is the marker of the pursuit, apprehension, and deportation of someone found walking unauthorized across the Cabeza Prieta—a moment of intensity and violence hardly contained by the archive.