Jason De León’s Undocumented Migration Project and Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive are two archival studies of the U.S.-Mexico border crisis that challenge hegemonic practices of documentation, including those historically privileged by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, human rights activism, and the field of digital humanities alike. Though De León and Luiselli have participated in human rights work while identifying migrant corpses and collecting detainees’ testimonies, both use counter-mapping to interrogate the dominant humanitarian move of restoring visibility and voice, or sight and sound, to human victims. After investigating the ways in which De León and Luiselli privilege visual and sonic counter-mapping, respectively, I model a more multi-sensory counter-mapping practice. Though this practice remains far from perfect, I argue that such digital counter-mapping crosses sight and sound in ways that defy historical divisions among humans and nonhumans. Accordingly, it decenters humans as the sole victims of the U.S.-Mexico border crisis.
Lacey Schauwecker (Sat,) studied this question.