The Desert: Vanishing Time and Sacred Landscapes

In 1994, the United States implemented Prevention through Deterrence (PTD)—a policy that further militarized the southern borderlands and redirected migration to the Sonoran Desert, leading to an unimaginable loss of life. While many scholars have written about this policy, they largely describe the desert as complicit with the government, its temperatures and remote landscape a weapon against people attempting to cross state borders. The author draws on theories of the sacred to understand how the Sonoran Desert escapes capture, meandering in ways that often defy and unsettle PTD. The chapter draws on water drops with humanitarian groups and interviews with Tohono O’odham and Hia-Ced O'odham activists to think about the desert as sacred, a meaning at odds with the profane world of metal beams, roadside checkpoints, and surveillance technologies. The desert, both positive and negative sacred, exceeds state attempts to turn its forces to utilitarian, profane ends.