- As many of you know, I was arrested
in January of 2018 in Ajo, which is where I live.
There I'm a volunteer with a number of
humanitarian aid organizations and many of those folks
who do that work are in the audience today,
I'm just one of many.
I was arrested for, in the words of the official
border patrol complaint against me,
giving food, water, clean clothes, and beds
to two men, Jose and Kristian, from Central America,
and I was charged with the crime of harboring.
- [Female] Border activist Scott Warren walked out of an
Arizona courthouse on Tuesday after a jury
failed to reach a verdict in his case.
The human rights activists and geography professor was
accused of transporting and hiding undocumented migrants.
- So we've had a trial in which the jury was hung,
the judge declared a mistrial and the government
will try me again in November.
but we're not here to talk in details about the legal case
so if you wanna leave you can leave.
(audience laughing)
It is very interesting, on a personal note,
giving talks on these topics where before
maybe a handful of people would show up
and then suddenly this interesting experience
of being in the news, which is very new,
and exciting, and uncomfortable, and lots of people show up.
So landscape itself is thought of as an open book.
You can go out and you can read the landscape
in the same way that you can read a book.
You can get information from it,
you can come to understand it, but be careful what you infer
from what you read from the landscape itself,
because the landscape, it also contains power
and it conceals as much as it reveals.
So I think in the example of where I live, Ajo itself,
and if you go to Ajo, you drive to Ajo,
and you get to the middle of town,
and there's a very beautiful plaza there,
and if you go there and you start looking at that plaza,
you can learn a lot about the town
and you can make of inferences about the town
and about the kind of place that it is by that landscape.
The thing is, that plaza was built in about 1919
by an Anglo mining company,
(audience laughing)
headed up by John Greenway,
built by an architecture firm from Maine
that very much wanted to create a town
in the middle of the desert to evoke
a sense of place that did in fact not exist.
And they built it in this new company town,
and when they did that,
they essentially completely destroyed the old town of Ajo,
which was an O'odham Mexican settlement that was very old,
and they moved everybody in this new town with it's plaza.
And the town was deeply segregated,
and the plaza was in a part of town called American Town,
and there was separate districts
called Mexican Town and Indian Village.
And that plaza itself was segregated,
you could not be in it if you were non-white
and the town was built in that way for the purpose of
mining for business, for the extraction of resources.
And that sort of orderly separation of the races
and the creation of a hierarchy of race
was seen by the company as being necessary
to produce the commodity, in that case, copper.
So when you go to a place like Ajo,
the landscape is both an open book that can be read,
and you can learn things from it, you can look at it,
but it also conceals as much as it reveals
because it was built by somebody,
it was authored by somebody, and it reflects power,
and those power of relations.
And we could no doubt do that with any kind of landscape
that we see in the border region.
And you go to places like Oregon Pipe,
and Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge,
and other conservation areas, places that we often think of
as not being impacted by humans,
but they are still very much authored.
Right now, we are facing the construction of a 30 foot high
border wall across much of the desert of Oregon Pipe
and Cabeza Prieta, South of Ajo,
and I had a sense of nostalgia for the old border wall.
(audience laughing)
Which is funny and it's really troubling at the same time.
The vehicle barrier, the Normandy fence,
the old 12 foot pedestrian fence, the new 30 foot fence
is gonna have 24 hour lighting, and sensors,
and all this kinda stuff, and I had this sense of like
nostalgia when you saw those pictures in the news
of the new 30 foot high panels going up.
And so each time we sort of up the intensity
of the enforcement landscape in the border region,
we sort of normalize that landscape,
and we normalize the social relations that it represents.
So we normalize going through checkpoints,
we normalize the scrutiny that we get.
That becomes as much of a part of the landscape
at the Ajo plaza does, and often times we forget
what's really underpinning that and the social relations
that it's reflecting and creating as well.
I bring these things up because it's just an opportunity
for me to share my perspective and the kinds of things
that guide me in the ways that I live here in this place,
the ways that I explore the landscape,
think about this place and the history of migration
and the ways that that migration is both a central part
of shaping this place and is also, in turn,
shaped and changed by how our place
looks and how it feels as well.