Material Interventions on the US-Mexico Border: Investigating a Sited Politics of Migrant Solidarity

As changing border enforcement policies reshape patterns of migrant traffic across the US-Mexico border, the rapid increase of migrant deaths along the border has led to the development of solidarity organizing that provides humanitarian aid and alters the physical environment of the most deadly migration corridor along the US-Mexico border. Through their presence in this space, volunteers working with the organization No More Deaths are drawn in by the power of the events that take place around them and that they themselves take part in. Based on 12 weeks of participatory research with No More Deaths, this article follows the trajectories of individual activists who have become enmeshed in a material context that demands their intervention. This description treats the border space as an autonomous site, imbued with seductive potential that allows it to disrupt or reconfigure individual conceptions of political agency.