Echoes in the Desert: Digging Out the Disappeared in the Digital Age

This article explores the relationship between new media, memory, and materiality, through an analysis that focuses on three digital projects: Marco Williams's The Map of the Undocumented, Ivonne Ramírez’s Ellas tienen nombre (“They have a name”), and John Craig Freeman’s Border Memorial: Frontera de los Muertos. These projects were developed in response to the migration crisis at the US/Mexico border and Ciudad Juárez’s feminicide. Taking advantage of the possibilities offered by “thick mapping” and augmented reality, they locate and give visibility to the migrants who have died while crossing the Arizona desert ( The Map of the Undocumented and Border Memorial ), and to the hundreds of girls and women who have been murdered in Ciudad Juárez since 1985 ( Ellas tienen nombre ). Drawing from the works of Gabriel Giorgi, Judith Butler, Doreen Massey, and Avery Gordon, this article argues that the three projects store, mobilize, and memorialize “digital remains” that produce a form of spatial and temporal disorientation, complicating distinctions between presence and absence, materiality and immateriality, and proximity and distance. Through operations of haunting and re-membering, these remains make users “lose their grounding” and, in the process, become affected by others who, though anonymous, physically distant, missing and/or dead, feel familiar, proximate, and urgent. They thus shed light on new cartographic practices that productively reconfigure our understanding of memory, space, and global ethics, and that invite us to consider what a “geography of care and responsibility” could look like.