Álvaro Enciso, a Colombian artist, based in Tucson, Arizona, has already installed more than a thousand crosses in the desert in remembrance “of the places where the dream of these people ended”.
In 2022, a record number of migrants attempted to cross the border between Mexico and the United States. They were more than two and a half million. Among them, 853 lost their lives during this crossing, double the number of previous years. In Arizona, in Tucson, Álvaro Enciso, Colombian artist, launched an original project to honor their memory.
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His project was baptized:where dreams die“. It involves placing brightly painted crosses where bodies of migrants have been found. Enciso explains that when he started ten years ago, he was struck by the fact that these Migrants’ deaths were considered insignificant.There is a geographical dimension to this indifference: they are deaths hidden by the desert, where no one ventures except migrants.
“The desert keeps a secret: there are people dying there. So I wanted to mark the places where the dream of these people ended, where their American dream failed”, explains the artist. Álvaro Enciso attributes these deaths to the increasingly severe policies of the authorities which, according to him, force migrants to go through the desert, where they know they will die.
More than a thousand crosses installed in ten years
To place these crosses, Enciso is based on the map drawn up by an NGO, Humane Borders, and by the coroners of Pima County, in Tucson. This map shows, across the entire region, the exact location where bodies were found. In ten years, he has already placed more than 1,000 crosses. However, 3,700 corpses have been discovered in the Sonoran Desert. The task is therefore still immense. During the week, the artist paints very simple crosses which, according to him, do not necessarily have a religious dimension, but which are a symbol. On weekends, he leaves to install them in the desert.
Regarding the crossing, migrants have to walk for several days if they want to escape the border patrol. The temperatures are extreme. In the summer it can be over 40 degrees and in the winter the nights are freezing. People die of dehydration or exhaustion. Álvaro Enciso imagined this project so that these dead do not fall into oblivion, to honor the courage of these people who left their whole lives behind.