The University of Arizona Press
April 3, 2026
The Latin@ Stories podcast features an interview with Gabriella Soto author of Border Afterlives: Migrant Deaths, Forensic Investigations, and the Politics of Haunting. Soto is an associate teaching professor and honors faculty fellow at Arizona State University’s Barrett, the Honors College. She is affiliated faculty with the Binational Migration Institute at the University of Arizona. Soto studies death investigation for undocumented people on the U.S.-Mexico border and the contemporary archaeology of militarized borders.
When asked about the concept of “migration materiality,” Soto said her study of twentieth-century conflict archaeology at the University of Bristol and her father inspired her: “As part of my master’s program, I studied mass graves in Spain and Latin America, and the objects that were on remains that helped identify people. And my father said to me, ‘don’t you think there’s some conflict archaeology here in Arizona?’ And this was in the early 2000s when areas on the border line were routes of migration. The change was noticeable, with people leaving objects behind. And so in this space, there were industrialized objects of war and walls, and right next to them there were things like tortilla wrappers, worn-out shoes, and backpacks with holes in them where people rubbed up against a cactus. It is such a laden place . . . with a combination of high tech and low tech material.”
Listen to the full podcast here, on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
About the book:
Border Afterlives begins with the undocumented individuals who die crossing the U.S.-Mexico border—deaths that are both preventable and politically produced.
Drawing on over a decade of ethnographic, participatory, and community-engaged research, author Gabriella Soto examines the postmortem journeys of these migrants through the fragmented infrastructure of medicolegal death investigation in the U.S. Southwest. She reveals how the state’s deterrence-based border policies not only generate death but also fail to provide adequate care for the dead. Soto argues that these deaths should be understood as structural homicides and that the forensic neglect they face is a form of ongoing violence.
Moving between the practical and the philosophical, Soto asks what it means to care for the dead and what society owes to those who die in its name. Through the lens of haunting, she explores how the dead continue to shape the living, not as objects of horror but as moral agents whose presence demands justice.
