The University of Arizona Press
July 23, 2026
What is the interplay between federal immigration policy and local practices of death care on the border, and the implications of policies that cause increased death tolls? In the latest University of Arizona podcast, Jennifer Rose Najera interviews Gabriella Soto, author of Border Afterlives: Migrant Deaths, Forensic Investigations, and the Politics of Haunting, the book that answers these questions.
In the interview, Soto, a contemporary archaeologist and teaching professor at Arizona State University, explained how her research project started: “I decided to focus my field work in Brooks County, Texas, where border crossing had moved from Arizona into Texas after 2011. Border crossing was concentrated Brooks County, which has a population of less than 7,000 people. And they documented that since 2009, there were at least one thousand of what were thought to be border-crossing deaths. . . . And the local officials investigating the deaths were doing the best they could, they didn’t have medical background [to determine how people died], . . . but were just burying the people without investigation who they thought were undocumented border-crossers. And when this got national attention, they tried to reform their ways, but there was a lack of resources.”
Listen to the entire podcast here.
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.
