The University of Arizona Press
Date: Thursday, April 9, 2026
Time: 3 p.m., MST
Place: Little Chapel of All Nations, University of Arizona, 1401 E 1st St, Tucson, AZ
, author of Border Afterlives: Migrant Deaths, Forensic Investigations, and the Politics of Haunting, will speak at the Little Chapel of All Nations, on the University of Arizona campus on April 9. In her talk titled “Death by Design: Border-Crossing Mortality and the Concept of Homicide,” she will reflect on decades of research about the mortality of undocumented border crossers (UBCs) in the U.S. Southwest. Her work highlights how the intent to impose a “cost” on would-be UBCs is central to deterrence-based border enforcement strategies.
Gabriella Soto is an associate teaching professor and honors faculty fellow at Arizona State University. She is affiliated faculty with the Binational Migration Institute at the University of Arizona. The Institute is a sponsor of this free-and-open-to-the-public event. Books will be available for purchase and author signing.
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. Border Afterlives offers a border-scale comparative account of forensic practices, critiques the limits of “best practices” in under-resourced systems, and calls for a reimagining of forensic humanitarianism grounded in reciprocity and dignity, beyond human rights. This is a book that insists on remembering the dead.
