Tucson artist devotes decade to placing crosses where migrants died, says don't look away

Álvaro Enciso leaned over a map spread on the hood of an SUV, somewhere outside the Southern Arizona ghost town of Ruby, in search of an unmarked road where an unidentified migrant’s remains were discovered in June.

The 78-year-old artist and his crew of volunteers were seeking the exact place the man died in order to mark it with a yellow cross, part of Enciso’s long-running art installation project called “Donde Mueren Los Sueños” — Where Dreams Die.

The cross isn’t a comforting religious symbol for Enciso, who says he isn’t a very religious person. It’s a way to lend visibility to an ongoing tragedy that’s invisible to most. It’s a reflection of the brutality of death by exposure, like those sentenced to die by crucifixion during the Roman Empire.

And, he says, it’s an indictment of those who turn a blind eye to the mounting death toll in the Southern Arizona desert.

As much as he wants to honor those who lost their lives, he also wants to confront Americans with a harsh reality: the migrant-death crisis that advocates say is the inevitable result of U.S. border-enforcement policy, and lawmakers’ decades-long failure to enact immigration reform that could stop or slow the mass-fatality event unfolding here.

“In a way we’re all complicit, because we haven’t been able to stop it,” said Enciso, who migrated to the U.S. from Colombia in the 1960s. “There’s a story here; the story of a very embarrassing chapter of American history, a very sad chapter of American history, that we did not treat our neighbors properly.”

On Tuesday morning, Enciso and his crew of six, including friends and volunteers from the Tucson Samaritans, set off at 7 a.m. from Borderlinks in downtown Tucson.

By the time they leaned across the hood of the Toyota 4Runner, searching the map and a GPS navigation device for clues, Enciso and his team had already been out for six hours, traversing unmaintained rocky roads and steep terrain that pushed the limits of their four-wheel-drive vehicles.

It was the third cross installation of the day. With highs only in the 90s, it’s an easier day than usual for Enciso, who has spent each Tuesday for the past decade placing his hand-made crosses in the desert.

“It’s not an easy thing to do every Tuesday. It’s a lot of work, it’s a lot of bad roads,” he said. “It leaves me with a whole bunch of emotions. ... But it’s what I do on Tuesdays. That became part of my life.”

The unknown migrant’s cross

After realizing they had backtracked too far, the group hopped back into their dust-covered SUVs and continued down a dirt path through the green high-desert terrain.

Fifteen minutes later they found the unknown migrant’s final resting spot, within sight of a remote water-catchment tank and surrounded by manzanita shrubs, juniper trees and barrel cactus.

The team dug a hole for the yellow cross under a tall alligator juniper. Placing the cross in the hole, they surrounded it with quick-dry concrete and water, mixing until it began to set. Enciso stepped back and directed his friend, Peter Lucero, to tilt the cross a little further back to get it straight. The volunteers gathered rocks to stabilize the base of the cross, which Enciso had adorned with pieces of metal cut from debris left in the desert by migrants.

“This person is not yet identified; however, he has a name. We just don’t know it yet,” Enciso said, standing near the cross. “And he has a family. ... He had dreams and plans and feelings and ideas of wanting to be somebody in life. It just all ended here. This is a very tragic spot.”

The tranquil setting might have offered some consolation to the dying, he said.

But that should not comfort the living: Enciso wants his audience to recognize that the migrants he honors suffered an excruciating death — usually from overheating or dehydration — a horror obscured by clinical terms like “death by exposure” or “hyperthermia,” he said.

The unidentified migrants hit Enciso the hardest, those whose families are caught between wondering and grieving.

He estimates he’s placed 1,600 crosses since he began his project in 2013. It’s less than half the known number of undocumented migrants, identified or not, who have died in the Arizona desert.

He knows he’ll never be able to honor them all.

“I don’t have enough life in me to finish,” he said.

Secular symbol

Enciso says he allows his friend Lucero, a devout Catholic, to drape a rosary across his crosses. But for Enciso the symbol is secular, and its meaning is multifaceted: The cross’ vertical line represents migrants in life, vital and upright. The horizontal represents their position in death.

At the two lines’ intersection, Enciso attaches a red dot made from clay that mirrors the thousands of red icons scattered across a digital migrant-death map created by Tucson nonprofit Humane Borders. Populated with data from the Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner, the map grows by the dozens each month, as more migrants’ remains are discovered and more red icons are added.

The clay red dot is the physical representation of an abstract symbol, Enciso said.

More than 4,100 migrant deaths have been mapped by Humane Borders since 1990, and at least one-third of them have not been identified. Sometimes, the desert’s victims have been dead less than a day when they are found. Others are in an advanced state of decomposition.

In August alone, 25 fatalities were added to Humane Borders’ map, including eight people who were found within one day of their death, according to the nonprofit’s latest report.

Thousands more are still missing.

“The desert is full of bones, people we haven’t been able to find yet,” Enciso said.

Reports of migrant deaths began surging in the early 2000s, as the Clinton-era border enforcement policy of “prevention through deterrence” channeled migrants into increasingly remote areas of the desert.

Before 2000, the medical examiner’s office in Pima County received less than 20 bodies of undocumented migrants each year, said Dr. Greg Hess, chief medical examiner for Pima County. In 2000, the number shot up to 71. In 2002, the office received 146 sets of migrant remains.

Now, the medical examiner receives on average 170 migrant remains each year. In 2005, the office ran out of space in its 1989 building and began relying on refrigerated trucks to store remains. The county has begun construction on a new building to accommodate the added storage demands, Hess said.

Trauma fatigue

Well-intentioned journalists have come and gone, said Hess, who estimates he’s had more than 1,900 conversations with reporters over the years. They publish lengthy features, investigations or documentaries highlighting the tragedy and spotlighting victims, seeking to center those whose humanity can get lost in fast-paced breaking news reports on the immigration crisis. They detail the tortured experience of those who die from exposure.

Despite those efforts, nothing has changed, Hess said.

“It’s kind of numbing,” he said on Thursday. “There’s kind of a mental fatigue with it. You see people’s rediscovery of the issue time and time again.”

Yet, he said, “it has no impact in the number of decedents that we’ve found. People’s attention to the issue waxes and wanes over time.”

Enciso understands the sentiment. His project has been ongoing for 10 years, garnering national and international attention. Yet the deaths continue, even accelerating in recent years.

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But like the northward journey of the migrants he honors, Enciso’s art project is rooted in hope, he said.

“Things are getting worse,” he said in an interview from his Menlo Park home in Tucson earlier this month. Yet, he said, “you have to be hopeful. You cannot let go. Everything that I make has that intentionality, that things will get better.”

Julian’s cross

Earlier in the day last Tuesday, headed toward their first set of GPS coordinates, Enciso’s three-vehicle caravan reached Amado on I-19, then veered west through Arivaca before continuing south to the border. The group made a wrong turn on the unmarked dirt roads and ended up bouncing down a roller-coaster steep stretch of rugged road for the next half hour.

Enciso shifted into four-wheel drive, shutting off the air conditioner so the vehicle didn’t overheat, and warned his passengers to “hang on” as he urged the SUV up and down steep passes.

Close to 10 a.m., he finally met up with a tidy road running parallel to the imposing border wall, a clean line blasted into the mountainous terrain by contractors building this segment of the wall in the final months of the Trump administration.

The team disembarked and followed GPS coordinates into the desert to where 20-year-old Mexican migrant Julian Xochiquiquisqui Tlehuactle was found on July 1, 2013, less than a week after his death from exposure, likely hyperthermia, according to the Pima County medical examiner’s office.

The red cross they installed is within sight of the border line, prompting Enciso to imagine how difficult must have been the trip through Mexico, for Julian to have only made it this far.

Migrants’ journey through the Sonoran Desert is so perilous it should be impossible, said Diane Noonan Pothast, volunteer with the Tucson Samaritans. Pothast has been accompanying Enciso on his trips for about five years, she said in a Friday interview.

“People go on faith,” she said. “Some people are out of water and don’t have shoes before they even cross to the other side of the border.”

Lizbeth’s cross

The team continues on to a nearby site, also in view of the wall, where the body of Mexican national Lizbeth Sanchez Ramirez, 36, was discovered in July.

She was found less than three weeks after her death from hyperthermia, according to the medical examiner’s report, based on her body’s state of decomposition and the partial skeletonization of her cranium.

Enciso and his team take a moment to search the area for any signs the deceased, or other migrants, were there. Often, they find bones, discarded food containers, clothing or empty water bottles.

In 2018 Enciso’s team found a decomposing body on one of their trips. Enciso remembers the migrant — later identified as a woman from Guatemala — was wearing new brightly colored sneakers for her trip.

“There was still the smell of death there,” he said.

The trauma of it was too much for one of his team members, who afterwards decided to step away from the project, Enciso said.

On this day, the group finds clumps of silky black hair at the GPS coordinates marking Lizbeth’s place of death, the dark strands still gleaming even resting in the yellow dirt.

Medical examiner Hess said it’s “highly likely” the hair belonged to Lizbeth, as her head was uncovered when she was found and bodies tend to decompose quickly in the desert, as mummification sets in.

Scattered by scavenging animals, parts of recovered migrants’ bodies are often missed during the collection process, Hess said. Reviewing forensic photos, he said Lizbeth’s skull only had some hair remaining on the back of her head.

Both Julian and Lizbeth’s remains have been returned to their families.

As Enciso’s team installed a green cross for Lizbeth, Pothast of the Samaritans scouted the area to see if water bottles she’d dropped there previously needed to be replaced. The volunteers who accompany Enciso often take the opportunity to place water that could be the difference between life or death for future travelers.

“When we put up a cross, I think the person the cross is for is going to save lives because now, we’re going to put water there,” Pothast said. “Now, we’ll check on the cross and see if there’s (another migrant’s) trail.

“In the big picture, I think these folks will end up being heroes in a strange way. They sacrificed their life, and they are going to save other people.”

The Samaritans have been putting out water for migrants for 20 years, Pothast said.

“The system needs reconstructive surgery, and we’re putting Bandaids on it,” she said. “But Bandaids help. They’re not the solution, but we’re going to keep doing that. It’s never over.”

Shared dreams

Back at the vehicles, the group is close to the spot where the 30-foot-tall border wall abruptly ends, as the mountainous terrain becomes impassable. To the west, a large break in the border wall has only low-lying vehicle barriers to accommodate the ephemeral wash there, where floodwaters rush across the border during storms.

Floodgates and breaks are installed in various points along the wall out of necessity: Powerful floodwaters and debris could damage or topple the wall without the openings.

As Enciso’s group prepares to leave, two young men on the Mexican side speak across the break in the border wall, while an energetic blue heeler flits around their legs. Before retreating out of view, they say they have a group of 10 migrants with them, including two children, and that they’ll wait until nightfall to cross.

Enciso has no love for the human smugglers, known as coyotes, who lead migrants here, possibly to their deaths. He notes that the young men were likely employed by a cartel and view the people with them as merchandise to be delivered.

In August, the Border Patrol encountered nearly 49,000 migrants who crossed the border between official ports of entry in the Tucson Sector — the highest number of all nine border sectors, according to figures released Friday by U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

Enciso doesn’t distinguish between migrants who turn themselves in to make a plea for asylum, and those who cross the border between ports of entry seeking to evade law enforcement. It’s impossible to know each individual’s reasons, he said.

When he legally migrated from Colombia in the 1960s, Enciso was easily able to obtain a resident visa. Today, that would be extremely difficult, he said.

“I would have had to make a big decision whether to make the trip illegally and to take the risk,” he said.

Enciso focuses on the humanity of all migrants, and he can’t help but recognize himself in their hopeful journey.

His art project is also a meditation on his own migrant experience: the dreams he had as a young man seeking to escape poverty, followed by years of working as a taxi driver and mopping floors in New York. Then, a period of homelessness before he was drafted into the Vietnam War, where he lost of sense of smell from inhaling napalm. He attended college on the G.I. Bill, before finding his place as a renowned artist.

Once, Enciso said, he was just as vulnerable as these migrants were in life. And even in their desert death scenes, in the scattered evidence of their final breaths, he sees himself reflected.

Looking toward the yellow cross under the alligator juniper tree, the final memorial of a long day, Enciso said, “This could have happened to me.”