Curator's Choice: Jason De León and the Undocumented Migration Project
Join Anthropologist Jason De León and Fowler Chief Curator Matthew H. Robb to learn about De León’s research and travels as part of Hostile Terrain 94, a project that brings together ca. 3,200 handwritten toe tags representing migrants who have died trying to cross Arizona’s Sonoran Desert between mid-1990s and 2019.
Wednesday, Oct. 13, 4 p.m.
Free
Jason De León is an anthropologist whose research interests include theories of violence and Latin American migration. He is the executive director of the Undocumented Migration Project (UMP), a long-term study of clandestine border crossing intended to understand the phenomenon in a variety of geographic contexts, particularly those of Northern Mexican border towns and the southern Mexico/Guatemala border.
Join the Fowler’s Chief Curator Matthew H. Robb and Jason De León for a discussion inspired by photographs of the Mexican border in 1920 from the LA Times archive— currently displayed in The Map and the Territory exhibition. Learn about De León’s research and recent travels as part of Hostile Terrain 94, an art project that brings together ca. 3,200 handwritten toe tags representing migrants who have died trying to cross the Sonoran Desert of Arizona between mid-1990s and 2019.
Jason De León is professor of Anthropology and Chicana/o and Central American Studies at UCLA. He is executive director of the Undocumented Migration Project, a research-arts collective that seeks to raise awareness of the experiences of clandestine migrants; and president of the Board of Directors for the Colibri Center for Human Rights, a non-profit that seeks to identify and repatriate the remains of people who have died while migrating through the Sonoran Desert of Arizona. De León is the author of the award-winning book The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail (2015) and a 2017 MacArthur Fellow.
This program is online — RSVP
Image: Undocumented Migration Project, HostileTerrain 94, 2019.installation shot, detail of Toe Tag Wall (Phillips Museum of Art, Franklin & Marshall College). Image courtesy UMP.
