Border Afterlives
Regular price
€92.99
A01=Gabriella Soto
Author_Gabriella Soto
biopolitics
border humanitarian crisis
border migrant deaths
border patrol migrant deaths
borderlands deaths
Category=JBFH
Category=JHMC
Category=JPVH
death investigation
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_new_release
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
forensic anthropology books
forensic humanitarianism
immigration ethnography
immigration human rights
immigration studies
migrant death
participatory research methods
structural violence
undocumented immigrants stories
US-Mexico border crisis
Product details
- ISBN 9780816555086
- Weight: 454g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 31 Mar 2026
- Publisher: University of Arizona Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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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.
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.
Gabriella Soto is an associate teaching professor at Arizona State University’s Barrett, the Honors College. Gabriella studies death investigation for undocumented people on the U.S.-Mexico border and the contemporary archaeology of militarized borders.
