On the day before Valentine’s Day this year, another of Alvaro Enciso’s simple wooden crosses was planted near Patagonia.
Yellow among the vivid red manzanita branches, it memorializes the passing of 26-year-old Juan Villegas Chilala, whose body had been found October 18 in upper Temporal Canyon.
The forces driving him to such a risky journey might have been the economic desperation of poverty, cartel violence in his world, corrupt local government, or increasingly, the effects of climate change on local agriculture, shelter and livability, or some combination of these forces.
This Temporal Canyon death site is among 16 that are mapped within seven miles of Patagonia. (See map above) It’s a significantly more local view than the eastern Santa Cruz County map that the PRT published in October 2022, showing roughly a hundred cases. The SC County map is, in turn, a small portion of Humane Borders’ red dot map for the whole of Arizona, now showing 4,177 cases between the Douglas area and Yuma.
Enciso’s ‘Where Dreams Die’ project is his continuing empathetic response to the deaths, as he remains focused on the mission of memorializing deaths that occur at places that would otherwise be soon forgotten by history.
All death sites have their own unique features. Two cases in this local map were unidentified, and of the remaining 14, three were female and 11 male. Among them were no children or teenagers, with the youngest being 23 and the oldest 61. The most recent date of discovery for the red dots shown here is December 28, 2023, up Little Casa Blanca Canyon. A cross was planted there in mid-January.
Migrants naturally choose their routes to avoid detection, so the red-dot crosses are generally not visible from paved roads. In the broader region, “vehicle events,” i.e. crashes, have caused deaths near the roadsides. East of Sonoita on SR 82, near milepost 36, a group of eleven brightly colored crosses is hard to miss, and SR 83 has two individual sites and two group sites near the pavement at Milepost 45.
In the updated map for the Patagonia area, the one cross near pavement sits along SR 82 as you head toward Nogales, on the right shortly past the T4 Ranch.
Eleven of the 16 red dot sites have been memorialized with crosses over the ten years of Enciso’s ‘Where Dreams Die’ project. On the map, these are indicated with a cross symbol added to the red dot. Most are in Coronado National Forest. Access to a couple on private land has been facilitated by permission from ranchers.
Of the five sites without crosses, one doesn’t yet have private owner’s permission for access, and three others are simply too hard to get to.
The fifth location that lacks a cross has been memorialized in a different way. It’s in a steep and ledgy wash about two miles north of Salero Rd., and has been documented by a 360-degree interactive video made by documentarian Alyssa Quintanilla. For her, this technique lets viewers directly experience the texture and feel of the places the various deaths occurred. Later this year, Quintanilla plans to post the video on her site, vistasdelafrontera.com/map-1, joining the many other pins she’s placed for migrant death sites in southern Arizona.
The Flux Canyon area has five sites, four marked with crosses. One body, discovered this past November, is high on Flux Canyon Rd., about a half mile down Alum Gulch from the Hermosa Project property. The other four bodies are lower in Flux Canyon, near the residential area, three of which were accessible for cross placement. Preservation of all five of these locations will very likely be in the NEPA (National Environmental Protection Act) discussions of South32’s application for a new access road through the Coronado National Forest.
One of the Flux Canyon sites, 23-0606, in the grasslands south of the residences, is where
Enciso’s scouts found small body parts that had not been included in the remains retrieved by law enforcement for transport to the Pima County Medical Examiner’s office (PCOME).
Identifying papers were in a wallet and backpack nearby, allowing tracking the migrant’s
sister’s address to a town in western Oaxaca State in Mexico. After placing the cross, these
discoveries were conveyed to the PCOME. Following their examination of the remains, what happened next was confirmed by Dr. Jennifer Vollner, a forensic anthropologist. She wrote, “We did end up identifying this individual as a collaboration with the Mexican Consulate here in Tucson and with the family’s cooperation. We were able to release this individual to a local funeral home to be repatriated.” This process brings them the tragic news that can nevertheless bring some emotional closure. For the whole team participating in this particular cross placement, it was a sobering and powerful moment about the reality of life in the Borderlands. Mauricio Sanchez Bautista was 54.
Circling back to Temporal Canyon, Juan’s dream ended roughly six miles north from
Patagonia, at an elevation of about 5,000 feet. The location was within 20 feet of the GPS
location that was part of the case information, within the accuracy of the digital geolocation process. Further confirming the location were clothing and food containers as well as a pair of bright purple latex gloves presumably discarded by the law enforcement team who had recovered the body.
This site, 23-3735, was under the spreading limbs of a fair-sized oak, a place cattle clearly
like also. The slope above the road commanded a postcard view of the snow-dusted summits of Mt. Wrightson and Josephine Peak. Always empathetic with the lives his crosses memorialize, Enciso quietly speculated on the end of this particular migrant’s dream: “To get here from the border, he’d probably have walked for about a week,” Enciso said. “This beauty would have been his last look at the world.”