By Molly Goldstein and Lauren Vissman
A large paper map, decorated with clumps of vibrant yellow and orange tags, spreads across a white wall in the backroom gallery of UC Santa Barbara’s Art, Design & Architecture Museum.
Four plastic work tables are set up at the gallery’s center. They beckon visitors to take a seat, inviting them to learn about the many individuals who have died trying to reach America.
Across from the tables, tattered, dirt-encrusted T-shirts of all different colors hang limply, yet boldly, in silent stillness.
It’s all part of Hostile Terrain 94, a political art installation that memorializes upwards of 3,200 migrants, all of whom died in their attempts to cross the Sonoran Desert at the Arizona-Mexico border.
In 1994, stricter immigration controls were implemented by the United States Border Patrol. Common ports of entry to the U.S. were no longer accessible for those wishing to migrate to the country, and many ultimately felt forced to travel through an inhospitable desert if they hoped to reach their destination. The ‘94’ in the exhibition’s title refers to this fateful year.
Hostile Terrain 94’s interactive approach sets it apart from other political art exhibitions. Visitors are encouraged to review information that is provided on spreadsheets, each section about a real-life victim who perished while crossing the border. They then inscribe the information onto a toe tag, which symbolizes the death of the individual they have read about.
The exhibit, also known as HT94, has already had a meaningful impact on the UCSB students who have participated in it since it opened in late January.
“It can be devastating to personalize and relate to these people,” said Kristin Lynch, a second-year Environmental Science major visiting the exhibit between classes. “It’s super hard to write down and imagine the horrors and difficulties experienced by fellow human beings. It was an extremely eye-opening experience.”
The somewhat graphic process of filling out the toe tags can be a hauntingly educational experience for some students. “When you fill out the tags, there’s one portion that asks you to write down the body composition of the victim’s remains,” Lynch said. “Writing down details about the skeletal remains of an actual person was super jarring for me.”
HT94 is directed by anthropologist Jas De Leon and coordinated by the Undocumented Migration Project, an organization that studies covert movement between Latin America and the United States. The exhibition has been installed in over 150 different venues worldwide, with each one featuring actual artifacts recovered from sites along the border.
For second-year Spanish major Abby Barber, it was these artifactual elements that had the most profound effect on her. “Seeing the clothing on the walls and the belongings they had on display in the boxes was probably the most meaningful part for me,” Barber recalled. “Just knowing that actual people wore those clothes, tied those shoes, made it so much more real for me.”
To Barber, the objects on display in the exhibit help to close the gap between UCSB and the events on the Arizona-Mexico border. “It can be easy to shrug this issue off as something bigger than ourselves, or as beyond us, because most of us might not be directly involved in these tragedies,” she said. “Seeing those clothes sort of erases that distance and makes it close.”
As its entrance “Warning” sign might suggest, the HT94 exhibit does not pretend to be unaware of the jarring material it displays. Second-year Communication major Dylan Overboe says learning about an individual migrant’s sufferings and sacrifices challenges audiences to confront the tension between current American policy and the day-to-day reality of migration.
“The Hostile Terrain exhibit really forces you to look at some information that’s pretty uncomfortable, and really think about how we got to this point,” said Overboe. “But those feelings of discomfort can be super powerful, because it causes us to look at things from a different perspective. I think that can inspire change.”
The Hostile Terrain 94 exhibition is free for UCSB students, faculty, and community members. It is open Monday through Sunday, and will remain in the Art and Architecture Museum until Dec. 6, 2020.
Lauren Vissman is a third-year Biology major planning a Writing minor in Scientific Communication. She co-wrote this article with Molly Goldstein, a second-year student double-majoring in Communication and Film and Media Studies.