We’ve previously posted about Jason De León and his use of discards left through undocumented migration on the US/Mexico border to narrate the social, political, and geographical elements of one of the world’s largest ongoing modern-day migrations. He continues this work with a new publication in the Journal of Material Culture with the article “Undocumented migration, use wear, and the materiality of habitual suffering in the Sonoran Desert.”

We feel this work expands discard studies as a method by looking at things left behind by people crossing the boarder, as well as conceptually by linking affect to place-based objects to politics:

“In this article, I argue that the seemingly mundane things left in the desert are key to understanding the routinized and widespread forms of suffering that many border crossers experience, but often downplay. After more than a decade of crossing the Sonoran Desert on foot, many migrants…