A Matter of Waste and Bodies: Life, Death, and Materiality in the United States-Mexico Borderlands

Alyssa Quintanilla, PhD Candidate in Critical and Cultural Studies in the Department of English, received an inaugural Immersive Dissertation Research Fellowship (IDRF). These fellowships incentivize and support dissertation projects that involve substantial professional development and will likely result in dissertation formats other than the conventional proto-monograph.

We discussed her plans for her project, “A Matter of Waste and Bodies: Life, Death, and Materiality in the United States-Mexico Borderlands 1990 to the Present.”  Alyssa uses digital art and literature as a means of understanding and representing the realities facing migrants in the United States-Mexico borderlands at the intersections of policy, the environment, materiality, and migrant bodies.

We first talked about how she was collaborating with institutions and communities as part of her dissertation project. Alyssa said:

I’m planning on working with a few migrant aid groups in Southern Arizona to produce a digital memorial, currently entitled Vistas de la Frontera, for border crossers recovered in 2019. No More Deaths and Humane Borders both run water drops, search and rescues operations, and other migrant aid efforts in hopes of keeping people alive as they cross the harsh terrain into the U.S. I plan on devoting much of my time next year to working with these organizations while simultaneously creating a digital and interactive memorial. While the piece is part of my dissertation, my intention is that it is used and circulated alongside the efforts of migrant aid non-profits. With the help of these organizations I’ll be able to safely navigate the desert, have access to their migrant death maps, and create a piece that aids in their mission of keeping migrants alive.

We then talked about how her research could be incorporated into an innovative dissertation format:

My digital project combines 360 video and sound with digital maps. As a digital memorial it captures the reality of where bodies have been recovered and makes them accessible and interactive to people outside of the region. Constructing this project brings together different theoretical threads throughout my dissertation – ideas of mourning, materiality, and the weaponization of the borderlands environment – and puts them both on display and into practice. This project complements my writing but is also more public-facing than a traditional dissertation. The map and memorial videos will all be publicly accessible and interactive. My hope is that this digital memorial will show the deadly reality facing many migrants and highlight the amazing work that migrant aid organizations do. More than anything, Vistas de la Frontera is a digital memorial for those who have died, and the work of collective mourning is only possible when it’s made visible.

We concluded by talking about the Humanities Engage project overall.  Alyssa is

so excited to see the amazing research that Humanities Engage will fund in the future! Pitt has so many brilliant humanities graduate students who are pushing the boundaries on interdisciplinary and innovative research. My hope is that Humanities Engage continues to allow graduate students to explore and create projects that push the humanities into the public eye, not as a justification for continuing to have them within university systems, but as an essential part of society and culture.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Michele Krugh, PhD 
Project Coordinator, Humanities Engage 

March 31, 2020

Learn about all the Immersive Dissertation Research Fellowships