The Public Lands Project

Moving Through Exigency:
Who Speaks for Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument?

Everyone knows that the U.S. border wall doesn’t “work,” in the sense of mitigating the ever higher numbers of undocumented movements across the border. But this means vastly different things in different regions, and the work the wall does do is equally different, from place to place. This chapter focuses on one unique and important place, Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument in Arizona. The numbers of migrants apprehended inside the park daily is currently in the hundreds, and the rate of drug and human trafficking through this particular corridor is as high as it was in 2003, when the park was shut down because it was declared too dangerous for visitors. No other national park unit in the U.S. has even a comparable level of border security.

A UNESCO biosphere reserve, 95% of Organ Pipe is designated wilderness, and so under the highest level of environmental protection that U.S. law provides. It is a powerful landscape, a spectacularly beautiful and delicate part of the Sonoran desert. Despite this, the border patrol is entitled by law to override any and all wilderness laws in order to execute its mission of protecting the border, as long as it can demonstrate exigency. As Jacqueline Schlossman and I have shown in our previous collaborations (Grebowicz 2015 and 2021), and as others have argued about the militarized border, this state of emergency is created by the ongoing heightening of border security itself, the most recent example of which is the wall itself.

The national park visitor is a subject primed for spectacle, and the border wall is nothing if not spectacular. It runs the entire length of Organ Pipe’s southern boundary, and one of its most spectacular aspects is its permeability—in both the physical and ideological sense. The permeability of the border for large groups of migrants, the environmental effects of the funneling of human and animal movements through the wall’s still-unfinished sections, and the border as just another exhibit in the park for visitors to experience—a metaphorical hole in its seriousness and invisibility as a tool of the state. There are endless “holes in the wall,” as it were, breakdowns of security that in turn requires greater security and keeps the manufacture of exigency in a vicious cycle.

Who decides what is exigent, and to whom it is exigent? The following is an attempt to move through the park in a series of stories designed to show that the exigencies at work in Organ Pipe are many and various.

As scholars have argued, what gets overlooked in national level policy making about border regions is the perspectives of the border residents themselves (Díaz-Barriga and Dorsey 2020; Büscher 2013). Accordingly, recent research has been devoted to giving voice to those perspectives and lifeways. However, when it comes to the national parks on the border, there are no longer any clear “residents”; on the contrary, the logic that created and maintains these public lands in one in which “man is a visitor who does not return.” (Wilderness Act). Of course, given the history of Native American displacement and later, of the displacement of settled residents, in order to create large sections of land devoted to the visitor, there most definitely are—to put it mildly—interested parties. And this category includes not only local residents, the indigenous peoples for whom the lands are ancestral, and local business, but also those park visitors who keep showing up in droves. And, in the case of the American southern border crisis, the “interested parties” category includes all of the people for whom these wide open spaces facilitate cross-border movement, a combination of asylum seekers, professional human traffickers, drug traffickers, and everyone else profiting from what has become nothing less than a migration industry.

In national parks, the perspectives of these different groups of local stakeholders is overlooked not only by border policy, but also by federal environmental policy, which also comes from the top down. In what follows, I attempt something like a fleeting and fleet-footed ethnography of this cacophony, in an effort to bear witness to a moment inside a place in which so many different voices are speaking at once, and so little of that is reaching the attention of the public. This is also in response to the culture of surveillance which has become such a big part of Arizona’s identity. This is, after all, “Optics Valley” (Schaeffer 2022).

One enters the park by means of the highway that bisects it, the 85. This highway is also the most impressive opening in the border, the port of entry in Lukeville. The 85 connects the metropolis of Phoenix to the resort city of Puerto Peñasco on the Gulf of California. This highway splits Organ Pipe into two parts, and is the only avenue for legal entry into from Mexico into the United States. While the wall offers a spectacular barrier running from east to west, the highway offers a less spectacular one running from north to south. The road and the wall meet in Lukeville, at what looks like a perfect right angle. To move through this park is to move along and across--and often be slowed down by--at least these two barriers, as both humans and animals have been for decades. To make movements that reflect the park’s hemispheric geography, as well as the hemispheric nature of claims to exigency (who speaks for the difference between exigency that has been manufactured and the real drive, desire, and need of beings in motion?)—and to write from that attunement: that’s part of my goal.

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West Side

On the West side, the border wall constructions remains unfinished, which means that the Roosevelt Easement, the road that runs the length of the wall and on which only official vehicles may drive, is still dirt.

Jackie is visiting from Long Beach, and we drive into the park via South Puerto Blanco Road, towards Quitobaquito, the ancient oasis, the only year-round water source for hundreds of square miles and revered site for all the people who lived here for thousands of years before the park’s creation. We pull over at the first place where it is easy to park and walk across the Easement, to look at, touch , and of course photograph the border wall. A few minutes later, a father and son pull up in their car. The dad urges the little boy to make like he’s scaling the wall, while dad photographs.

We move on, and within minutes, we encounter a large scene blocking the way.

“57 give-ups from Venezuela,” the officer explains as I awkwardly try to turn the car around on the narrow dirt road. Give-ups, I learn later, traditionally referred to migrants who were too exhausted to continue turned themselves in at gas stations or along major roads. These days, more and more give-ups fit a different description, that of people crossing the border and immediately turning themselves in to border patrol, never runners to begin with.

Sure enough, the border wall is only about 100 feet from the road on which we have all suddenly come to a stop: a large group of migrants, BP, and us, a couple of park visitors trying to get Quito photos at the golden hour.

“May we photograph?”

“I’d rather you didn’t,” says the officer, “but I can’t stop you.”

I’m squinting into the low-hanging sun, but even so, I distinctly see some people in the group wearing white jeans. There are children, but they are pulling those little wheeled suitcases for kids, like you’d see at an airport.

We go back the next day at the same time—the golden hour-- and encounter another group, this time before BP gets there. Many minors, most of them boys, a few small children, and at least one woman carrying a baby. Everyone is dressed well and tightly masked. The clothes are especially noticeable, designer brands, nice luggage, jewelry.

An older man, one of few older people in the group, waves for us to roll down our windows. “Estamos venezolanos,” he says more than once, gesticulating for us to call border patrol. This late in the day, the chances are good that we are the first people the group has encountered after crossing.

I stop the car despite the many signs throughout the park that warn visitors to avoid contact with migrants—signage from years ago, back when runners were the ones you were most likely to meet. This large group actually consists of smaller groups of family or friends. A teenager asks for water, and we give her the unopened gallon in our trunk. Many speak some English, and all seem relieved to see us. We take some photos.

The girl lets out a happy shriek as she runs back to her cluster of people with the water. A slight and friendly young man approaches with his father, explaining that they’ve been traveling for several days, by airplane and bus. He’s studying to be a dancer. He asks where the pictures will appear, where his picture will appear. Hurriedly, he and Jackie connect on Instagram, as his group calls to him to keep moving.

By the time we catch up to them again, BP has lined them up against the border wall. More and more agents drive up, their trucks creating a sort of barrier between us and them. As everyone is asked to surrender their valuables, the last of the group are walked in along the Roosevelt Easement, the road that lines the wall, for official vehicles only. Among them is a woman carrying a baby on her chest underneath a white cloth. We’re told to stay at a distance, but allowed to photograph. Most of the agents avert their faces.

I’m squinting into the low-hanging sun, but even so, I distinctly see some people in the group wearing white jeans. There are children, but they are pulling those little wheeled suitcases for kids, like you’d see at an airport.

We go back the next day at the same time—the golden hour-- and encounter another group, this time before BP gets there. Many minors, most of them boys, a few small children, and at least one woman carrying a baby. Everyone is dressed well and tightly masked. The clothes are especially noticeable, designer brands, nice luggage, jewelry.

An older man, one of few older people in the group, waves for us to roll down our windows. “Estamos venezolanos,” he says more than once, gesticulating for us to call border patrol. This late in the day, the chances are good that we are the first people the group has encountered after crossing.

I stop the car despite the many signs throughout the park that warn visitors to avoid contact with migrants—signage from years ago, back when runners were the ones you were most likely to meet. This large group actually consists of smaller groups of family or friends. A teenager asks for water, and we give her the unopened gallon in our trunk. Many speak some English, and all seem relieved to see us. We take some photos.

The girl lets out a happy shriek as she runs back to her cluster of people with the water. A slight and friendly young man approaches with his father, explaining that they’ve been traveling for several days, by airplane and bus. He’s studying to be a dancer. He asks where the pictures will appear, where his picture will appear. Hurriedly, he and Jackie connect on Instagram, as his group calls to him to keep moving.

By the time we catch up to them again, BP has lined them up against the border wall. More and more agents drive up, their trucks creating a sort of barrier between us and them. As everyone is asked to surrender their valuables, the last of the group are walked in along the Roosevelt Easement, the road that lines the wall, for official vehicles only. Among them is a woman carrying a baby on her chest underneath a white cloth. We’re told to stay at a distance, but allowed to photograph. Most of the agents avert their faces.

The following morning, I am on the phone with the Public Lands Liaison for the Tucson Sector of BP. Their jurisdiction is from the NM state line all the way to the Yuma County line, 262 mi. of border. That’s almost all of the Arizona border. 82% of that, I am shocked to learn, is on public land. Arizona is unique in this strange respect: most of the border in this state is on land that belongs democratically to the American people.

“May I ask you about what we witnessed today?”

“Yes.”

“Um… so…. what exactly did we witness? How do over 60 people (at once) cross the border in broad daylight without getting stopped, and without their clothes getting dirty? I hear rumors that the South Side has keys to the floodgates. Is that true”

(Long pause) “I can’t speak to that.”

“Is it some insane paranoid fantasy? Is it worth pursuing?”

“Ma’am, I cannot speak to that.”

We make our appointments and he’s very generous with his time, offering to put me in touch with a number of different BP officials. “I’d be happy to help you,” he says, “but you need to decide how deep you really want to go.”

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East Side

My ranger friend who asks to remain unidentified takes us to where the border wall ends in the East, where the Sierra de Santa Rosa create a natural barrier between the park and the neighboring Tohono O’odham Nation Reservation. Not so long ago, all this land was O’odham. Every mountaintop was where the O’odham took the corpses of their Apache enemies in battle.

Unlike the West side, the East side of the wall is finished, and the Easement here is paved and built to address the hydrological problems that the wall brings with it. In its finished state, this border wall is the industry standard for the rest of the country: while the wall changes slightly from state to state, this is the tallest and strongest construction anywhere. Along the way we see flood gates again, elaborate aqueducts, and even a cat hole for animals to move through.

But then we arrive at the end. The Easement and the fencing both stop at the edge of the mountain. It was too expensive to keep building, so there’s nothing there except some vehicle barriers, called Normandy barriers. We all three jump over them and hike up the mountain for some spectacular photos of the length of the wall as it runs across the vast valley, from here to Monument Hill, past which it of course continues to stretch. The ranger wants us to take in the vastness, the variety, most of which is the alluvial fan that stretches out and downwards from the very mountains on which we are standing.

The point is not only the pleasure of the landscape, but the long view. His own interests lie in showing us how much damage the manufacture of exigency does. Whenever he drives us around he points out every few minutes where BP has driven vehicles where they should not have, driving right past the signs that say “restoration area,” put there expressly to deter them. The worst damage is from the military surplus SUV’s, because they can zip around anywhere—and they do. BP has the right to override any wilderness restrictions for up to 100 miles north of the border. He wants us not to forget this, even as the wall dominates the landscape and the conversations so much that it’s easy to forget SUVs, helicopters and every other form of incursion on the wilderness.

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Tohono O’oham Nation Reservation

No one from the Nation will respond to my emails, not even the Tribal Historic Preservation Offier, who is anglo, as I find out later from the Cultural Center director, who is also anglo and also won’t talk to me beyond the one phone call in which I happen to catch him by surprise. The reservation is under strict quarantine, even after the rest of the U.S. has begun to reopen. “May I drive onto it?” “Yes, that’s one of the roads that takes you to Tucson.”

I play dumb about what that means and drive in on the 86, despite massive, clumsily handwritten “no trespassing” signs everywhere. Abba is in the backseat. I make the sharp right from the highway, to drive south to the village of Ali Chuk. The road changes immediately, from a relatively normal U.S. highway to a country filled with potholes so massive that they are encircled with white spray paint to be more visible. More “no trespassing” signs appear, and at this point, it’s clear that what I’m doing is not quite legal. The drive is slow and long. And gorgeous, different. The horizon seems further away here, and the sky less clear. The whole rez is free range, so cattle walk across the road all the time, to graze. That and the potholes slow me down.

I pass two police cars and they turn around and follow me. The cop car behind me drives way up to my license plate and follows me closely, just like that, for what feels like a long time, with no other cars around. He never turns on his lights. I continue at a casual 45 mph, avoiding the potholes and playing dumb. They cops fall back and turn away, and I’m triumphant. It’s an interesting moment: I know I’m breaking the law, and I suspect that they know that I know, but since my car registration checks out, they decide to leave me alone.

I drive through the village of Ali Chuk and stop to figure out how to get down to the wall. A woman stops her truck next to me, to ask if I need help. We chat for a bit and she explains that she’s on TikTok and posts videos of the wall all the time all the time. It’s down that way, she point. She tells me I’m not really allowed to be there: T.O.P.D. should have escorted you out, she says, and they probably will. She gives me directions anyway, and I drive on.

Everything down here is still and silent and green like only the desert can be green in spring, at dusk, when the haze has lifted.

Slowly, I drive down to the unfinished wall, just a simple car barricade. Nothing to look at. No BP in sight, no other humans in sight, and maybe for that reason, I realize that I’m scared. I swallow hard and get out to take some photos. There are cows wearing tags and bells, a good sign. I drive down about another 500 feet and suddenly there’s a car parked on the South side, with two people sitting in it. It’s too much for me and I flee. Within minutes, as I approach the town again, the police cars reappear, but this time it’s one behind me and one in front. No lights necessary: I’m not going anywhere.

If I have learned nothing else from my time talking to BP, it’s this: if you want law enforcement to talk to you, break the law.

I’m committing criminal trespassing, I am told.

I explain myself and they are kind. The second officer says hello to her while I photograph the text on the side of the patrol car. This language is Uto-Aztecan, not Athabaskan, underlining the absurdity of the US/Mexican border from the O’odham perspective. There is no mistaking the fact that I am in another country, down here. The officer won’t let me photograph their coat of arms, and not only that—to even get an explanation for why I may not photograph the coat of arms, I must apply for a research permit. It’s not expensive, he says, but in order to get it, you have to list every question you’re going to ask in the application itself. And only those will be answered. That’s just how it is.

Street dogs come. They are—how can I describe this?--eaten alive by mange, so badly that one of them has half her face bloody from scratching. They all have teats hanging down, they’re hungry, dirty. I don’t know how long it’s been since someone has touched them. “Roll up your window,” the officer says, “you don’t want your dog to catch something.”

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Ajo

I sit with a Hia C-ed O’odham elder who tells me the stories of how Quitobaquito was once a village that stretched well into what is now Mexico. Her great grandparents are buried on park grounds. Hia C-ed are the tribe that lived all over these lands, but they are not recognized and so have attached themselves formally to the Nation. I mention that I’ve been having trouble getting the official spokespeople who work for the Nation to speak to me. Whom did I try? I name the names and she waves them off: "They’re just employees.” She gives me the name and phone number of someone I should interview. He knows all of this very well, she said, more than most. He is a retired math teacher in Tucson, and the only anglo she knows of who has walked all the ancient roads, hundreds of miles of them. More than once.

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West Side

The park ecologist sits with me at a shaded picnic table just several feet away from the Visitor Center, named after ranger Kris Eggle. Eggle was shot in a chase between park law enforcement and a South Side presence of some kind. As a visitor, you never find out who shot him, because the monument only announces that he died “while protecting visitors from harm.” The mood is unusual for a national park Visitor Center: the narrative is clearly meant to remind visitors that rangers are law enforcement agents, and that this is a dangerous place. In all my travels to parks, I’ve not encountered anything else like it.

From the park ecologist’s perspective, the border wall is a small problem compared to all the others. He’s been in this region since 1977, and he’ll retire in three years. “I bet you saw that viral photo of a dead deer next to the wall,” he says, exasperated,” but do you know how much roadkill we deal with because of this godforsaken highway? And no one publishes photographs of that.”

While American mainstream media relentlessly focuses on the wall, not least because it’s epic and sexy, the much less sexy topic of sustainable agriculture is the elephant in the room. The Rio Sonoyta is drying up and the groundwater levels are dripping dramatically, a result of wells dug for agriculture on the Mexican side. And really, he tells me, the main problem is the human presence. The test flights overhead from the neighboring Barry Goldwater Air Force Base.

“And tourists?”

It seems to me that the park visitors are the least invasive, given all the trash that results from the illegal crossings and BP’s wanton driving through designated wilderness.

“True,” he says, “but visitors do harm in other ways, like letting their dogs off lead.”

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East Side

Let’s face it: I can go only travel for so many days before letting my dog off lead, legally or not.

One lovely early-evening, I drive Abba to Tillotson Peak Wayside, way in the northeast, where there’s a paved lot and no other cars or people. Off lead is against park regulations, but there’s no one here, and my dog needs to run. Not a soul to be seen in any direction. We hike into the nearby canyon and sit down for a bit to think. Abba loves nothing more than this: a long walk off lead that ends in a sitting together, to silently ponder the landscape and listen to birds and insects and watch the sky turn colors.

That’s when I notice the birds—are they vultures?—circling above a small area, which turns out to be a migrant encampment. Four camo backpacks have been left here and are now being torn apart by birds and coyotes. There’s a mountain of trash, including tubes of toothpaste, toilet paper, empty black water bottles, plastic bags of chips. I open a compartment in one of the backpacks and find an unopened jar of mayonnaise.

And, as if this weren’t creepy enough, my dog has suddenly vanished.

I call to her for what feels like forever, and start running back and forth between the camp and my car, desperately calling out “Abba!” Maybe it’s only been five minutes, but it feels like too long. She’s never gone for this long, and I’m running back to the parking lot again, and like a miracle, suddenly, in the glow of the setting sun—again—like some angel, BP is there. It’s a truck with a trailer with an ATV on top—that thing my ranger friend says does the most damage to the desert ecosystem.

I’m running I’m crying I’m asking for help finding my dog.

What follows is nothing less than 60 seconds of exquisite ballet: both men get out of the truck and while one asks me to describe my dog, the other climbs on top of the ATV to get a better view. “I see her,” he says right away, and I realize that I’m here with surveillance specialists. The have located my dog in under a minute.

May I say hi? Asks the officer after I have her back in the car. “Is she friendly? It’s the best thing that will happen to me all day,” he says, “if I can pet your dog. New York, huh? You’ve come a long way.” I have been cursing my old Jeep and beating myself up for not springing for a rental on all these awful roads, until now: when my license plate opens a conversation that could never have happened otherwise.

I tell them about the camp and the trash but they’re not impressed—because such camps are everywhere, all around. There are parts of this park, they tell me, where no one goes, and there are things there that look like landfills. The park service can’t keep up with the amounts of trash left behind by the runners.

The agents’ perspective on all of this is completely different than that of my ranger friend. Sure, the ATVs disturb the environment, but if BP doesn’t patrol a section regularly, migrant activity picks up in that section, which means more litter. “Not to mention that I saved the lives of 42 people yesterday,” says the more talkative one, “in different small groups that needed rescuing.” I have a strong feeling the other one has many such stories, but is more careful. Then tell me that they and all their friends routinely get death threats—not only from the South side, but also from locals and activists on the US side who perceive them as the bad guys.

On my last morning in the park, my ranger friend takes me to see some pictographs made by the Sonoran Desert people—until recently called the huhugam—over two thousand years ago, next to what was once an Ak Chin farm. Visitors cannot drive to this spot, only hike in. As we leave his vehicle, we find a pair of carpet shoes in the dirt. Carpet shoes are one of many objects created for the cottage industry the has emerged around cross border activity, designed for walking without leaving footprints. Meanwhile, BP has created so-called drags in response to carpet shoes—dragging tires across sand to smooth out the dirt and make it more difficult to hide footprints.

As we’re scrambling up, he is behind me and suddenly I hear him say, “we have to leave.”

My first thought is that there are people coming. But he wouldn’t have been scared of people. No: we have walked into the territory of an Africanized bee colony. As soon as he says it, I can hear one buzzing close by. He explains: these early messengers are the ones that warn. If you swat at one of them, they attack instantly. You have exactly one option: to leave. “How do you know they’re Africanized?” I ask. “All the bees in the park are at this point,” he says.

In all the meetings we’ve had, wandering around the desert while talking about every possible thing, this is the only time he has told me, in an unmistakably firm tone, to hurry up.

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Works Cited

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