Border issues: McGuire explores walls and their human impact in recent books
Archaeology isn’t limited to ancient cultures and lost civilizations, or focused solely on the grave goods of warriors and chiefs. Instead, it can provide the physical evidence of today’s realities, the conditions that created them and the impact of material culture on the lives and bodies of contemporary human beings.
Such is the premise of two recent books co-edited by Binghamton University Distinguished Professor of Anthropology Randall McGuire. A prolific scholar, his publications include six books, nine edited volumes, nine monographs, 142 academic articles and another 26 articles geared for students or the general public.
Archaeology relies on excavation — an act that makes the invisible visible, and trains the individual to be skeptical about surface appearances, McGuire explained. When combined with history and ethnography, the techniques used in archaeology provide a distinctive perspective on contemporary issues.
“Archaeological techniques give us the ability to find detail in the seeming chaos of the current material world,” he said. “This detail reveals the complex relationship that the material shares with social relations, meaning and agency.”
The Border and its Bodies: The Embodiment of Risk Along the U.S.-México Line, co-edited with Thomas E. Sheridan and published by the University of Arizona Press in November 2019, examines the impact of migration from Central America to the United States on the human body. It was included in the Association of University Presses’ Read. Think. Act. reading list of 75-peer reviewed books intended to help non-academic readers understand the issues shaping their world.
Co-edited with Laura McAtackney and published by the University of New Mexico Press in April 2020, Walling In and Walling Out: Why Are We Building New Barriers to Divide Us? explores the roles and uses of walls in a variety of contexts, ranging from neighborhood to international borders. Sheridan is a cultural anthropologist who also works on border issues, while Irish archaeologist Laura McAtackney has written about “peace walls” in Belfast, among other topics.
Both books resulted from advanced seminars, which bring together a small group of scholars to discuss and explore a topic. In both cases, the editors chose a range of scholars to contribute, including archaeologists, cultural anthropologists, biological forensic anthropologists, sociologists and geographers. Both seminars occurred within a year of each other, which was coincidental, McGuire said.
The books include essays written by McGuire, in addition to introductory pieces co-authored with his fellow editors. In The Border and Its Bodies, he and Ruth Van Dyke, his wife and a Binghamton University anthropology professor, co-authored “Crossing la Línea: Bodily Encounters with the U.S.-México Border in Ambos Nogales.” In Walling In and Walling Out, McGuire contributed “Barbarians at the Gate: A History of Walls.”
McGuire began studying the ancient indigenous inhabitants of the Sonoran Desert in both Arizona and the Mexican state of Sonora in 1974. In 1988, he established a project in northern Sonora — about 60 miles south of the United States border — that continues today. During the decades since then, he’s crossed the border thousands of times and spent months in the borderland community, witnessing firsthand the changes that international policy wrought on both the barrier itself and the bodies of those who sought to cross it.
The U.S. government militarized the border in 1994 and built the first wall dividing Nogales, Arizona, from Nogales, Mexico, called Ambos Nogales, or Both Nogales. By 2006, the region was crammed with prospective border-crossers, and McGuire and Van Dyke talked to migrants in the streets, traveled to (but not beyond) the border with them, and contributed food and money to the Catholic Church’s relief efforts. Two years later, McGuire and Van Dyke began working with the humanitarian organization No More Deaths to provide aid to migrants, the border wall looming over their aid station. In 2011, the U.S. tore down the first wall and built a 30-foot barrier to replace it.
“Our work with deportees brought me into daily contact with the border wall and the human cost of that wall,” he said. “As an archaeologist, the materialization and rematerialization of the border intrigued me as a material process.”
Archaeology and activism
McGuire’s attraction to archaeology began in his youth. A native of Colorado, he grew up on Air Force bases across the west, interspersed with periods on the family’s ranch near a prehistoric site where ancient hunters drove bison over a cliff. Known as a bison drive, the site was filled with bones and artifacts. He went on his first archaeological dig in high school, courtesy of the family dentist, who was active in the Colorado Archaeological Society.
Around the same time, he had his own introduction to activism. Graduating from high school near the end of the Vietnam War, he participated in the antiwar movement and learned his Marxism in the streets, he said. His archaeology also put him in contact with protestors, including the American Indian Movement activists who entered a Colorado State University lab in 1972 and demanded the return of a burial he had excavated the summer before.
While he finished his PhD during the Reagan era, activism faded into the background. It revived when he joined a community of radical scholars at Binghamton University, and joined the struggle of indigenous peoples for the return of their sacred objects and burials. His work took him away from Native American archaeology — a field fraught with a history of colonialism and exploitation — into the field of workers’ rights, with an excavation at the site of the 1914 Ludlow massacre in Colorado, a tent camp of striking coal miners and their families, as well as the company towns where workers and their families lived.
The Ludlow project ended in 2008, and his work shifted to the U.S.–Mexican border. The intense focus of the Trump administration on the border wall has inspired McGuire’s current research into the failures of physical barriers to solve contemporary social problems.
“The solutions to problems such as undocumented migration, drugs and violence do not lie on the border. We must address the reasons that people flee their countries and why the U.S. has such a high demand for drugs,” he said. “Walls seem like easy solutions, but they do not work.”