Introduction: The Migrant Trail as Grief Action

Every year, beginning on Memorial Day, a group of 35 to 85Footnote ¹ activists walk from Sásabe, Mexico to Tucson, Arizona, USA over eight days, through the arid, rugged terrain of the Sonoran Desert. They walk through soaring desert temperatures, along dirt roads and highways, enduring hot spots, blisters, and leg cramps, as shade gradually disappears with little to block the rising sun. At night, walkers sleep in tents or on tarps. Participants carry small white crosses emblazoned with the names and ages at death of migrants who perished while trying to complete a perilous journey undetected. Some are labeled “Deconocido/a” (Unknown) to memorialize someone whose remains have not yet been identified. Periodically, over the course of each day’s journey, participants conduct a role call in honor of the dead, with each walker reciting the name of the person they commemorate as the group responds with the word “¡Presente!” to “indicate that the life and death of the migrant whose name was read is recognized and witnessed” (Mankel Reference Mankel2021: 104). Participants undertake this journey to highlight the scale of death in the desert and its individual ramifications.Footnote ²

This event, the Migrant Trail, traces a journey reminiscent of but not identical to that undertaken by the thousands of migrants who have attempted to cross the Arizona portion of the Sonoran Desert in the twenty years since the federal policy of Prevention through Deterrence closed the southern US border to safe entry at urban crossings.Footnote ³ Founded in Tucson, Arizona in 2004 and initially conceived of as a one-time protest action, the Migrant Trail brought together those who knew migrants who had crossed, whose relatives had gone missing, and who were involved in search and rescue work in the desert (Mankel Reference Mankel2021: 8, Rodriguez personal correspondence Reference Rodriguez2023). It also included those moved by the deaths who wanted to act in solidarity and those, such as a contingent from Colorado College, seeking to understand more about the situation at the border (Rodriguez personal correspondence Reference Rodriguez2025). Supported by a range of border solidarity, human rights, and progressive faith organizations, the Migrant Trail now includes participants from across the US and abroad even as it continues to respond to the specific harms that those who live and work on the Arizona-Sonora border witness on a regular basis. Over the course of its twenty-year history, the Migrant Trail has seen its participation numbers surge when Prevention through Deterrence was a fresh outrage and when new, draconian anti-immigration legislation, such as Arizona’s 2010 SB 1070 law, was passed (Migrant Trail Participant Packet 2025). At the same time, however, activists recognize that people continue to die in the desert even when hardline legislation is not in the news, and, thus, the walk continues, until, in the words of organizers, “the deaths stop.”

The Migrant Trail operates as what Susan Foster (Reference Foster2003) identifies as reflexive activism, in which participants protest unjust conditions while living out their alternative. More specifically, the Migrant Trail is a grief action, through which activists call attention to systemic violence via the sustained, physicalized recognition of its consequences. Grief distinguishes itself among emotions because of its political significance. Critical theorist Judith Butler (Reference Butler2004, Reference Butler2016), philologist Robert Pogue Harrison (Reference Harrison2003), psychologist Leeat Granek (Reference Granek2014), and anthropologist Jason De León (Reference De León2015) have argued that grief is inherently social because it exists in relation: we mourn because of the bonds we have with one another. Butler (Reference Butler2004) further argues that grief instantiates a life’s worth. Conversely, a death treated as ungrievable is a death ignored; once the significance of a death is diminished, the life that preceded that death can be, in Butler’s terms, disavowed (Butler in Stanescu Reference Stanescu2012: 569).

This disavowal enables structural violence to operate (Stanescu Reference Stanescu2012: 569). Because structural violence comprises harm caused by social inequalities (Holmes Reference Holmes2013: 43), it is indirect, hidden, and normalized (Galtung in Mankel Reference Mankel2021: 36). Structural violence positions some death and injuries as inevitable, reducing victims to statistics, occluding their individuality, and treating its targets as inconsequential through victim blaming, criminalization, or trivialization. At the US-Mexico border, violence is literally naturalized; as anthropologist Jason De León (Reference De León2015) notes, the US government and media outlets speak of “the desert claiming lives” as though the landscape, not political policy, inflicts harm.

Grief actions intervene into structural violence by creating opportunities for the public mourning (Russo Reference Russo2018: 71-76) that restores its victims to view. Grief actions demand that the victims of structural harm be acknowledged and, in the case of the Migrant Trail, be named. Grief actions deploy “collective memory and commemorative expression” (Mankel Reference Mankel2021: 37) to counter the reduction of those whose deaths are caused by structural harm to abstractions, reminding participants and onlookers that these individual lives were worth living and that they could have been longer and better, their suffering unnecessary, and their premature deaths avoided (De León Reference De León2015: 284). By engaging and intentionally evoking grief, participants insist on the value of these individuals.

Through these actions, participants acknowledge, tap into, and mobilize grief that may be personal – focused on a specific, known, and cared-for individual – but that also comprises what sociologist Jasper James (Reference Jasper2018) labels “moral emotions,” which arise from the acknowledgement of harms that are not experienced personally. Moreover, grief is simultaneously the motivator for the action and its result. Participants join the Migrant Trail Walk because of a grief that is unintelligible to much of the larger society (Stanescu Reference Stanescu2012: 568) and, through participation, invoke their own, ongoing mourning in the face of structural harm. Grief actions create opportunities for participants to bear witness to the consequences of structural violence (Mankel Reference Mankel2021: 22), centralizing and invoking mourning such that moral grief emerges not as aberrant but as a logical response to large-scale harm.

Social movement theory provides a basis for understanding the political importance of grief actions such as the Migrant Trail. It has, however, focused largely on emotion as motivation for and result of political mobilization, rather than as a key component of the structure of justice efforts.Footnote ⁴ Grief actions, like other types of reflexive activism, evoke emotion intentionally in their enactment in addition to being drive by emotion. Understanding grief actions, thus, requires attention to how protest events evince emotion in their realization, how their constructed nature enhances rather than undercutting their potential significance, and how physical experience dovetails with the invocation of sentiment. In other words, it requires attention to the mechanisms through which grief is evoked.

Critical dance and performance studies scholars have attended to such mechanisms, primarily through the analytics of dramaturgy (Kershaw Reference Kershaw1997), choreography (Foster Reference Foster2003, Giersdorf Reference Giersdorf2003, Browning Reference Browning2004, Kedhar Reference Kedhar2014), staging (Kowal Reference Kowal2004), and technique (Goldman Reference Goldman2007). Such concepts, by highlighting planning and rehearsing, signal the ways in which the management of bodies in space and time is central to protest events. However, like sociologists, dance and performance studies scholars have tended to focus on what precedes justice efforts (planning, training) and what follows it (the meaning produced). In the case of the Migrant Trail, however, while planning is crucial to the event, persuasive elements come through what the participants experience over the course of the walk, rather than how they prepare or even how the event looks to others. Thus, while I build on dance scholars’ analysis of protest, I depart from their attention to dramaturgy, staging, choreography, and technique and focus instead on the evocation of sentiment and on physical effort, components that pertain to the immediacy of an event’s enactment.

I understand emotional experience here through the concept of sentiment, rather than affect, because of sentiment’s relationship to thought and opinion. To develop this idea, I reference a concept distant form the US-Mexico border context of the Migrant Trail: bhava, as articulated in the South Asian literary tradition focused on technical knowledge in artistic production known as Sanskrit aesthetic theory, a body of works that are simultaneously pragmatic, descriptive, prescriptive, and analytical. Bhava is often translated as sentiment in the aesthetic context and it consists of complex emotions that blend thought and feelings, including disappointment agitation, and jealousy.Footnote ⁵ I invoke this concept not to suggest that it is universally applicable but rather to draw from a robust theorization of sentiment that signals the ways in which it achieves its salience in the moment of rendition. By drawing upon understandings of sentiment as articulated in Sanskrit aesthetic theory, I add sentiment to analytics such as dramaturgy, staging, choreography, and technique that have been used to shed light on the salience of protest efforts.

One goal of this undertaking is to signal how sociological studies of protest, and specifically affective social movement theory, can benefit from a dance studies approach. Conversely, I aim to provide dance studies with another model, in addition to choreography, dramaturgy, staging, and technique, through which to analyze non-dance phenomena, including justice efforts. My goal is to extend conversation around dance as methodology, applicable to non-dance examples, demonstrating that the potential for dance studies to contribute to analyses of protest extends beyond their formal components toward their experiential ones.

This analysis is based around my participation in the Migrant Trail Walk on three annual occasions and on its organizing committee for two. This essay also draws from formal and informal conversations with participants and organizers as well as on published work by scholars associated with the Migrant Trail. It uses an approach that blends choreographic analysis, phenomenology, and ethnography while drawing on theories from affective social movement and aesthetic theory. This study emerges out of a larger ethnographic project on physicality and emotion in reflexive activism (O’Shea Reference O’Shea, McNeill and Zebracki2022, Reference O’Shea, Adams and Wise2024). Through the example of the Migrant Trail, then, I propose a theory of experience for grief actions through a dance and performance studies framework.

Migrant Trail, Grief, and Solidarity

The Migrant Trail Walk begins in the border town of Sásabe, Mexico. In 2023, walkers were welcomed at a migrant aid shelter, where members of the group received empty coffins, representing those who died while attempting to cross the Sonoran Desert on foot, and recited Catholic prayers for the dead. A slow, somber walk along Sásabe’s main road followed this opening ritual. Participants had received crosses emblazoned with the names of the dead before leaving Tucson and they carried them in hand as they processed to the border. Participants then gathered in an open space near the checkpoint for a mourning rite, which blends O’odham, Yoreme, and Catholic ritual elements and which includes the presentation of a prayer stick that holds individual prayer ties, in line with Yoreme practices, one for each recorded death in the desert that year, that is carried for the walk (Mankel Reference Mankel2021: 70).Footnote ⁶

The Migrant Trail traces the route a migrant who attempts clandestine migration from the US-Mexico borderFootnote ⁷ to Tucson might travel, through the minimally populated desert terrain of the Buenos Aires Nature Preserve and private ranches to the town of Three Points and onward to Tucson. Although increased Border Patrol surveillance has pushed some migrants into the steep trails of the Baboquivari mountain range rather than through the relatively flat but still hazardous routes of the nature preserve and grazing lands, walkers nonetheless encounter the traces of those who travel the flatter route: rosaries tied into trees; gallon-size water bottles made of black plastic, meant to absorb the light from Border Patrol trucks; and desert camouflage clothing, shed at the side of a road when a pick-up arrived.

Walkers not only hike for miles, but also, depending on the team they’ve joined, may also complete the day’s walk and unload backpacks and tents from support vehicles, setting up shade structures in fierce heat. Alternatively, they may unload crates of food from the cramped quarters of a trailer or carry 5-gallon jugs of water from a truck’s trailer to the food station. They may increase their walking distance when serving on the safety team, taking up the rear of the line to make sure no one lags behind and circulating to the front to ensure safe crossings across roadways. Participants commit to physical activities beyond walking that keep the journey going and facilitate recovery from walking. Corporeal effort is central in this process, operating as both choreographic in the pre-planned sense that dance studies’ theorization of protest have described (Foster Reference Foster2003; Giersdorf Reference Giersdorf2003) while also producing an immediate and only partially predictable experience.

Participants camp in designated, primitive campgrounds within the national park; once the walk moves past Three Points, walkers have access to a commercial campground, a Baptist church that allows participants to sleep indoors, and a BLM campground near Tucson. Participants wake early: 5 am on most days; 3:30 am on the day with the most miles to cover. The food team gets to immediate work, preparing a simple breakfast. Several of the Trails’ volunteers drive vehicles – vans, trucks, SUVs, some pulling trailers – in which gear, food, and water are stowed. This leaves participants free to hike without the burden of a heavy backpack and, crucially, without needing to carry all the water that the walk requires. Walkers carry one-to-two-liter bottles, the contents of which can easily be depleted within a few hours, but which are refilled by drivers who set up water stations. Every few hours, the food team rides ahead and sets up a snack station while the logistics team raises a shade structure so walkers can rest out of the heat. A volunteer drives a sag wagon, to pick up participants who get leg cramps, who feel unwell from the heat or from illness, or whose blisters are severe enough that moleskin can no longer help. Because of Border Patrol harassment of the walk in previous years and because of the more recent targeting of US legal residents, green card holders, and citizens in ICE raids and abductions, immigration attorneys accompany the walk at its start near the border and as the procession passes the border patrol checkpoint on highway 286, 26 miles north of Sásabe.

Because of this provisioning, the Migrant Trail does not replicate conditions of migration. It is, as organizers point out, not an immersion experience (Mankel Reference Mankel2021: 22). Unlike Caminata Nocturna, for instance, in which tourists pay to be taken on an excursion that ostensibly simulates migration, with participants running steep trails at night as workers, in the role of smugglers, bark out commands, and others, playing the role of Border Patrol agents chase them (Johnson Reference Johnson2008), Migrant Trail participants walk in the early morning at a methodical pace more reminiscent of a religious ritual than a surreptitious escape, walking some legs in silence and others in quiet conversation or song. Participants are both walkers and part of the support team; no one performs the role of adversary.Footnote ⁸ Migrant Trail participants walk not as migrants but as mourners who recall the struggles of others.

The Migrant Trail is also not a mock funeral or a die-in. The latter are often confrontational in nature and the emotion associated with them is more typically anger rather than grief. In them, rituals of mourning create a primarily discursive rather than experiential effect. Thus, a mock funeral might suggest: “justice is dead and we may as well bury it” (Ross Reference Ross2015). A die-in makes statement such as “this policy is killing us.” They denote an event that is not taking place, nor does it feel as though it is taking place.Footnote ⁹ The Migrant Trail, by contrast, evokes states of mourning that are constructed through components of the walk and felt intimately by participants while also being directed at general conditions of harm.

Likewise, the Migrant Trail is not a performance or a work of art. In contrast to site-specific works at the US-Mexico border that challenge the interstitial space of the border and its representations (Fusco Reference Fusco1989, Reizman Reference Reizman2024), the Migrant Trail is focused inward rather than outward. It attends to the emotional, physical, and intellectual experience of the participants as that experience has the potential to enhance solidarity with those whose conditions force them into clandestine migration and with one another. Although both border performances and solidarity efforts such as the Migrant Trail seek to persuade those they encounter, for the Migrant Trail, potential influence emerges out of the adversity and care that participants encounter during the walk and how it is described afterwards.Footnote ¹⁰

Despite the distinction between the migrant experience and that of the activists who make this journey, the Migrant Trail brings participants into contact with some of the hardships faced by clandestine migrants: extreme heat, relentless sun, high winds, venomous animals, and, of course, the task of covering seventy-five miles on foot. The action creates a choreographic and phenomenological reality that is both planned and unpredictably experiential, driving home the severity of what people face when desperate conditions force them into dangerous crossings, even as it highlights the contrast between the care walkers experience and the fatal neglect migrants face (Russo Reference Russo2018: 99; Mankel Reference Mankel2021: 97-98; Rodriguez personal correspondence Reference Rodriguez2023). Participants describe the completion of the walk as finishing the journey that those who are commemorated didn’t, receiving the welcome they wish had been offered (Rodriguez personal correspondence Reference Rodriguez2025). Instead of attempting to replicate migration, then, the Migrant Trail commemorates its perils.

Like other protests, the Migrant Trail makes a statement that characterizes its raison d’etre: we walk until the deaths stop. However, unlike a rally or march through a city center, the Migrant Trail’s meaning is not primarily discursive. Its main purpose is not only to send a message to those in power but also to create an experience of physical difficulty and emotional recognition. It doesn’t depict a funeral; instead, it operates as a generalized form of ritual protest that points to the sustained nature of political grief (Russo Reference Russo2018: 180). The Migrant Trail uses components of mourning rites – coffins and crosses, prayers, walking at a deliberate pace, prayer ties, and reciting the names of the dead – to evince a grief that is intimate and personal, even as it operates largely as moral rather than quotidian grief. Rather than depicting a funeral through primarily theatrical or choreographic means, as ACT-UP’s die-ins (Foster Reference Foster2003) did in the interest of representing rage at neglect, the Migrant Trail enacts elements associated with grieving to restore solemnity to the indignity of death in the desert, even as it recognizes the impossibility of this task. It comprises “space sacralization processes,” constituted by “devotional labor” and “logistical preparations… that develop, preserve, and legitimize sacred space” (Peña Reference Peña and Narayanan2020: 243). As such, the Migrant Trail aims to restore the personhood obscured in statistics around migrant deaths by creating emotional and physical experiences.

Social Movement Theory, Performance, and Protest

Sociologists and philosophers foreground the function of emotion in political mobilization. Allison Jaggar links feelings to the development of new forms of political consciousness when she suggests that “outlaw” emotions “enable us to perceive the world differently” (Reference Jaggar1989: 167). Sara Ahmed (Reference Ahmed2010) reflects on the political possibilities of emotion via the concept of the “affect alien,” who rejects normative notions of happiness (2010: 593). Although Ahmed (Reference Ahmed2014) sees affect as “internalized cultural practices,” affect, when applied to protest often retains an association with “a mysterious force,” “transient alterations in an organism’s neurophysiological state” (Jasper Reference Jasper2018: x; Barrett in Jasper Reference Jasper2018: 28).Footnote ¹¹ While affect is central to protest, it is not the only form of emotion through which justice efforts evince a response.

Rather than treat affect and emotion as identical, James Jasper provides typologies of emotion that inform political mobilization: reflex emotions, which are automatic responses to events; urges or bodily needs; moods, states that persist across settings; affective commitments, “feelings…about others or objects;” and moral emotions, that is approval or disapproval (Reference Jasper2011: 287, Reference Jasper2018: 33). Jasper’s framework suggests a progression from the most innate physical responses (reflex emotions) to the most complex thinking-feeling kind of emotions (moral emotions). In the discussion that follows, I propose the additional category of sentiment, defined through performance theory, as it sits farther toward thinking from moral emotions because of its overlap with opinion.

In grief actions, emotional responses do not appear organically. Rather, participants intentionally evoke them through specific actions. While moral grief precedes involvement in the Migrant Trail, for instance, it is less a hard-wired reaction to a specific stimulus and is, rather, a complex, cognitive response to an awareness of structural harm. Moreover, the invoking of emotion comes through physical experience and effort. The emotional impact of events such as the Migrant Trail thus hinges not so much on affect as on sentiment, the primary definition of which, “an idea colored by emotion,” unites thought and felt responses. Other definitions include “an attitude, thought, or judgment prompted by feeling,” a “specific view or notion,” and an “opinion,”Footnote ¹² with the sentimental in aesthetics suggesting emotion “filtered by intellect, subject to critical scrutiny” (Schiller Reference Schiller and Elias1967: 13). Affect and sentiment, then, represent opposite ends of a spectrum of emotion: affect comprises an organic response while sentiment describes feeling turned toward thought. Both can be rooted in the immediacy of an event but, because sentiment can be recognized as constructed, it operates as a performative articulation of emotion.

My understanding of sentiment in justice efforts is indebted to Sanskrit aesthetic theory, or rasa theory, and, so, I rehearse some of its tenets here. I do so not to replicate its hegemonic status in South Asian performance nor to assume its global applicability. Rather, I invoke rasa theory to reflect on a robust theorization of sentiment as central to aesthetic experience. If affect theory foregrounds the innate aspects of emotion, rasa theory highlights the mechanisms through which emotions are evoked in performance, acknowledging their constructed nature as it produces an experiential state. While affect theory hinges on spontaneous reactions, rasa theory privileges analytical understanding. Although the goal of performance, in rasa theory, is to speak to a “kindred heart,” or sahṛdaya (Sundarajan and Raina Reference Sundarajan and Raina2016: 791), the path to that heart runs through the mind, that is through aesthetic analysis. Such a recognition is not exclusive to Sanskrit aesthetic theory as, for instance, Diana Taylor, invoking the Mayan worldview, refers to the blending of thought, experience, and emotion as “epistemologies of the heart” (López in Taylor Reference Taylor2020: xi). Such epistemologies evince an understanding of emotion that is both performative and experiential, acknowledged as constructed and felt as real.

Rasa theory accounts for the aesthetic experience by attending to the specific means of constructing bhava-s, emotional states, the accumulation of which produce an overall mood or tone, rasa. Footnote ¹³ In doing so, rasa theory engages the immediacy of performance by recognizing the importance of both transient and durable states, noting that a movement between them produces an overarching aesthetic effect. Bhava-s are recognized as consciously created and, yet, they are, ideally, felt as powerfully real. Rasa theory therefore suggests that the aesthetic experience is both analytical—rooted in an ability to decipher and appreciate codes and conventions of performance—and transformative, in its capacity for producing sparks of emotional connection. It thus allows the possibility of experiencing critical distance, analytical awareness, and full absorption at once.

Similarly, a participant in or a witness to a grief action often sees its mechanisms laid bare: they may observe how a given gesture, grouping, song, or recitation is meant to convey emotion; often, that knowledge enhances emotional experience rather than undercutting it. The recognition that emotions are constructed is not so much a limitation of justice efforts but a condition of their existence. A participant in a grief action may attend to mourning as an overarching state while moving through and between a range of emotional experiences, the plentitude of which can enhance rather than reduce the impact of an event. Just as sentiments emerge from the worldview of an art work’s creator but are not identical to what a performer feels at a given moment, sentiments conveyed in protest emerge from the perspective of the organizers but are not identical to what activists feel at the time of realization. An activist may experience collective effervescence while evoking the grief and anger that drives a justice action, for instance. Or an advocate may feel frustration at the lack of response to an effort meant to evoke hope for a better future. Justice efforts, then, like performance, engage states that are emotionally affecting and abstracted from the interior life of both creators and participants.

Although performance and protest differ in their goals, both sets of activity hinge on persuasion; frameworks for performance analysis can explain the transference of ideas more generally. Thus, the concept of sentiment opens to ways of understanding how intentionally constructed actions, including in protest, can induce emotion.Footnote ¹⁴ By allowing for critical distance combined with emotional absorption and by attending to the effort required in the cultivation of emotion, the concept of sentiment fills a gap in understanding posed by the attention to affect in social movement theory. Simultaneously, by recognizing the range of emotional conditions that constitute the immediacy of a justice effort, sentiment attends to interstitial moments not encompassed by the concepts of dramaturgy, staging, choreography, and technique that have characterized dance and performance studies approaches to protest.

The Migrant Trail and Grief as Sentiment

The Migrant Trail provides an opportunity to express a grief that, in quotidian life, is rendered socially unintelligible (Butler in Stanescu: 2012). The task of the Migrant Trail is to create a space where participants can experience, share, and acknowledge this grief while also conveying it to others. Walking is, in part, a demand that a felt loss be recognized and be acted upon by others, hence the recurring statement that “we walk until the deaths stop.”

As Chandra Russo points out (Reference Russo2018), many of the actions central to the Migrant Trail intentionally echo quotidian funeral rites although they differ from proximate rituals of mourning. In parallel to personal mourning rites, the Migrant Trail moves from the individual to the social: to grieve the dead is to insist on their importance to a community (Mankel Reference Mankel2021: 116). Like a funeral, the Migrant Trail enacts a relationship of the griever to society but, here the function of the grief ritual is inverted, not so much reintegrating mourners into society (Harrison Reference Harrison2003: 59, 62, 70) as pointing to what remains unresolved. Unlike quotidian grief rituals, then, the Migrant Trail, and other political grief actions, move not toward acceptance but toward continued rejection of the status quo.

The grief evoked on the Migrant Trail is for an individual whose cross is carried and for thousands who have died because they were trying to escape conditions too difficult or dangerous to endure. The grief may be for someone known, as when TeresaFootnote ¹⁵ reflected on her friend’s son’s disappearance in the desert and Barry recounted learning that a coworker had died of thirst and exposure in a remote location. Or grief may be for someone whose story a participant tries to reconstruct. For instance, I was moved to tears one morning early in the walk when Eliza called out what was written on her cross – Eduardo, companero de viaje de Ramiro (Ramiro’s traveling companion Eduardo) – and the tragedies embedded in this phrase sank in: Ramiro was forced to leave Eduardo behind. Ramiro never learned Eduardo’s full name. Ramiro survived; Eduardo died.

Over the course of the Migrant Trail’s seven days, participants express a wide range of sentiment and sensation, such that grief exists alongside other states: anger and frustration at policy; exhaustion and unease about the arduousness of the journey; contentment and joy produced by collective action; and worry about quotidian concerns such as the tasks that keep the walk functioning.Footnote ¹⁶ Other states that walkers comment on include pleasure at the company of other walkers, awe at the natural beauty of the desert, fear over one’s own or another’s illness or injury, and discomfort in the heat.Footnote ¹⁷ Those who see the walk pass may not experience grief; depending on their views of migration, they may instead experience annoyance or even anger or they may be more impressed with the effort than moved by its ethos.

Grief comes and goes in waves the course of the walk. For example, first time walker Henry described his interest in the 2024 Migrant Trail as initially prompted by the physical challenge of the journey. Although empathy motivated his participation, he wasn’t expecting emotional experience to be central. He described a feeling more of curiosity than of immediate grief, until it was his turn to carry the prayer ties, at which point, as he put it, “the water works start[ed].”

Sometimes, what is most moving isn’t grief but rather the muted effervescence that comes from working as a team. The roll call of names has the potential to operate in the interest of the persuasive function of the walk, as when the group travels along the highway and a driver stops to observe them, a member of the media is recording, or at a Border Patrol checkpoint. At other points, “¡Presente!” operates as a form of intra-group solidarity building, as when some Trail participants drive ahead to set up a rest station and walkers chant on the approach, reminding themselves and their fellow volunteers of why they continue.

In other instances, hope emerges alongside grief. The care actions accompany this journey – the medical team with their moleskin and tape, the truck with water, the rest stops for snacks, and the meals brought by border solidarity groups – suggest an alternative to the violence, incarceration, and lethal neglect that migrants encounter. This acceptance of care models an alternative to the punitive immigration system: that those who traverse this landscape under duress could be received with kindness (Russo Reference Russo2018: 99, 180).Footnote ¹⁸

Conversely, it isn’t hard to see how, without this network of care, a miscalculation or bad luck could end one’s life, especially if the journey required walking in darkness over rougher, steeper trails. Another sentiment, then, is the empathy that emerges from this awareness of vulnerability, one’s own and others (McCaughey Reference McCaughey1997; Gilson Reference Gilson2014; Butler Reference Butler2016). Kat, for instance, speaks of the physical struggles of the walk as instances where we are “humbled by our humanity.” Another organizer, Dan, reflects that experiences of the Migrant Trail are a continued reminder of the deadly consequences migrants face because they don’t have the same rights as walk participants (Abbot personal correspondence 2023). The insights provided by Kat and Dan are rooted in emotional recognition and, yet, they are also examples where corporeal effort and physical experience come to the fore.

Physical Effort on the Migrant Trail

The form taken by Migrant Trail, as anthropologist Magda Mankel notes, echoes long-distance protest marches and religious pilgrimage (2021: 94 – 97). The conjoining of these two modalities is pronounced enough that sociologist Chandra Russo refers to the Migrant Trail as a protest pilgrimage (Reference Russo2018: 108-109). Protest pilgrimages differ from symbolic protests in, for instance, city centers in that the latter, although involving movement, focus on conveying specific messages rather than on the effort involved in their display. Protest pilgrimages, such as Southwest Toxic Watch, Nevada Test Site hikes, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ March for Dignity, Dialogue, and a Fair Wage, and, historically, Gandhi’s Salt March, position the physical effort of walking, with its challenges and sacrifices, as central to their political meaning. Urban marches centered on symbolic protest can be similar across different locations whereas the structure of long-haul protest marches depends upon and interacts with specific physical spaces (Solnit in Russo Reference Russo2018: 109).

Migrant Trail participants include religious progressives such as Franciscan Catholics, Presbyterians associated with the Sanctuary Movement of the 1980s, Mennonites, and Quakers. For many participants, the act of walking, and the effort that goes with it, operates as a “deeply spiritual and psychological task” (Dan Abbott, personal correspondence Reference Abbott2023). Several participants have undertaken other, overtly religious pilgrimages such as Spain’s El Camino de Santiago (ibid.) and the pilgrimage to Magdalena de Kino in Sonora (Mankel Reference Mankel2021: 97). As participant Ricardo notes, even for those who don’t attach a religious significance to the walk, the rising sun that accompanies the early morning trek encourages a walker’s head downward into a penitent position, suggesting a phenomenological echo of pilgrimage. Other elements do the same: the slow, intentional pace, the procession formation, which is retained even when not required for safety, and the muted conversation facilitate the association with religious pilgrimage.

As Mankel notes (2021: 97), a pilgrimage centers the act of walking, valuing the effort associated with it, while it also gives walking a purpose. Walking collectively in pilgrimage centers on a promise or request, which in a religious context, is made to a saint or deity. A secular pilgrimage, as Magda Mankel suggests, provides an opportunity to negotiate with an abstract power such as “civic-society or the nation-state” (2021: 99). The walk likewise acts as what Diana Taylor labels acuerpamiento, an action that literally means embodiment but connotes solidarity through the act of showing up, which Taylor describes as “learning of a situation by living it in the flesh… walk[ing] the walk” (2020: 2).Footnote ¹⁹ The act of walking in itself is central and the corporeal experiences it evokes can only partially be planned, signaling an immediacy that comprises interstices between choreography/dramaturgy and rendition.Footnote ²⁰

The Migrant Trail Walk serves an overarching purpose at the same time that it is located within a specific geography, protesting the militarization of borders generally and commemorating the dangers of the Arizona-Sonoran border. There is no clear natural boundary between the US and Mexico here, in contrast to, for instance, the Texas border where the countries are divided by the Rio Grande/Rio Bravo. This lack of an obvious geographical demarcation makes a crossing appear possible to clandestine migrants while the geography, its low population density, and its constant surveillance render it perilous. A migrant could walk from Sásabe, Mexico east or west to a point where the border wall ends fairly easily and could head north through the desert. If they were to walk out to a main road or a town where they could find water, however, they would be at immediate risk of being identified and detained since, along the highways, Border Patrol trucks often outnumber civilian vehicles and both of those far outnumber pedestrians. Their only option is to walk through the desert until they are met by a pre-arranged pick up or until they reach Tucson, the latter being an almost impossible task without logistical support. The remnants participants find of migrants’ journeys, such as rosary beads, clothing, and black water bottles, are reminders of this specificity, as is the exhaustion of the walk itself.

Corporeal exertion and engagement with risk are not incidental but are part of what makes the justice effort what it is. Migrant Trail participants’ experience with difficulty, effort, and exhaustion enables them to build “new ways of knowing” (Russo Reference Russo2018: 99) and a “deeper understanding” that accrues to those who “face discomfort for the sake of another” (Mankel Reference Mankel2021: 17). This allows the formation of a temporary community around an awareness of what has been experienced but also what has not: the hardships migrants contend with that walkers avoid. When participants walk in hundred-degree-plus heat, it invokes the risk of heat exhaustion, even as, should it strike, they are spared its worst effects. Trail walkers travel in daylight while migrants must walk at night to avoid detection, exposed to deadly falls or to the broken legs or sprained ankles that could get them left behind. The path and roadways run alongside the mesquite trees, where migrants seek shade to sleep during the day. Over the morning hours, that shade gradually disappears into nothing and such direct sunlight in this heat can be fierce enough to kill. The walk traverses dirt roads and highways as the Baboquivari range, where migrants are now forced to travel because of increased surveillance, stands in the distance. At rest stops, walkers attend to hot spots, even as every blister bandaged recalls the minor injuries that could get a migrant abandoned. Every few miles, participants are offered water, by the vehicle support team, a reminder that it is impossible to carry enough liquid to cover 75 miles on foot in the desert. When the walk arrives at camp for the night, the meals provided by border solidarity groups contrasts with migrants surviving on the bare minimum of dried food. When a participant feels unwell and rides in one of the accompanying vehicles, it is a grim reminder that leg cramps, a stomachache, or a fever can be enough of a reason for a smuggler to leave someone behind. The most indicative elements of the Migrant Trail, are revealed both experientially and by extrapolation.

The Migrant Trail creates a corporeal experience that drives home the severity of what people face when desperate conditions force them into the Sonoran Desert. It is rooted in these miles walked, along this route, in this blazing temperature, with these blisters and this exhaustion. The Migrant Trail makes systemic violence tangible through this sustained, physicalized recognition of its consequences on individuals. The task of walking the length of the desert, alongside the near impossibility of doing so without support, makes concrete the harm done to living beings when the desert, in De León’s terms, is weaponized (2015: 36).

The physical effort involved in the Migrant Trail evokes the hardships faced by migrants but does not, and can never, approach them in scale or quality. Moreover, because this is a grief action, it advocates for people who have suffered and died, and, thus, it contends with the unbridgeable ontological gap between life and death. Even walking through heat, incurring blisters, and weathering windstorms doesn’t even begin to approach what is faced by someone who must stay hidden, who per force travels with insufficient water, and who must keep walking regardless of their body’s state. The Migrant Trail, like other grief actions, centers on what is happening, for the participants, and also what is not happening, what conditions those who are grieved were subject to that protestors are able to avoid. As Diana Taylor puts it, acuerpamiento only goes so far (2020: 3).

The scale of the effort involved in the Migrant Trail, the fact that it hinges on crucial differences in experience, and the range of emotions that come and go might seem superfluous to the goal of bearing witness to the lives destroyed by draconian immigration policy. However, a performance-based understanding of sentiment frames up how and why this level of physical effort matters. It suggests that the shifting impact of an action rooted in emotion is not a detriment of the effort; rather, it is inherent to the act of perceiving (intentionally constructed) emotion itself. Conversely, to understand the scale of the effort involved in the Migrant Trail and how such extremes of corporeal experience contribute to the event’s salience suggests a need for concepts arising out of the physical immediacy of the event as much as, if not more than, those associated with planning and training, such as dramaturgy, staging, choreography, and technique. Even as it does not replicate the experience of another, the Migrant Trail’s evocation of emotion and its deployment of physical effort signal how justice efforts might accomplish their goals of recognition and acknowledgment, albeit in a perhaps more roundabout way than might be readily assumed.