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At the University of Oregon, we built a collaborative team of faculty and museum staff to bring students, campus, and community stakeholders together in planning and implementing an exhibition of an installation of the Undocumented Migration Project (UMP) Hostile Terrain ’94 exhibition. The HT94 installation aims to do several things, including “to raise awareness during a presidential election season about the realities of the U.S./Mexico border including the death and suffering that has been happening daily… as a direct result of [U.S. immigration policy].” The exhibit uses the work of archaeologist Jason De León and his team at the UMP to install “toe tags” representing missing or deceased migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border and to geolocate those toe tags on a large wall map. Since 2019, HT94 has been hosted by over 150 universities and colleges around the world, and the UMP offers host institutions an installation kit that supports visitors’ interpretive experiences, while encouraging each host site to connect the exhibit to local issues and community interests. Having hoped to bring the exhibit to campus for the past number of years, we were finally able to do so after securing a small grant from our campus Center for the Latino/a and Latin American Studies Center (CLLAS), and with collaboration from the UO Museum of Natural and Cultural History. We viewed the opportunity to bring HT94 to a campus museum as a broader opportunity to bring together a campus coalition interested in im/migration studies and border studies, bridging across traditional university silos by uniting staff, faculty, students from across campus around a common objective.
Since the summer of 2024 our team of cultural anthropologists (Hansen and Yarris) and museum staff (Craig, Willis, and White) have met together on a regular basis, planning the design, installation, and visitor experience surrounding HT94. Our overarching aim was structuring and scaffolding the installation of HT94 at UO to support the visitor experience, anticipating that our audience will be a combination of UO students, faculty, staff, as well as community members. We have treated this topic with sensitivity and care. We started our collaborative work from the premise that an exhibit about undocumented migration and migrant deaths must center visitor experiences, acknowledging that visitors will approach this topic from a range of perspectives and viewpoints. We also were aware of the ways in which the broader political context, characterized by migrant-exclusionary federal policies and anti-immigrant discourse, has only heightened our commitment to using HT94 to enhance understanding about im/migrant lived experiences. One of our key aims has been to reach out to faculty, students, and affinity groups across campus and in the larger community to help create engagement with the content of HT94 leading up to the actual installation of the exhibit.
Because the installation relies upon the prior preparation over 4,000 tags, we have used the toe tag preparation as a means of reaching out to classes and campus and community groups to participate in preparing the installation. The two cultural anthropologists on our team (Hansen and Yarris) regularly teach undergraduate and graduate courses related to immigration policy, migration studies, deportation, and immigrant social movements. Thus, we drew on this pedagogical experience—alongside materials UMP makes available to those hosting HT94—to develop our own Teaching and Learning Guide. This document contains a set of readings, films, videos, and discussion questions that we share with other UO faculty interested in involving their students in the creation of the toe tags that are central to the HT94 installation. This aspect of our project involved a significant amount of outreach across units and departments at UO, connecting with faculty colleagues who teach courses related to immigration, border and global studies, and inviting them to complete the toe tags in classes in advance of the exhibit installation. While most faculty we reached out to were supportive of the project, some raised concerns. How would we prepare students to experience an exhibit centered on missing and dead migrants? How would we account for the ways in which the exhibit might be particularly challenging for students who feel vulnerable to political attack in this current climate, such as Dreamer students, students from mixed status families, international students, and other students with family stories of migration-related violence and trauma? These were questions our team had already begun to address but hearing them echoed by our colleagues reinforced our intention to center visitor experience in the museum installation.
As we have engaged students in classroom activities related to HT94 over the past academic terms, we observed how the centering of undocumented migrant and border crossing experiences humanizes discussions and understandings of immigration in profound ways. For instance, Hansen designed a module in his course, Human Care and Intimacy, to engage students with the topics surrounding HT94 and the completion of toe tags. On a brisk fall morning on campus in Eugene, the 19 students in Hansen’s class were seated in small groups around rectangular tables in the MNCH’s exhibit space. As students filled out toe tags, they quietly engaged in conversations focused alternatively on the tragedy and heartbreak of border-crossing and the more mundane questions about what to do with extra toe tags. Students shared emergent understandings of U.S. immigration policies and their impacts on human lives, on the harsh desert environment of the Sonoran Desert, and the grueling hardships of the multi-day trek northward that undocumented migrants take. Filling out toe tags became sort of a reverential activity, completed in honor and memory of missing human beings, but the very completion of toe tags becoming a testimony to remembering lost migrants as victims of harsh political and environmental climates. Several students shared their incomprehension that U.S. immigration policies could directly lead to so much human devastation. One particular student, from southern Arizona, observed three tags with the same date designated Pinal County, AZ, as the site of discovered remains. Were these three migrants travelling together? The student said, “I wrote on the back of their tags. I told them that I’m from Pinal County. I said that I so wished that we would have met. I would have given them hugs and told them ‘Welcome’.” This is one of many examples of the ways in which co-curricular activities surrounding the installation and exhibit of HT94 on campus can become profound teaching and learning experiences about the realities of immigration, the human cost of broken immigration policies, and the daily tragedy of migrant death in the US-Mexico borderlands.
In addition to the profound experiences occurring in classrooms leading up to the UO HT94 exhibit, our museum partners have also taken the lead on connecting to campus affinity groups as well as community groups interested in immigration topics. The outreach and support of the community engagement staff in this regard has been incredibly valuable in fostering connections and creating opportunities for campus and community groups to engage with the HT94 exhibit well before its installation. For instance, in the months leading up to the exhibit, the MNCH will host a gathering of our UO Dreamers Working Group, which is a group of faculty, staff, and students working to support Dreamer and undocumented students on campus. Members of the Working Group will share time and space together, engaging in toe tag preparation, and using this curatorial exercise as an opportunity to connect around shared concerns about immigration policies and their impact on UO students. Additionally, non-university affiliated community groups working in immigration and social justice, as well as internal museum stakeholder groups including staff and volunteers, will be invited to prepare toe tags ahead of the installation. These opportunities to come together in community to learn and process meets a museum objective to provide service and engagement to the broader public. These preparation sessions include careful planning to deliver information and instruction in an emotionally supportive manner.
Similarly, our team has carefully considered the installation and exhibit viewing space itself as an opportunity to curate an emotionally supportive experience. In addition to offering context on the root causes of immigration (which will be presented textually on a panel in the hallway leading to the exhibit space), we have also designed “soft spaces” inside the exhibit itself, which will allow visitors to sit, reflect, and contemplate what they are viewing and experiencing. For example, one corner of the exhibit will have a small table, surrounded by comfortable chairs, with a box of tissues and a reflection book on top. Here, visitors will be invited to share in writing or in drawing form any reflections on what they have learned or experienced by visiting HT94. Further, the museum staff have made productive connections with cultural experts and artists through the Oregon Folklife Network who have consulted on the installation of the project. Our team envisions creating a wall-mounted, interactive ofrenda (altar) art piece, which visitors will contribute to during their visit as a form of memorial to migrant lives lost. Visitors will be invited to create paper flowers in memory of their own lost loved ones, which will in turn be pasted onto the wall-mounted ofrenda. We are looking forward to seeing how this experiment of interactive co-creation works, as it reflects our commitment to curate an exhibit that acknowledges not just the intellectual but also the emotional experience that viewing HT94 may produce.
For our collaborative team, the opportunity to bring HT94 to UO has led to productive synergies between faculty and museum staff that otherwise would not have been realized. The faculty involved in the project have appreciated the support, time, and expertise of the museum staff, and the museum staff in turn have appreciated collaborating with faculty with research-area expertise in immigration studies topics and, through faculty, connecting with students to prepare for the installation of the exhibit. Two ideas we are still working on in advance of our spring installation include: first, working with a small team of students (undergraduate and graduate) who will be trained to serve as on-site docents during the museum exhibit. We plan to announce the times students will be onsite as a way of curating an even more welcoming and supportive experience. Second, as part of the CLLAS grant that Hansen and Yarris received to support the installation of HT94, we are creating a brief survey of visitor experience, to be administered on site using a QR code linking to an online survey. This survey will assess the ways visiting HT94 has enhanced visitors’ understandings of the human impact of immigration policies and provide a space for visitors to give feedback on their experiences. All of these activities are designed to help our team understand how our exhibit has had an impact on our community’s knowledge about the experiences of undocumented migrants and border crossers during a political period of hostility and misinformation that only heightens the need for greater awareness, empathy, and understanding.
Lilia McEnaney is the section contributing editor for the Council for Museum Anthropology.