| Sumario: | In this article I consider the intertwined dimensions of contemporary surveillance technologies and digital memorials for migrants in the United States-Mexico borderlands. I examine how digital memorials make border surveillance apparent through the charting, mapping, and visibility of the Sonoran Desert. These memorials rely upon existing and escalating border infrastructures for visibility while reinscribing digital interfaces as a means of mourning, particularly for migrants who have died as a result of deadly US policies. As such, they highlight the contradictory realities of hypervisibility and erasure that are critical to the continuation of contemporary immigration policy. Here, I consider how two digital memorials, Josh Begley's 2016 Fatal Migrations and John Craig Freeman's 2012 Border Memorial, to explore the possibilities and limitations of digitality as a means of awareness, advocacy, and political resistance. These pieces use existing technologies and logics of mapping attached to the Sonoran Desert to highlight how the specificities of place are critical to the policies that not only kill migrants but hide their deaths under "natural environmental" processes. By anchoring digital memorials in the Sonoran Desert, the pieces challenge dominant narratives of the desert borderlands as a site of nothingness or a space of erasure. Taken together, these digital memorials suggest how migrant deaths have been erased or made invisible, and that the efforts at visibility require complicating the state-run systems. To remember and mourn, especially digitally, reconfigures the state's view and reorients the maps to account for the continuous violence happening just out of sight.
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