Here lies a dream in the Sonoran Desert, where migrants risk death to cross into the US

After turning off the West Ajo Highway, 20 miles west of Tucson, a car full of volunteers heads down a dirt track, carefully traversing the wide fractures in the road en route to plant the first cross of the day. The road is flanked on each side by rusted four-barred fences, behind which lie a couple of buildings with corrugated iron roofs.

The car is quiet, apart from the spade, bucket and cross rolling around in the trunk.

The car parks and the riders get out and stand in a circle. David, one of the volunteers, glances back and forth between a piece of white paper in his left hand and a GPS satellite phone in the other, listening for the distant beep every time the system acknowledges a coordinate.

Still looking at the GPS, David sets off slowly behind the others. Diane holds a pick axe; Alvaro Enciso, the artist who leads this project, drags a spade; Haley lugs a large water container; Alyssa carries a wooden cross and Peter leans gently to his left side to counteract the heavy bucket of cement in his right hand.

After walking less than 50 feet, they arrive and, almost immediately, Alvaro digs his spade into the parched earth. Once Alvaro is satisfied with his digging he holds the cross in position while Peter bends down and offloads some dry cement around its base. Haley follows with the water, careful to distribute it evenly.

This is one of approximately 1,700 crosses Alvaro has planted across the desert as part of his project, “Donde Mueren Los Sueños.” Translated roughly into English, it means “Where Dreams Die.”

The cross shape isn’t meant to invoke religion, but rather the intersection of life and death. Alvaro has been installing them on sites like this since 2013.

Alvaro Enciso and a group of volunteers walking through an ocotillo forest. (Crispin Kerr-Dineen)

“The spaces that I was visiting were talking to me,” he says. “Telling me, there’s a story here that — if you don’t tell it, it’s going to disappear.”

Dogs bark in the background, unsure about the new faces on the edge of their property. Diane, wearing a red and black cap and a tie-dyed sweater, speaks: “This site was reported May 1, 2024, for unidentified persons.”

Diane points to the settlement they’d just driven past and continues: “The human remains were found on the porch of a private residence. The dogs had brought a human skull to the porch. The cause of death is undetermined. The skull is thought to be over six months old.”

* * *

In 1994, under the Clinton administration, the United States Border Patrol introduced a strategy known as prevention through deterrence. The strategy tightened security at popular, urban ports of entry along the U.S.-Mexico border. Migrants then looked for more remote areas, like the Sonoran Desert in Southern Arizona, to cross undetected.

Since 2000, 4,284 migrants are known to have died crossing the Sonoran Desert. Because bodies decompose incredibly quickly in the sweltering heat, the total number is almost certainly higher.

The Sonoran Desert bridges Northern Mexico and the southern United States and covers approximately 100,000 square miles, a surface area larger than the United Kingdom. Temperatures in the desert can reach up to 120 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer months and dip below freezing during the winter.

“People just weren’t crossing from Mexico through Arizona until it became more difficult to cross in major populated areas,” Dr. Greg Hess, Chief Medical Officer for Pima County, Arizona, explains. “[So] people started to look for other routes and slowly migration started moving to Arizona. That’s the problem with Arizona, it’s just too hot and dry. If something goes wrong, there’s relatively little recourse in the environment that people can fall back on, like water and food or anything.”

Hess has been the Chief Medical Examiner and a forensic pathologist for Pima County, an area that covers a vast expanse of the Sonoran Desert in Southern Arizona, since 2011. He says his department has seen, on average, around 170 migrant bodies arrive each year since 2002.

“The number one cause of death is undetermined. With very decomposed remains, it’s very difficult to tell how the person died,” Hess says. “That said, for most of the remains that come in good condition, those that have not been deceased in the desert for very long, 97% of the time those people die as a result of exposure.”

“Exposure” in these cases likely means dehydration, hyperthermia or hypothermia, or some other death due to lack of protection from environmental elements.

With many of the remains already skeletal, identifying the bodies can be a challenge, especially since documents found with a person may not be accurate. Forensic anthropologists work with Hess to develop a profile. After determining, most notably through the pelvis bone, if it’s a male or a female body, they will examine ethnicity characteristics consistent with native populations from Mexico or Central America. With no leads on identification, DNA comparisons are tricky. About a third of the 4,284 bodies recovered remain unidentified.

Although tightened border security in 1994 saw a sharp increase in migrants crossing through more remote areas, border-crossing deaths in the Sonoran Desert started long before then.

Growing up in El Salvador, Dora Rodriguez walked to school every day, even in the rain.

“I grew up in a country that is beautiful. A country surrounded by trees, rivers and mountains,” Dora explains with fondness in her voice.

“I never thought in my wildest dreams that I would have to flee the country. But when I graduated high school, that changed.”

Dora graduated high school in November 1979, a month after civil war broke out across El Salvador. She started hearing about death squads who were coming for anyone they deemed suspicious. Members of youth groups, like Dora, were a target then — seen as enemies of the government.

“It was for me and my mother the most painful decision we had to make [to leave El Salvador.]”

Soon, only 19, Dora set off with a group of friends for the United States.

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On the first trip Dora made to El Norte she was arrested and sent back home on a seven-day bus journey. For her second trip, she hired smugglers to take her across the border but was again arrested and sent back home. On her third try, in July 1980, Dora crossed over barbed wire into the Sonoran Desert on the United States side of the border with 25 other migrants when tragedy struck. The smuggler who guided them was a young man who didn’t know the route. Soon they were lost, with very limited supplies of water.

After a few hours of falling down into desert washes and getting spiked by cactuses, the group realized they were in trouble.

“Where do you go? Where do you walk? Where’s the way out? When you’re in the middle of the desert and you look around you, everything is the same,” Dora explains.

On the first night, one of the group died from a heart attack. By the second night, having run out of water, the group started drinking their own urine.

“It was like we were sitting on a hot pavement. The trees in the desert are not very thick with shade. There was no comfort.”

With blisters on her feet and cactus spikes all over her body, Dora recalls struggling to walk. She told her uncle to leave her to die under a tree. He refused and tied his belt to Dora’s waist and they carried on walking. On the fourth morning, Dora stopped walking.

The next day, Dora heard noises in the back of her head. The rumble of motorcycles.

Before long, she was in the hands of a border patrol agent with IV drips in her arms. The border patrol agent pleaded with her not to die and to stay awake.

Of the 25 people who crossed the border with her, 13 died, including three teenage sisters.

After the fateful crossing, Dora was not granted asylum, but was allowed to remain in the country due to, in her words, being a “witness of a criminal activity by smugglers.” In 1982, she married her high school sweetheart, a green card holder, and then ten years later, she became a United States citizen.

Today, Dora resides in Tucson, where she is the Director of Salvavision, a nonprofit offering aid and support to migrants and deportees on both sides of the border. Through her work, she still hears people explaining that attempting to cross the desert is their only hope.

Last month, a woman from southern Mexico explained to Dora on the Mexican side of the border that she couldn’t go back home, where organized crime and cartels were rampant, and that to provide for her children she must attempt to cross the desert. Still, Dora warned her against it.

* * *

Now the cement has partially solidified. Alvaro takes a few steps back. He tilts his head and moves his arm, asking one of the volunteers to adjust the cross slightly. He then takes a picture.

“This project is about witnessing something, except I decided not to be a silent witness,” Alvaro explains. He's been the subject of several films and articles over the course of this project. Every year, the need for such attention intensifies as the deaths continue.

“I'm trying to compare my own life to the people who died out there. I’m grateful that I’m one of the lucky ones," Alvaro says. "One of these people could’ve been me. He and I, she and I, came from the same circumstances."

"I'm trying to compare my own life to the people who died out there. I’m grateful that I’m one of the lucky ones. One of these people could’ve been me. He and I, she and I, came from the same circumstances.”

Now 78, Alvaro grew up in Colombia drawing planes. In hindsight, he realizes he was dreaming of a ticket out, for a better life.

“I hated being poor. I didn’t want to resign to the idea of being poor forever.”

After finishing high school, his family wanted him to work so he could contribute to the household. But Alvaro wanted a college degree — he wanted the American dream, which was revered in Colombia. Alvaro left Colombia at 20 with visa documents in hand.

After arriving at JFK, Alvaro soon realized the American Dream he heard about in Colombia was greatly exaggerated. There were no gold-plated streets or a college education waiting with his name on it.

“[I had] no idea how difficult it was going to be. It took me a few years to get it together. In the meantime,” Alvaro says, lifting and readjusting his red cap.

“I was drafted into the U.S. Army. Fourteen months in Vietnafm,” Alvaro pauses, then takes a long breath. “Survived.”

After his service, Alvaro went to Queens College in New York, on the GI Bill. While in school, he worked part-time jobs in New York City, driving taxis in Manhattan and, on weekends, mopping floors at a peep show on 42nd Street. Throwing his hands up, Alvaro remarks, “very menial work,” and then with a smile continues, “but I wanted to go to college.”

Alvaro finished college, went to graduate school and then landed a federal government job in the Washington D.C./Baltimore area. After 20 years there, he decided to move to New Mexico to become an artist, which is when he started to think about his cultural identity.

Alvaro moved from New Mexico to Southern Arizona to be in the borderlands. At first, before the project started, he would go to the sites, sometimes spending the night, hoping some kind of message would form from the energy he felt.

“It needed to exist. [It’s] addressing a situation that’s happening right now, which makes it very contemporary. [It’s] an artistic attempt to tell a reality. It becomes part of the landscape, part of the political landscape.”

Alvaro and his volunteers walk through an Ocotillo forest to place the most remote cross of the day. After five miles of off-road driving from Arizona State Route 286, followed by a half-mile hike, the feeling of remoteness starts to kick in. Surrounded on all sides by a continuous oppressive chorus of cicadas and the mountain ranges making up the Altar Valley, you quickly lose any sense of direction.

Using his spade as a support, Alvaro leads a quiet group back to the car. Back when the project started in 2013, Alvaro had a long history of fitness, as a marathon runner and cyclist, to lean on while traversing mountains. Now, 11 years later, these are long mornings, especially for a soon-to-be octogenarian.

“My mental health is pretty good. It all depends on how my body will let me do it. What I do on Tuesdays has become a very important part of my life. It provides me with meaning and purpose, and I think it's important.”

In the upcoming presidential election, immigration consistently shows up as one of the most pressing issues Americans think about when heading to the polls. Alvaro emphasizes that there is no easy solution for such a complicated issue, and that this country has had immigration issues since day one. However, his project aims to humanize an issue that can get overgeneralized in political rhetoric.

“One of the elements of the project is to honor the courage that it takes for someone to leave everything behind, but also, to give this person, or these people, these 1,700 people, a little bit of presence, those people that didn’t make the news. The death went,” Alvaro lifts his hand up to the sky, “without anybody knowing.”

“That person had a name, that person had family, that person had people who loved them, that person had dreams and that dream died in that piece of terrain, there.”