Alvaro Enciso's Desert Monument to the Dead

It starts with a dream that becomes a dot. A red dot, representing a GPS coordinate on a map transformed into a hole, not too deep, cut into the earth with a pickaxe and shovel, then filled with moistened gravel and quick-dry cement into which Tucson, Arizona-based artist, Alvaro Enciso, plants a simple cross of rough 2x3inch pine strips painted a vibrant color and secured at the midpoint with a red dot made from metal trash he’s harvested from the floor of the vast Sonoran.

Since the October 1, 1994 launch of Operation Gatekeeper, the Sonoran desert, one of the hottest places on Earth in the summertime, has destroyed the lives and stolen the dreams of an estimated 10,000 souls. Forcing upon them a death most cruel, the US government remains steadfast in its nearly 30-year bet that the agony of some will deter others from coming. It hasn't. So what started as a dream “to reveal to the world the US government’s responsibility for turning the Sonoran Desert into a graveyard” has resulted in Alvaro transforming the desert into a cemetery, an art installation, and a memorial to the needless suffering of the unknown.

To date, he has marked the red dots of 1,200 (and counting) of the 10,000 (and counting) fallen. It's a work of monumental art, exposing government-sanctioned inhumanity. Art without sentimentality. Art without end. Art intended to lift up the lost while informing the living. It's a symbolic expression of who we should not be as a country. 

Alvaro's Desert Monument to the Dead screams quietly at us to rethink the policy of “Prevention Through Deterrence,” our First, Second, and possibly Third Solution.

Find Alvaro's tale alongside other stories of how art keeps good alive in the worst of times in the now available collection from She Writes Press: Art in the Time of Unbearable Crisis, in which women writers reveal that in tumultuous times such as these, we need poets more than we need politicians.

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