For more than a decade, Alvaro Enciso, 78, has hammered together wood and junk scavenged from the desert, fashioning more than 1,700 crosses in a workshop at his Tucson home. Each cross is unique.
Every Tuesday, he and other volunteers trek into the remote desert of Southern Arizona to plant the crosses in memory of migrants who have died.
It’s his tribute to them, and these crosses are the only marker that many of them may ever get.
A volunteer with the Tucson Samaritans shows the GPS coordinates to the places where Isaías Choc Chen, 45, and Darwin García, 23, died in 2021 and 2008, respectively. The area is located in the distant Sycamore Canyon in Santa Cruz County. — Simon Feisthauer Fournet/TucsonSentinel.com
Volunteers and interns from the Border Community Alliance plant a cross beside a windmill and metal water tank for Cruz Ramos Chajal, 40, who died in 2023. There are only dirt roads in the area in Sasabe, Ariz. —Simon Feisthauer Fournet/TucsonSentinel.com
On a recent Tuesday morning in late July, the first cross was planted beside a windmill and water tank.
Using donated paint, Enciso had painted it brilliant orange, an unmistakable spot of color that now marks the place where Cruz Ramos Chajal, age 40, died last year from heat exposure in Sasabe, Ariz. Ramos Chajal attempted to cross from Mexico to the United States, and lost his life near the border town that lies about 70 miles southwest of Tucson.
En español: ‘No quiero ser Santo Alvaro’: Conoce al artista que pone cruces en el desierto
A group of interns from the Border Community Alliance gathered to listen to Enciso speak and then help plant the cross.
“These crosses are altering the landscape, they don’t belong here. But a migrant dying out here doesn’t belong here either,” said Enciso.
The impact isn’t just individual, as Enciso was quick to remind them.
“That person had a destination in this country. There was another household. That person did not arrive. So now we have not just one death here, but a whole bunch of people who are impacted as to what happened here,” he said.
Peter Lucero, a friend and volunteer, blesses Ramos Chajal’s cross with holy water and a rosary. — Cris Seda Chabrier/TucsonSentinel.com
‘Donde mueren los sueños’ — Where Dreams Die
“I’m not really an activist, I’m a person who found the perfect storm to do my project, to connect myself to migration,” Enciso told the Tucson Sentinel as he planted one of the three crosses he placed that day.
Instead, he considers his project to be artistic. “Donde mueren los sueños” — Where Dreams Die — came about due to his desire to explore what migration meant for him.
“I have acquired some fame, so people see me as a good guy or a humanitarian. A person dedicated to doing good, it is not like that,” Enciso said in an interview at his home. “I do not want to be St. Alvaro. I want to be Alvaro.”
Ramos Chajal’s cross. Enciso said he painted it a vibrant orange to evoke the colorful cultures of Latin America. — Cris Seda Chabrier/TucsonSentinel.com
Beginnings of the project
Enciso moved to New York City as a teenager from Colombia in the turbulent decade of the 1960s. He studied cultural anthropology and worked with a government team of experts tasked with researching how best to integrate immigrants into the United States.
As the decades passed, he turned those questions onto himself.
“Every time I go to Colombia I feel like I don’t belong,” he said. “But sometimes I feel that I don’t belong here either. Something is missing, I am out of place.”
His artistic interests laid in that displacement, so he quit his government job as a cultural anthropologist and moved to New Mexico to start his career as a painter of large colorful abstract works. Then he changed it from paint to painted metal pieces discarded by migrants.
In 2011, he moved to Arizona and was shocked as he learned more details about deaths in the Borderlands. He began to experiment with how best to portray the thousands of migrants who lost their lives crossing the desert.
“Donde mueren los sueños” came about after two years of trial and error that even included possibly renting an unwilling mule to carry a 70 lb. red metal disk across isolated dirt roads to mark where a death had taken place.
“When I went to meet the mule she did not like me,” Enciso laughed. “The mule said ‘Ay, Don Alvaro, I’m really sorry, but I’m already retired. I don’t want to carry things.'”
Eventually, he came upon the idea of using crosses, and taking photographs of them, as a conceptual art piece, land art and performance. Enciso also turned the idea of a Christian cross on its head.
“The Roman empire invented the cross to kill people. It used to hang the body in the sun without any water as a way to tell people ‘Don’t mess with the empire’,” Enciso said, drawing a parallel with Border Patrol’s policy of “prevention through deterrence.”
Since 1994, the Border Patrol has stepped up enforcement to prevent crossings in urban areas and push people out into the most harsh and remote parts of the U.S.-Mexico border’s desert. The reasoning was that most people would not risk the trip.
Instead, more than 4,000 human remains have been recovered along the Arizona border with Mexico, according to a map kept by the Pima County Medical Examiner’s Office and the nonprofit Humane Borders.
It’s not clear how many individuals have died, since bones are sometimes scattered across vast stretches of land, and many are unidentified.
Groups like the Armadillos Búsqueda y Rescate and Battalion Search and Rescue search isolated regions like Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument and Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge. But many territories — such as private ranches and the Tohono O’odham Nation — remain closed to humanitarian groups.
“They never understood the desperation of being poor,” Enciso said to the students, the rolling mountains of Southern Arizona behind him.
Enciso shovels soil at the foot of Isaías Choc Chen’s cross in the remote region of Sycamore Canyon. He was 45 when he died. —Cris Seda Chabrier/TucsonSentinel.com
The crosses also have a geometrical symbolism to represent death.
“The vertical line represents the person that is still alive. They stand upright, and the horizontal is where the person has died. Where the two lines meet, one passes from being alive to being dead,” said the artist.
The red dot also remained — just on a much smaller scale at the center of all his crosses — and it corresponds to the digital red points in the map.
“I’m taking the red dot and bringing them where the actual tragedy took place,” Enciso explained.
The dot might be the only part of the cross that is left, once termites eat the wood, or a cow knocks it over, or people vandalize them.
“In 200 years from now people are gonna start finding these pieces of red dots and say ‘what happened here?’ Oh, you know, there was a beat-up old guy who used to put crosses out here, he’s gone but that was his legacy,” Enciso said.
Ultimately, for Enciso, the crosses are markers of where the American dream died as a false and failed promise made to thousands of hopeful migrants.
Enciso paints a new cross at his workshop on a Monday morning. It will be placed in the desert soon. — Cris Seda Chabrier/TucsonSentinel.com
Enciso uses a piece of an oxidized metal can to decorate a cross. It might carry the DNA of the border crosser who ate from it, Enciso said. Then, adorning the cross with it is a combination of an object from a person who perhaps “crossed the border 50 years ago with one who crossed the border one year ago.” —Cris Seda Chabrier/TucsonSentinel.com
Hispanic & Latino community must come together
After 11 years, Enciso is disenchanted and frustrated. Humanitarian groups, according to him, are applying Band-aids to an issue whose cause is political.
“We’re going to continue to leave water, hand someone a bottle of water, and me putting crosses,” he said to the group of interns. “That’s not conducive to very much.”
In part, according to Enciso, the fault lies with the people who are the faces and driving forces of many humanitarian organizations on the border.
“The work is being done by white people, most of them retired, most of them are in good financial situations,” said Enciso. “For this thing to take traction, to be noticed, the Hispanic community has to participate in it.”
The disconnect creates an imbalanced relationship between aid groups with paternalistic motivations and migrants who each have their own reasons for coming to the U.S., Enciso said.
But, the Latino community is divided over policies that could prevent deaths at the border.
According to the Pew Research Center, “U.S. Latinos are less likely than other Americans to say increasing deportations or a larger wall along the border will help the situation.”
Yet, the center also found that Latinos are split on whether the situation at the border would improve or worsen if the federal government made it harder for asylum seekers to be granted temporary legal status while they wait for their asylum hearing.
Additionally, policies that can enable racial profiling — such as Arizona’s 2024 ballot measure Prop. 314 and the SB 1070 of the previous decade — fuel fears of deportation and prison time for Latinos, and makes them less likely to participate in politics.
“They don’t have the documents, they cannot cross the checkpoints, they have families and they have to work. A lot of them don’t wanna be reminded that they crossed the border illegally,” said Enciso.
Enciso remains hopeful, though, because of the younger generation, such as the interns that accompanied him from the Border Community Alliance.
“I don’t like to hang out with old people, I like to hang out with young people,” Enciso said about the groups of students he often takes out in the desert. “That gives me energy.”
It also passes on his empathy for the migrants who have died.
Isabel Pan, a student at Pitzer College in Claremont, Calif., carried Enciso’s last cross for the day. She said that stopping at each spot felt like going to a funeral.
“Carrying the cross felt almost like carrying a body in a coffin,” said Pan. “There’s a very intimate weight in carrying something that symbolizes someone who has passed here, in the desert.”
Volunteers stabilize Darwin García’s cross. He was 23 when he died. —Cris Seda Chabrier/TucsonSentinel.com
Isabel Pan, a student from Pitzer College, touches Darwin García’s cross after carrying it to its resting place. —Cris Seda Chabrier/TucsonSentinel.com
Small crosses and artwork at Enciso’s home. —Cris Seda Chabrier/TucsonSentinel.com