The Cross ~ Dawn Drake

Over the course of the trip, we had heavily interacted with one fact: many migrants die crossing the Sonoran Desert. This fact was unavoidable. The border wall, designed specifically to harm and kill migrants trying to cross, is one of Agua Prieta’s most central pieces of architecture. There’s hardly anywhere you can go in the town or the surrounding state and not see at least part of the wall. Despite this, the grim reality of what migrants experience while crossing was still abstract. It was visible and imposing, but I still felt distant from it.

Some events and moments throughout the trip helped to narrow that disconnect. One such moment was the vigil we participated in on Tuesday evening, in which we presented crosses engraved with the names of migrants who had died, alongside others for those who were unidentified. The unnamed crosses were the ones that held the most impact for me. It forced us to reckon with the fact that there were migrants whose identities were completely lost, their lives reduced to the words, “No Identificada.” However, despite this growing sense of closeness, I still felt a lingering sense of detachment. The crosses we held and names we announced were real, but we were still, in essence, acknowledging and mourning migrants as a collective, not as individual persons. Their suffering was present, but it wasn’t personal.

That changed for me towards the end of the week, when the BWAP team participated in a cross-planting ceremony. The ceremony blended elements of traditional indigenous practices and modern Christian ones to commemorate Juan de Jesús Garcia, a young migrant who died after crossing the border. The cross we planted was engraved with his name, date of death, and painted bright red to indicate him as a male. Yet, what struck me the most was not the color of the cross, but the small number “16” carved at the top. Juan was only sixteen years old when he died. That one detail was what shattered any remaining emotional distance. No longer were we just commemorating the many migrants who have died in the Sonoran Desert. We were mourning a child. More than that, when Juan died, he was two years older than me. Now, at his cross, I had surpassed him in age.

The ceremony was deeply intentional. We began by digging a hole for the cross, a process too reminiscent of digging a grave. We laid out an altar with various indigenous spiritual objects and lit incense, asking the wind to carry the scent to Juan’s family as a means of comfort. We offered prayers for him, and to end the ceremony we moved around the circle one-by-one and touched the cross, leaving something of ourselves with Juan. Each part of the ceremony was so overwhelmingly physical that it was impossible not to recognize it as a funeral. Every gesture was one of remembrance and grief, and acknowledgment that Juan’s life mattered and that he had not been forgotten.

Before leaving the site, we cemented the cross into place, leaving a stone altar around it. The cross isn’t going anywhere. It will stand as a permanent marker of Juan’s life and death. Every passerby will see it and, whether they know it or not, be confronted with the grave of a child who died as a result of our government. In a world where migrants and their suffering are so often ignored, this cross offers a lasting recognition. It ensures that Juan de Jesús Garcia is remembered—not as a statistic, but as a child whose life was cut far too short by a border that renders so many deaths invisible.

Dawn Drake (she/her) is a freshman studying global health.

Photo: The BWAP team participating in a cross-planting ceremony along a highway near Douglas, AZ.