Jason De León Introduces Hostile Terrain 94 Exhibit at Santa Barbara Museum

January 10th, Jason De León was the featured guest at a UC Santa Barbara roundtable discussion focused on Hostile Terrain 94, the exhibition he organized to highlight the thousands of immigrants who have perished crossing the border between Mexico and Arizona. The exhibition will be at the Art, Design, and Architecture Museum for one year. Visitors will be able to fill out toe tags that represent recovered bodies and then place them on a map in the locations where the individuals were found. There are more than 3,400 toe tags marking deaths that occurred between the mid-1990s and 2020. This is the seventh prototype of the exhibition, which will be launched officially on May 8, 2020 in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Iterations of this installation will be presented in 150 venues around the world between May and November of 2020.

De León is professor of Anthropology and Chicana/o Studies, and a core faculty member of the Cotsen Institute. On February 11, he will be the second speaker in the 50th Anniversary Lecture Series, discussing “The Land of Open Graves: Making Undocumented Migration Visible.” For further information, contact Michelle Jacobson at mjacobson@ioa.ucla.edu.