IT’S A GRAY, mid-May morning in Panteón Municipal #1, a city cemetery in Tijuana’s Zona Norte neighborhood. Alberto, the gatekeeper, saunters down a rocky pathway lined with palms, jacaranda, and gravestones to a prominent, red brick chapel, built over the tomb of one Juan Castillo Morales.

The shrine is covered wall-to-wall with candles, flowers, and plaques with names and messages of thanks to “Juan Soldado” (Juan the Soldier), as Castillo is known. Amid the array sits a stylized bust of a young soldier, resplendent in military attire, this morning bearing a black rosary and a blue-and-white Los Angeles Dodgers snapback hat.

The shrine is one of many unofficial memorials where loved ones remember lives of immigrants lost along the U.S.-Mexico border. From chapels erected around the graves of unofficial saints such as Castillo to digital memorials people carry with them into the desert to the crosses, flowers, and other mementos left along the border boundary itself, these monuments not only pay tribute to the individuals lost but bear witness to the ubiquity of death — and faith — in America’s southwestern borderlands.

Rosalba Ruiz-Hernández, a 46-year-old mother of five, stands in the shrine. Ruiz-Hernández, originally from the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, was deported back to Tijuana after her own failed attempt to start a new life in the U.S. Two of her grown children still live in Long Beach, Calif., near her former husband. They are undocumented, she said, but they make a living. Two others are in Tijuana with her. Matías, her middle son, died in the desert on his way north to join his siblings in Southern California.

“I come to Juanito’s chapel to give thanks for the children who have their new life in Long Beach,” Rosalba said, “and to pray for Matías’ soul.”

Unlikely saints, untold deaths

JUAN SOLDADO IS an unlikely saint. According to the Roman Catholic Church, he isn’t a saint at all. On Feb. 17, 1938, Castillo was executed for the rape and murder of Olga Camacho Martínez, a young girl who is buried in a cemetery just up the road. William Calvo-Quirós, an associate professor of American and Latino/a Studies at the University of Michigan, said the young soldier, a convicted murderer and rapist, transformed over time into Juan Soldado — a “folk saint” who is venerated as a victim of state violence.

Given questions around Castillo’s capture, his rushed trial, and his rapid execution by the military, some claim he was a patsy accused and convicted to protect a high-ranking captain. Others say his death was due to the pressure of a city on the edge of riots over Camacho’s death. Still others say the evidence was never properly analyzed to find him guilty. Little by little, however, convinced of his innocence, people began to bring offerings to his tomb, slowly attributing to Juan Soldado the status of a saint who helps people trying to cross the border or with health and family problems when institutions such as the state, the health system, or the church fail them.

“We have a real crime,” Calvo-Quirós told Sojourners, “but in peoples’ imagination Soldado became a vessel, so close to the U.S. border, for their own struggles with the state and not finding a solution.” Calvo-Quirós urged that Camacho, the original victim, not be forgotten, and said that both their deaths became “vessels for mourning the greed and exploitation that have made for a long legacy of violence along the U.S.-Mexico border. Olga, for example, is one in a long line of women tortured, violated, made invisible, silenced, and killed along our borders.”

Back at Juan Soldado’s tomb, Ruiz-Hernández said that Camacho and Juan Soldado are ánimas solas (“lonely souls”) who died with no one to pray for their deliverance — like many migrants who die in the desert, attempting to cross the border without documentation. Her fear is that such souls — like Juan’s, Olga’s, or her son Matías’ — may be suffering in purgatory or wandering aimlessly in a wilderness of life-beyond-death. “Ánimas solas cannot be forgotten,” Ruiz-Hernández said. “We need to remember these souls in pain.”

Tijuana holds many such stories, of border “saints” who, in death and in life, suffered at the intersections between worlds. And beyond Tijuana, there are numerous other unofficial saints’ shrines populating the U.S.-Mexico borderlands: El Tiradito in Tucson, Ariz.; Jesús Malverde in Culiacán, Sinaloa; Niño Fidencio in Espinazo, Nuevo León; the Virgen de San Juan del Valle, outside McAllen, Texas; and El Señor de los Milagros in San Antonio. Each memorial is part of a rich tapestry of rituals and beliefs that immigrants and their loved ones carry with them, or depend on, to sustain them amid migration, uncertainty, and death.

Nobody knows how many of these saints exist, wrote historian Paul J. Vanderwood. But the popular devotions and informal canonizations that emerged around them are a testament to the unjust circumstances of their deaths and, by extension, the deaths of many in the borderlands. These are souls with “unfinished” business, Vanderwood wrote — they “clamor for assistance” and cry out for justice.

Hundreds of migrants die every year along one of the world’s deadliest land borders. The U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency reports that 8,050 people died attempting to cross the border between 1998 and 2020. The agency recorded an additional 568 deaths in 2021 and 895 in 2022 — the most deaths recorded in a single year. Many more, who die from some form of exposure (heat stroke, hypothermia, or dehydration), are left unaccounted for and unclaimed. Then there are those who die somewhere in Mexico or Central and South America, en route to the U.S.-Mexico border.

This, said Calvo-Quirós, makes the border a nearly 2,000-mile stretch of “haunted land.”

Frontera de los muertos

JOHN CRAIG FREEMAN grew up in San Diego. “The border was always part of my life,” said the now Boston-based artist and professor. Later, as he started to create art projects as an adult, Freeman took up themes related to the border that had shaped his early life, especially the unsaid matters often left out of the public narrative — such as the nation’s reliance on cheap, undocumented labor or the logic of violence inherent in the United States’ increasingly militarized border security.

Starting in 1996, Freeman began tracking the increasing number of deaths along the border. Using records from the Pima County, Ariz., medical examiner’s office, Freeman saw that each time human remains were recovered, the GPS location was recorded in a vast database, along with other details about the deceased. As the numbers continued to add up — 249 in 1999, 380 in 2000, 492 in 2005 — Freeman started to wonder how he might memorialize these losses.

Looking at the digital data, Freeman said, he “couldn’t make sense of the scale of death.” He dropped a file full of thousands of data points — along with the attendant GPS coordinates of where the bodies were located — into Google Earth. The results overwhelmed him. “It was a difficult moment for me,” Freeman said, “and I wanted to help others feel the same discomfort.”

The result was the “Border Memorial: Frontera de los Muertos” project, a public art memorial dedicated to immigrants who had died. Using their phones, individuals near a location where an immigrant perished could hover over the GPS point with an augmented reality app and a three-dimensional geometric skeleton effigy would appear on screen, before slowly ascending to the sky above. “The project allowed people to visualize the scope of the loss of life by marking each location where human remains have been recovered along the border and the surrounding desert,” Freeman wrote.

To represent the points on the map where migrants died, Freeman modeled the skeleton on a traditional wood-carved style of calaca — a skeleton figure commonly used to commemorate loved ones during the Mexican Day of the Dead festival. He said he wanted the memorial to produce a sense of collective memory and empathy. “The border memorial project was for the families and loved ones and migrants themselves, but also for Americans who can easily find themselves disassociated from the human cost of border politics,” Freeman said. “The border is an experience we share; these are everybody’s losses, and I hope that it would unsettle or shake people out of their complacency.”

Devotion in the face of loss

MIGRATION CANNOT SIMPLY be explained in material terms. Nor can its spiritual and religious dimensions be summed up by certain, official forms of Christianity. There are devotions, beliefs, and practices beyond the mainstream that support and sustain migrants along the way.

In his book Undocumented Saints, Calvo-Quirós explores many such migratory devotions, in lands and lives where death is omnipresent. From the normalization of devotion to Santa Muerte — or Saint Death — to promises made to Juan Soldado on behalf of those migrating north, Calvo-Quirós said in an interview with Sojourners, he is not surprised to see an increase in devotion to unofficial saints. “At a time when policies of death have become the norm for many people, religious practices help people deal with a life where death may be the best thing that can happen to you,” he said.

For immigrants facing a potentially lethal environment, cartel violence, corrupt officials, and the state’s own obstacle course of death along the border, Calvo-Quirós said, making it to el otro lado (“the other side”) becomes a celebration of life. “In this culture of death, people have to make sacrifices to live,” he said.

In landscapes of death such as the southern border of the U.S., Calvo-Quirós noted, individuals such as Ruiz-Hernández find ways to celebrate life while also remembering the dead. “To pray for a good life is not to stop praying for the dead,” he said. “You are not sacrificing one for the other.”

Instead, Calvo-Quirós said, it might be helpful to think of how Ruiz-Hernández, despite all the conditions she faces, “crossed the border and performs devotions because she wants a good life, not only for herself, but for her children. In such tectonic places where the tensions of life and death have to be navigated, religion gives people a way to deal with an imperfect world,” he said. “It helps them figure out a way to find a good life in a place of death.”

Calvo-Quirós said we might all learn from rituals of death along the U.S.-Mexico border and apply those lessons to other spheres of life. “Economic exploitation, a health care system that fails us, education that fails us, a city that is not built to sustain those who live there, this is not the world we are meant to be living in,” he said.

“In that sense, we are all migrants in search of a better life. We are all living in haunted lands.”