ABSTRACT
This chapter probes the weaponization of the Sonoran Desert, and, in company with the independent documentary El Mar La Mar by Joshua Bonnetta and J.P. Sniadecki, the mediatic “unwalling” of the U.S.–Mexico border that passes through it. From a perspective of critical environmental media justice studies, Walker offers several analytic moves: first, spatial documentary studies as method with roots in human geography; second, a cartographically attuned “shot mapping” of the film in light of borderzone thinking that is environmentally just and condemnatory of racialized violence; and third, the insistence that elemental media be understood in the context of Kathryn Yusoff’s anti-racist critique of the politics of the Anthropocene. This chapter seeks to describe a multidirectional cartography being razed upon the Sonoran Desert, and to support the necessity—and vitality—of strenuous crossings into geosocial futures.
