University of Michigan anthropologist creates exhibit inspired by unauthorized immigrants

University of Michigan anthropologist Jason De Leon was inspired to start the Undocumented Migration Project after he came across the body of an unauthorized immigrant while doing fieldwork in the Sonoran Desert in Arizona. The immigrant, a 41-year-old woman named Marisol, had died attempting to crawl up a steep hill north of the state’s border with Mexico according to a story published in Salon.

Artifacts collected from the resulting project are now on display in Ann Arbor as part of a small exhibition entitled State of Exception. The exhibition includes a number of desert backpacks found by De Leon, an assistant professor of anthropology at U-M, and his students.

According to the report in Salon, a curator at the Institute for the Humanities Gallery at Michigan named Amanda Krugliak encouraged De Leon to develop the exhibit after reading about his research.

State of Exception is on view at the University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities Gallery in the Thayer Academic Building through March 12.

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• Read the full story at Salon.

Ben Freed covers business for AnnArbor.com. You can sign up here to receive Business Review updates every week. Reach out to Ben at 734-623-2528 or email him at benfreed@annarbor.com. Follow him on twitter @BFreedinA2