As an anthropologist interested in the ways that undocumented immigrants experience structures of state power, I am using this project to explore the ways in which the Adelanto Detention Center located in the high desert in California is used as tool for incarcerality, deportation and violations of human rights. While the facility was previously used as a state prison since 1991, it was later bought by the city of Adelanto and then expanded into an immigration detention center that holds up to 2,000 detainees in 2011. Adelanto is also neighbor to Victorville, California which held the George Air Force Base between 1942-1992. While the air force base has been closed since then, the site has been exposed for its use of harmful pollutants and burials of radioactive waste that have the potential to pollute water in the area. Finally, this project aims to map out connections between the use regions previous use of the George Air Force Base and the current use of the Adelanto Detention Center. Given the proximity of the two, this project also aims to investigate if the toxic waste and pollutants from the air force base have any health implication to the city of Adelanto and to the Adelanto detention center. My visualization tools for this project will include photographs of the outside of both facilities and a collection of maps. I will place more emphasis on the maps given that google maps is not able to generate a route that connects the Adelanto Detention Center with the George Air Force Base.
This screenshot is of a virtual 360 tour of the detention center. This virtual tour is important for various reasons. To begin it is a tool by the facility to show the facility to the public as a human space. As online tourists click through the various rooms of the facility, it becomes evident that the facility is being portrayed as "humane". It also becomes obvious the missing bodies in the pictures in the tour, which is an attempt to make the facility a neutral space.
This map pinpoints the housing areas of the base as well as noted sites of stored waste. The article that used the image discussed various reported miscarriages, childhood cancer and other health hazards believed to have been caused by the toxins from the base. While the base has now been closed, there has been no permanent clean up of the toxins. Given that this base is near the Adelanto Detention Center, the accusations of toxic waste of the military base is important to consider when thinking through the health hazards that people in the area and in the detention center may be continuing to experince.
Maria Liliana Ramirez. 24 November 2018, "Mapping Detention and Toxicity", Center for Ethnography, Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography, last modified 5 December 2018, accessed 26 April 2024. http://centerforethnography.org/content/mapping-detention-and-toxicity-0