The desert was flat. Flat and wide, like a face pressed up against a window. You couldn’t hide in it, but people tried. The silence was loud: louder than sirens, louder than the sun that bit your neck like a jealous god. Before fences, before borders, this land was Mexican. Before that, it was neither. Now, it’s patrolled. Branded. A territory where people vanish by staying still. The sand doesn’t reveal more than it remembers.

Families lived hidden in plain sight. Families lived beneath billboards selling luxury real estate. Their kids played next to chainlink and dried-out ditches. No camouflage — just poverty made mundane. Just presence mistaken for absence. This land doesn't forget what was taken. It just folds it into the backdrop, until even memory becomes infrastructure.