John Annerino
Dead in Their Tracks

A few years back, John Annerino headed south across the border, on assignment for Newsweek. He journeyed into one of the most distant spots on the planet, the heart of the 4,100-square-mile "empty quarter" that straddles the Arizona state line.

In this harsh environment, at the most deadly time of year — in August, when water is a precious commodity, when the temperature soars past 100 degrees in the shade and your lungs ache just from inhaling the hot air — Annerino, a veteran explorer and wilderness runner, linked up with four Mexican nationals determined to cross the border illegally in their quest for work to feed their families. Annerino and his companions survived their harrowing experience. But Annerino returned again and again to the sun-scorched barrens in an attempt to document the lives and struggles of those who continue to perish in America's killing ground. Following the route of the historic forty-niners, he journeyed on foot mid-summer across the Camino del Diablo, a treacherous 130-mile desert trail that claimed the lives of hundreds of Mexicans in the 1850s.

Dead in Their Tracks is the story of the "empty quarter" of America's Southwest, of the migrant workers, the ranchers, the Border Patrol trackers and the drug runners who haunt an inhospitable, if beautiful, wilderness for the most part "empty" except where it is studded with the bones of unfortunate explorers and immigrants. Thousands of people have died there since the first written records were made by the conquistadors in the 1500s; the latest tragedies will be written up, as they are every year, in this summer's newspapers.

Photojournalist and author John Annerino was born on the edge of the desert, where he still lives. An Arizona native, he has been working in the frontier of Old Mexico and the American West for the last twenty years, documenting its indigenous people, natural beauty, and political upheaval. Represented by Gamma Liaison, Annerino includes among his credits Life, Time, Newsweek, the New York Times, Scientific American, and many publications worldwide. He is the author of eight books, among them People of Legend (Sierra Club Books, 1996) and Apache: The Sacred Path to Womanhood (Marlowe and Co., 1998).

"…With nothing more than a thin cotton shirt to insulate my body from the burning salt pan, I stare up at the fiery heavens and realize that the odds of any of us making it out of this desert alive are staggering.…" — from Dead in Their Tracks

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