Capturing Los Migrantes Desaparecidos: Crisis, Unknowability, and the Making of the Missing

Drawing on fourteen months of ethnographic work, we analyze three population-making technologies (denuncias, biobanks, and bodies) that have emerged as dominant tools both on the part of governments and human rights advocates to capture the missing migrants. We conclude that missing migrants are a Population of Cognition that is both made legible and unknowable through specific technologies and delineations of crisis.