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“People see them and say, ‘Oh, they’re only looking for bones,’ ” Kristy Guevara-Flanagan said, of the search group at the heart of the recent film “Águilas,” which she co-directed.
On a recent Thursday afternoon, Marisela and Ely Ortiz, a middle-aged couple, went to a Costco in Temecula, California, to buy crates of bread and bottled water, a weekend’s worth of nourishment for twenty-five volunteers who would spend two days walking in extreme heat. They tucked the provisions amid camping equipment in their car and set off at dusk the following day for a six-hour drive into the Sonoran Desert, a trek they’ve made once a month for the past nine years. The couple and almost all of their volunteers emigrated to the United States from Latin America, and their group, known as the Águilas del Desierto, spends weekends in the desert searching for migrants who have disappeared. The scrubby, hostile terrain where California and Arizona approac