{"id":622729,"date":"2018-09-05T12:00:35","date_gmt":"2018-09-05T18:00:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/?p=622729"},"modified":"2018-09-05T18:35:13","modified_gmt":"2018-09-06T00:35:13","slug":"naming-the-borderlands-lost","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/2018\/09\/naming-the-borderlands-lost\/","title":{"rendered":"Naming the Borderlands\u2019 lost"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Shari

Maya L. Kapoor \/ High Country News<\/p>

Forensic anthropology graduate student Shari Ex studies the remains of a pig 10 days after placing it in the Sonoran desert. The clothes make the work more accurate — and remind researchers of the human relevance of their work.<\/p><\/div>\n

The young man was alive when he was left in the desert near Green Valley, Arizona. Perhaps he was making his first journey across the U.S.-Mexico border, or maybe he was a recent deportee. It\u2019s possible his parents or brother or girlfriend were still waiting to hear that he was safe. But when he turned up at the Pima County Medical Examiner\u2019s office in Tucson, Arizona, he\u2019d been dead for approximately two months, and all that remained was a partial skeleton \u2014 missing its ribs, arms, hands and feet \u2014 some torn clothes containing six 100 peso bills and a pre-paid Visa charge card, and one battered red sneaker, an Air Jordan.<\/p>\n

In his brightly lit Tucson lab, the forensic anthropologist lifted a sun-bleached bone from a gurney and turned it in his hand, indicating an almost imperceptible scrape mark where a coyote had chewed it. Bruce Anderson, a tall man with a tanned face, slicked-back dark hair and mismatched scrubs, was fairly sure he knew the man\u2019s identity, even without an identification card. Relatives back in Guatemala had convinced Aguilas del Desierto, or Desert Eagles \u2014 a volunteer group, composed mostly of immigrants, that does search-and-rescue work in the desert \u2014 to look for the man in the last place he was seen alive. These remains were found in the right location along with that red shoe. And the man had had an unusual set of extra canines; the teeth were gone by the time Anderson examined him, but the double sockets remained.<\/p>\n

Anderson, who became a forensic anthropologist in part because he loved puzzles, worked through the evidence patiently. He carved a rectangular two-inch section of bone from the man\u2019s leg to send for DNA testing. Anderson would ask the Guatemalan foreign consulate in Tucson to track down relatives in Guatemala and swab their cheeks for DNA samples, and to pay for a DNA comparison. \u201cEven though we think it\u2019s a good chance that this is a Guatemalan man who was missing two months ago, we still just can\u2019t use a double tooth and red shoes as proof, so that\u2019s the plan right now,\u201d he told me, as we gazed at the person\u2019s remains. But the plan could fall apart, if the likely family declined to provide DNA samples, or if the Guatemalan consulate couldn\u2019t pay for the lab work. And even if Anderson ultimately solved this puzzle, there would be others: The same day they found the man with the red sneaker, Aguilas del Desierto discovered two other dead men. The number of undocumented immigrants trying to enter through the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands has fallen in the past decade to 1970s levels<\/a>. But the number who die in the desert persists, so researchers and local officials have had to develop new methods for identifying their remains.<\/p>\n