Kate Spradley and Felipe De Brigard are two of this year’s MacArthur Fellows, each working at the interface of science and justice.
The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation
hide caption
toggle caption
The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation
It should have been a fairly routine exhumation of a man’s body at a local cemetery in south Texas’ Brooks County: Ask the funeral home to mark the correct location on a map, then dig up the remains with shovels and trowels.
But Kate Spradleyforensic anthropologist at Texas State University, had encountered a problem.
“We don’t know where he is buried,” the employees told him.
They also did not know where more than a hundred other deceased Central American migrants were buried.
Spradley says the practice is illegal.
“Everyone should have dignity in death,” she says. “And there is no dignity in taking someone away, burying them and forgetting them – and never coming back to try to further investigate who that person was or how to get them back to their family. The torture that families were going through, not knowing where their loved ones were.”
That’s when Spradley says she and her team realized, “We’re going to have to exhume this entire cemetery.” »
This effort, which began in 2013, caught the attention of the MacArthur Foundation, which just named Spradley one of MacArthur Fellows. This cohort of 20 academics and artists each receives $800,000 over five years, with no strings attached.
Other winners include a bioengineer which creates nanotechnology to improve vaccines and drug delivery, a climate researcher examine the interaction between polar sea ice and global change, and a organic chemist use electricity to help build complex molecules more efficiently and sustainably.
Spradley is one of the recipients recognized for their work at the intersection of science and justice.
Transform numbers into nouns
The body in this Brooks County cemetery belonged to a young man from El Salvador named Elmer Esau Barahona.
In 2012, he fled his country because a gang was pressuring him to join its ranks. “He didn’t want to join the gang,” Spradley says. “So he and a number of individuals paid a coyote, who is the person who guides them across the border.”
Barahona and his cohort were part of an influx of Central American migrants crossing the border from Mexico into Texas that year, “fleeing gang violence, political persecution, poverty — in record numbers,” Spradley says.
It’s a perilous journey. “Texas, like any border state, has some pretty hostile terrain,” she explains. “It’s just brush and cedars and sandy soil. So it’s hard to walk, it’s hot and there’s nothing to direct you to the north. So sometimes people get lost, they can’t keep up and they can go in circles.”
When Barahona’s family didn’t hear from him, they quickly realized something was wrong.
Spradley says the coyote called Barahona’s aunt and said, “Hey, we left your nephew by a tree. There’s a brown plaid shirt tied around his knee.”
Elmer died there. And the authorities buried him in the local cemetery.
THE Argentine Forensic Anthropology Teama group that searches for, identifies and repatriates the bodies of missing and deceased people, said it would pay for DNA analysis of the bones so that Barahona’s remains could be returned to El Salvador. And they enlisted Spradley and his team, based nearby, to recover the body.
Of course, this turned out to be a much more difficult task than expected, given that the funeral home did not know where Barahona was buried. They also didn’t know the whereabouts of the hundred other migrants they had buried that year.
“It was just too much for the county to handle,” she said. “They didn’t know what to do. And they started burying them” without keeping track of who was buried and where. “We call it an ‘administrative loss,’ where they get lost in the shuffle, fall through the cracks, and are buried forever without any chance of identification.”
Spradley started a group called Identification of the operation (OpID), “where we try to turn numbers into names,” she says, and helped form the Border Forensic Coalition make policy changes to resolve the problem.
“Although Brooks County was the worst case scenario for years,” she says, “local officials began to work together and are now a great example for other rural border counties to follow.”
More broadly, thanks to the coalition’s efforts, the FBI has now changed its policy to include the DNA of Latino families in its federal database, greatly facilitating Spradley’s identification efforts.
His search for bodies now extends to several South Texas cemeteries, sometimes using ground-penetrating radar. She and her colleagues attempt to extract identifying information from skeletal remains or by taking the fingerprints of individuals, even in advanced states of decomposition. (The FBI trained them to use rehydration to resuscitate part of the fingertip.)
These efforts can bring answers to families – and some measure of peace.
Rethinking memory
Another MacArthur winner examines how people who have survived trauma can create peace for themselves.
Felipe De Brigard is a philosopher and cognitive neuroscientist at Duke University who is rethinking what memory is. “I like to say that I’ve been interested in memory for as long as I can remember,” he offers.
For a long time, memory was considered an archival resource, like a library whose books could be placed on shelves and then removed to be read. This “suggests that every time we have an experience, it remains intact, unchanged,” says De Brigard. “Then, at the time of recovery, we go back as if we were going into an archive.”
But he believes that this perspective is “totally false”. Instead, De Brigard is part of what he says is a growing consensus that memory is reconstructive. “What memory does at retrieval,” he explains, “is puts together bits of stored information not only from the original event, but also from other events in the past.”
According to this view, memory is an assembly of fragments of experiences, knowledge, expectations and hypotheses. This means that memory can be – and often is – imperfect and malleable.
To explore this idea further, he and his colleagues launched a project called Memory and losswhich translates to “Memory and Forgiveness” in Spanish. The team explores the memories of those living in the north of De Brigard’s native country of Colombia who were victims of intense paramilitary and guerrilla violence.
“There were murders, massacres, kidnappings, disappearances,” he says. “We’re talking about 100,000 people who were victims in this area.”
Once the peace agreement was signed, many of the perpetrators returned home to the same communities they had terrorized. “Reconciliation becomes almost a matter of life and death,” says De Brigard.
For five years and counting, he and his team have been interviewing these victims, taking their vital signs and recording brain data. And they discovered that forgiving in the present can dilute the power of traumatic memories.
In other words, “memory is partly modifiable because this modification helps us carry the burden of our past,” explains De Brigard.
In some ways, memory is also very relevant to Spradley’s work with deceased migrants in Texas. “When you lose someone and you don’t know what happened,” she says, “all you have are memories.”
The efforts of Spradley and his team resulted in the positive identification of some 300 individuals. This includes a person who was identified using DNA after the discovery of an unmistakable item of clothing – a brown plaid shirt.
“I walked into the lab and saw this shirt hanging on a clothesline,” Spradley recalled. “And I thought, ‘Oh my God, that could be Elmer,’” the young Salvadoran said.
And it was.
“It really proved to us,” she says, “that what we were doing was a good thing and the right thing.”
Gn headline
