This year’s MacArthur Fellows include researchers who fuse science and justice

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It should have been a fairly routine exhumation of a man’s body from a local cemetery in Brooks County in southern Texas: ask the funeral home to point out the right plot on a map, and then dig up the remains with shovels and trowels.

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But Kate Spradley, a forensic anthropologist at Texas State University, had run into a problem.

“We don’t know where he’s buried,” the staff there told her.

Nor did they know where more than a hundred other Central American migrants who had died were interred.

Spradley says the practice is illegal — and a human rights violation.

“Everyone should have dignity in death,” she says. “And there is no dignity in taking someone, burying them and just forgetting about it — and never returning to try to further investigate who this person was or how to get them back to their family. The torture that the families were going through, not knowing where their loved ones were.”

That is when Spradley says she and her team realized: “We are 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 this year’s MacArthur Fellows. This cohort of 20 academics and artists each receive $800,000 over five years, no strings attached.

Other winners include a bioengineer who’s creating nanotechnologies to improve vaccines and drug delivery, a climate researcher examining the interaction between polar sea ice and global change, and an organic chemist using electricity to help build complex molecules more efficiently and sustainably.

Spradley is one of the recipients being recognized for their work at the intersection of science and justice.

Turning numbers into names

The body in that cemetery in Brooks County 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 did not want to join the gang,” says Spradley. “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 a surge of Central American migrants that year crossing the border from Mexico into Texas, “fleeing gang violence, political persecution, poverty — in record numbers,” says Spradley.

It’s a treacherous journey. “Texas, like every border state, has pretty hostile terrain,” she explains. “It’s all just scrub brush and cedar trees and sandy soil. So it’s hard to walk, it’s hot, and there’s nothing to orient you north. So sometimes people get lost, they can’t keep up, and they might wander around in circles.”

When Barahona’s family didn’t hear from him, they soon realized something was wrong.

Spradley says the coyote phoned Barahona’s aunt and said to her, “Hey, we left your nephew behind next to a tree. There’s a brown plaid shirt tied around his knee.”

Elmer died there. And officials buried him in the local cemetery.

The Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team, a group that looks for, identifies, and repatriates the bodies of missing people who have died, said they would pay for the DNA analysis of the bones so Barahona’s remains could be returned to El Salvador. And they enlisted Spradley and her team, who were based nearby, to recover the body.

This, of course, turned out to be a much more challenging task than expected, given that the funeral home did not know where Barahona was buried. Nor did they know the whereabouts of the other hundred-plus migrants they’d buried that year.

“It was just too much for the county to handle,” she says. “They didn’t know what to do. And they started just burying them” without keeping records of who was interred where. “We call this ‘administrative loss,’ where they just become lost in the shuffle and fall through the cracks and [are] buried forever without any chance of identification.”

Spradley created a group called Operation Identification (OpID), “where we try to turn numbers into names,” she says, and helped form the Forensic Border Coalition to make policy changes to address the issue.

“Although Brooks County was a worst-case scenario for years,” she says, “local officials started working together and now set an excellent example for other rural border counties to follow.”

More broadly, as a result of the coalition’s efforts, the FBI has now changed its policy to include DNA from Latin American families in its federal database, which has greatly eased Spradley’s identification efforts.

Her search for bodies now extends across multiple cemeteries in southern Texas, sometimes by using ground-penetrating radar. She and her colleagues try to extract identifying information from skeletal remains or by fingerprinting individuals, even in advanced states of decomposition. (The FBI trained them on the use of rehydration to resurrect a portion of the finger pad.)

These efforts can provide answers for families — and some measure of peace.

Rethinking memory

Another MacArthur winner examines how people who have survived trauma may create peace for themselves.

Felipe De Brigard is a philosopher and cognitive neuroscientist at Duke University rethinking what memory is. “I like to say that I have been interested in memory for as long as I can remember,” he offers.

For a long time, memory was thought to be archival, like a library whose books could be shelved and then pulled off to be read. It “suggests that every time that we have an experience, it gets stored untainted, unchanged,” says De Brigard. “Then, at the time of retrieval, we just go back as if we were going to an archive.”

But he believes this perspective is “entirely wrong.” Instead, De Brigard is part of what he says is a growing consensus that memory is reconstructive. “What the memory is doing at the time of retrieval,” he explains, “is piecing together bits of information that got stored not only from the original event but also from other events in the past.”

According to this view, memory is a cobbling together of fragments of experiences, knowledge, expectations, and assumptions. This means that memory can be — and often is — flawed and malleable.

To explore this idea further, he and his colleagues have launched a project called Memoria y Perdón, which translates to “Memory and Forgiveness” in Spanish. The team is exploring the memories of those living in the north of De Brigard’s home country of Colombia who were victims of intense paramilitary and guerrilla violence.

“There were murders, massacres, kidnappings, disappearances,” he says. “We’re talking perhaps 100,000 people that were victims in that area.”

Once a peace agreement was signed, many of the perpetrators returned home to the same communities that they had terrorized. “Reconciliation becomes almost a matter of life or death,” says De Brigard.

For five years and counting, he and his team have been interviewing these victims, taking their vitals, and recording brain data. And they found that forgiveness in the present can dilute the potency of traumatic memories.

In other words, “memory is in part modifiable because that modification helps us to carry the burden of our past,” says De Brigard.

In a way, memory is also quite relevant to Spradley’s work with the migrants who have died in Texas. “When you lose someone and you don’t know what happened,” she says, “all you have is memories.”

The efforts of Spradley and her team have yielded positive identifications of some 300 individuals. That includes one person who was ID’d using DNA after an unmistakable garment turned up — a brown plaid shirt.

“I walked into the lab and I saw this shirt hanging on a clothesline,” recalls Spradley. “And I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, this could be Elmer,'” the young man from El Salvador.

And it was.

“That really provided proof to us,” she says, “that what we were doing is a good thing, and the right thing.”