TCNJ

33 were part of the profile used to help identify border crossers — but Beatrice and Soler set out to measure just how prevalent they were. "We wanted to make sure that we could put some numbers behind it and make sure, to a statistically significant degree, that individuals coming across the border in Arizona and dying were showing indicators of physical stress to a greater extent than somebody born in the United States," Beatrice says. And they were. Using X-rays and their expert eyes, Beatrice and Soler examined the remains of 160 border crossers and compared them to the remains of 65 Americans. They found that porotic hyperostosis was 7.9 times more prevalent among the border crossers, and that enamel hypoplasia, the thin tooth enamel that also marks poor childhood nutrition, was three times more prevalent. The border crossers' skulls were more pitted even than those Beatrice had studied from Greece, where the rate of porotic hyperostosis was 17 percent; it was 58 percent in the border crossers. "More people have this condition coming through Arizona right now than in medieval Greece," Beatrice says. "That's why we couldn't believe it." He and Soler presented their findings at conferences of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences and the American Association of Physical Anthropologists, and in a paper slated for publication in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Forensic Sciences. "When you find this stuff in archeological remains and you're trying to tell the story of those people, you usually talk about things like invasions, massive drought, famine … ," Beatrice says. "Earthquakes," Soler adds. "There's all kinds of disasters invoked to explain this in archeological skeletons, but here it is right in front of us," Beatrice continues. "We have to be careful as objective scientists not to sound like we are advocating a certain viewpoint, but what the data says is very clear — that the individuals who attempt to cross the border in Southern Arizona and die in the desert very frequently experience pretty rough living conditions as kids." "I think this shows the desperation and makes it real," Soler says. "If people realized more often that people were migrating to this country because of desperate circumstances, that might change some minds," Beatrice says. What they found confirmed what the medical examiner's office had long suspected. "It went from anecdote to data," Bruce Anderson says. "And the data makes us feel more confident when making a call on an unidentified person: Are they more likely an American citizen or a foreign national of a lower socioeconomic stratum?" Their research continues — the Undocumented Border Crosser Health Project, they call it — and has expanded to Texas, where their initial findings " THERE ARE A LOT OF PEOPLE DYING IN TEXAS NOW," SAYS BEATRICE. "WE COULD CONCEIVABLY CONTINUE TO DO THIS FOR YEARS." seem to show more border crossers from other Central American countries, whose remains carry fewer signs of childhood deprivation. "We don't see quite the same level of systemic stress in people coming into Texas as we do in people coming into Arizona," Beatrice says. That could indicate more Central Americans fleeing violence, rather than Mexicans escaping poverty — but more research is needed. "There are a lot of people dying in Texas now," Beatrice says. "We could conceivably continue to do this for years." The man with the broken arm was eventually identified, his remains returned to his family in Mexico. Beatrice and Soler have not met them, nor the families of anyone else they have examined, but they would like to someday. "We'd like to talk with the families of people who have been identified, to understand what their childhood was like … ," Beatrice says. " … to put all this in perspective," Soler adds. Kevin Coyne is a freelance writer who teaches at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism.

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