Kate Spradley is digging up a cemetery in Texas, and the MacArthur Foundation thinks that is worth $800,000. The forensic anthropologist at Texas State University has spent years exhuming graves in Brooks County to identify the remains of Central American migrants who died crossing the border. Her work caught the attention of the foundation, which just named her one of this year’s MacArthur Fellows. Each of the 20 recipients receives $800,000 over five years, with no strings attached.
2013 marked the start of Spradley’s project. It began with a simple request: a funeral home wanted her to locate a grave in a local cemetery. She arrived with shovels and trowels. Only then did the staff admit they had no idea where the body was buried.
“We don’t know where he’s buried,” the staff told her.
They had no idea where more than a hundred other Central American migrants who had passed away were buried. According to Spradley, the method is against the law and amounts to a human rights breach.
“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 she realized the scale of the problem. “We are going to have to exhume this entire cemetery.”
A body named Elmer Barahona
The body in that 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 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 is 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 did not 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.
A team whose job it is to look for, identify, and return the bodies of people who have disappeared said they would cover the cost of DNA testing on the bones so that Barahona’s remains could be brought back to El Salvador. They reached out to Spradley and her team, who were close by, to carry out the recovery.
“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 eased Spradley’s identification efforts.
She has expanded her search for bodies across several cemeteries in southern Texas, at times employing ground-penetrating radar. She and her team attempt to gather identifying details from skeletal remains or through fingerprinting, even when the bodies are badly decomposed. The FBI trained them in the use of rehydration to bring back a portion of the finger pad.
Some measure of peace, along with answers for families, can come from these efforts.
What the MacArthur cohort does
The MacArthur Foundation has named its group of Fellows for this year, bringing together researchers, artists, and thinkers from throughout the country. The foundation singles out people who have demonstrated exceptional originality and commitment to their creative work, along with a clear ability to direct themselves.
- A bioengineer creating nanotechnologies to improve vaccines and drug delivery
- A climate researcher examining the interaction between polar sea ice and global change
- An organic chemist using electricity to help build complex molecules more efficiently and sustainably
Among those being honored for their contributions to the space where science and justice meet, Spradley is one of the people receiving recognition.
The memory researcher
A MacArthur award recipient looks into how individuals who have endured trauma can find tranquility. Felipe De Brigard, a philosopher and cognitive neuroscientist at Duke University, is reconsidering what memory actually is. “I like to say that I have been interested in memory for as long as I can remember,” is his contribution to the discussion.
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 info.”
The scale of the work
Spradley’s project reaches beyond a single burial ground in southern Texas, where several cemeteries hold bones with no names attached. She and her team employ ground-penetrating radar to pinpoint the location of graves before they dig up the human remains.
| Cemetery | Location | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Local cemetery in Brooks County | Southern Texas | Exhumed as part of the 2013 effort |
| Multiple cemeteries | Southern Texas | Ongoing search |
The FBI’s database change has eased identifications. Spradley’s team can now compare DNA samples from unidentified remains against a larger pool of potential matches.
Why this matters
This research goes beyond abstract study, touching real people whose families have gone missing. For Barahona’s aunt, the moment she received a call from the coyote marked the start of a long period of waiting for news.
A group led by Spradley has made it their mission to locate, determine, and give back remains to those who lost loved ones.
What comes next
Spradley’s project continues. The coalition she helped form is working to address administrative loss. The FBI’s database change is already easing identifications.
For the next five years, the MacArthur award will provide funding. The foundation has kept its plans secret, saying nothing about how she will use the money.
A quiet heroism
The digging is anything but elegant. Spradley’s work calls for sifting through hot, dry soil, hunting for bones, and attempting to match names to remains. The risks, however, are severe.
A foundation named for MacArthur has acknowledged that work, treating it as a mark of a life devoted to making names out of mere numbers.
This is a quiet form of bravery. It is the sort of effort that stays out of the news but alters lives for the better. Spradley is engaged in the hard, essential labor of keeping alive the memories of people who were once ignored.
For a long time, she has carried out this work, and now she has the means to continue it.
Source material: “This year's MacArthur Fellows include researchers who fuse science and justice,” NPR.
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