October 2019_Esquire 101This is America, she remem-
bers thinking. This is not what
we do here.
The history of our species is a
history of movement, whole civilizations picking up and settling down
and picking up again. We write complex histories of power and re-
sources and laws defending borders drawn, then redrawn. But we
often overlook one blunt fact in all of this: We are always, all of us,
searching the horizon for home.
Or a home.
Some people risk their lives defending their right to stay in the
place they call home. Others risk their lives for the right to leave in
search of a new one. At any given moment, millions of us are wan-
dering the chaos of this planet, making wagers we hope will get us
there. Some bet their lives against the open ocean, the thickest jun-
gles, the scorching plains, because anything ahead is better than
what they’re running from.
For those of us still standing, by chance or luck, what do we do
when someone searching for a new home dies on the doorstep of
ours? In our own backyard?
When word began circulating in Texas about the migrant burials
near the border, Baker was one of the first scientists to offer assistance
to local authorities in several counties. Some were more receptive
than others. The leaders in Brooks County, especially the then chief
deputy sheriff, Urbino Martinez, welcomed any help they could get.
Brooks County’s mortuary services weren’t large enough to pro-
vide long-term storage for the bodies that were accumulating within
its boundaries. A handful of cases were sent to a mortuary in Mission,
Texas, but in general none of the funeral staffers were trained to
identify decomposed remains.
Martinez says he and his colleagues simply did not know what
to do; they were already stretched so thin, with only a handful of
deputies to cover an area of almost one thousand square miles.
Without the funding for full
death investigations, local
authorities directed funeral-
home staff in Falfurrias to bury
the bodies of migrants in any location available.
Until 2013, no one else was willing to take them.
“I knew we’d catch hell for it,” Martinez says, remembering the
intense scrutiny that the county received for burying migrants
so quickly. “But I knew it was the right thing to do. If we could be
an example to others, then so be it.” (A 2014 investigation by the
Texas Rangers concluded that, while these burials were unfortu-
nate, they were not illegal.)
After almost forty years of working in law enforcement, Martinez
had seen the long shadow of migrant agony change his community,
and he worried about going numb to it. Almost every week, hunters
and ranchers outside Falfurrias found the dead in their paddocks
and under their trees, leaning against their fence wires or propped
against their cattle gates.THAT ANYONE SURVIVES the journey is a miracle. Brooks County
is a flat hedge maze of scrub oak and cactus where summer tempera-
tures regularly top 100 degrees. There are no hills or mountains on
the horizon to aim for and no streams or rivers to follow. It is so dis-
orienting that people who live there will tell you they don’t even drive
into the brush without GPS units and extra tires. With (maybe) a few
bottles of water and one or two snack bags of chips, migrants walk for
days in heat so oppressive that it can swell the tongue. Drifts of sand
slow every step, and the rocky service roads that cut through aren’t
much better. Few are marked, and all look the same.
Yet this hostile terrain is a highly appealing route for human
traffickers, because most of it is sparsely populated and private-
ly owned. That lowers the chances of migrants running into law
enforcement; U. S. Border Patrol agents can only enter a propertyTHE INVESTIGATORS
(A) Kate Spradley of Texas State
University at the school’s Forensic
Anthropology Research Facility.
(B) A forensic-anthropology team
exhumes the bones of migrants in
Falfurrias, Texas. (C) In the lab,
everything is painstakingly photo-
graphed and logged, to increase the
chances of identification. (D) A
student of forensic scientist Lori
Baker reconstructs a skeleton.ABCD