Category Archives: Environment

Talking about the weather, terrain, flora, fauna, etc…

Day 7: A New Day, A New Adventure

Community, Environment, Human Rights, Migrant Death, Reflections

The days are long, the evenings are short, and the nights are even shorter. This field season is different in many ways but has the same common goal as the past three field seasons I have participated in. The goal of recovering migrants in hopes of getting them identified and returning them home to their families. With our fifth field season in progress, we are still learning how each county and funeral home operates and nothing is the same from one place to the next. Some keep better records than others, but the reality is that these funeral homes and counties are doing the best that they can with an overwhelming situation. It won’t change until there is policy change and increased funding for this mass disaster situation.

Team members digging trenches.
Digging Trenches

Today was a hard day of moving a lot of dirt and digging trenches. Although we may feel tired, we are all still motivated in continuing this humanitarian effort. With each burial that we locate, it is an individual whose family is that much closer to finding out what happened to them. It is easy to get lost in the manual labor but once you find a burial, it is like finding that golden ticket.

In the area that we were working in today, we were told originally there were three possible burials. We located six in that area and the ones we found were not even in the direct area that we were originally pointed to. It is no one’s fault because the funeral home is relying on memory to point them out, so it really is a guessing game and thankfully, we have become pretty good at analyzing it.

Exposed trenches in the cemetery.
Our quadrant

After recovering three burials, Joe and Louis were able to come back and help us extend our quadrant outside the original lines. We did this because the group next to us located a burial outside of their quadrant; so, in order for us to do our due diligence, we needed to check our area too. I cannot thank Joe and Louis enough for helping us with this endeavor. Although the dirt is nowhere near as hard as it was in Rio Grande City, it is still extremely difficult to get through by hand. So far, most of the quadrant has been dug by hand so it was nice to have a small break while the back hoe did its job. It is also kind of sad because the amount of work that the backhoe did in 1 hour is more than we could do in a day by hand.

Day 7 team photo.
Day 7

I love being apart of this humanitarian effort and being able to work along side community members and Texas State University. We have had several visitors from when we were in Brooks county and it is nice to see the familiar faces. We only have two more days left in Harlingen and it is a bittersweet feeling. Tomorrow we plan to visit ‘the wall’ which will be a sobering experience and remind us why we are continuing this effort.

Jessica

Day 5: Tamales and Trenches and Wind, Oh My!

Community, Environment, Human Rights, Migrant Death
Texas sunrise next to a windmill.
The gorgeous, Texas sunrise we see every morning

Today was our fifth day at the cemetery. Our team, being a hard-working and motivated group of people, was determined to bring high energy to the site and complete our goals for the day. We compiled a plan the night before, in which we decided to confront a new area of our quadrant. The funeral director had given Dr. Kate Spradley, from Texas State University, an idea of where he thought migrants may have been buried, but it was our duty as anthropologists to be sure to check all possible unmarked areas that could have been containing migrant burials. We felt it was important to start a new trench within the cemetery that contained a long stretch of land where no grave markers were present.

Jordan digging a trench.
Jordan deepening the trench floor

Even before clearing surface vegetation to better observe the topography of the area, we could still see and feel some possible depressions beneath our feet. It is likely that we are correct, and there are burials far below the surface in this area. However, we have been facing the challenge that some of these burials do not fit the migrant profile due to the circumstances of their burials. Hopefully the funeral director was correct, and we find the final two individuals in this quadrant we are looking for so they can be analyzed and identified.

According to the iPhone weather application, it was supposed to be one of the hottest days during our trip. The temperature was listed as a low of 56 and a high of 76 degrees Fahrenheit. It seemed like the temperature would be practically perfect. Little did we know, strong, gusting winds reaching 27 mph would throw us for a loop, sending our hats and papers flying as the day went on. As Jordan, Jessica and I mattocked and shoveled our new trench, dirt was flying in our faces and eyes (not the best feeling in the world). Meanwhile, Leann and Dr. Latham were chipping away at a massive wall that was covering one of the burials we discovered by the large pit. By lunch time, the team had accomplished removing a decent portion of our new trench, uncovered the deepest burial we have found so far, photographed and removed the body, and added the precise corners of this burial into our maps.

Team members uncovering a burial.
Leann and Dr. Latham uncovering a burial

Since it was impossible to do anything in peace with the wind, Dr. Latham suggested eating by the van. We rented a stylish, grey minivan for our transportation needs, so we thought that sitting on the North side of the van might block some of the northbound winds. At this point, everyone was getting pretty physically exhausted. During lunchtime, Dr. Latham suggested taking a short-day, which was probably productive for the overall group morale. We went back to work for another hour or so and then called it a day around 2:15 pm.

Delia's restaurant in San Juan.
Restaurant in San Juan where we ate delicious tamales

Back at the hotel, everyone showered and had some down time. We were super excited for dinner tonight at Delia’s, which is a well-known tamale restaurant with an alluring reputation. It honestly wasn’t difficult for the group to agree upon driving 30 minutes from our hotel to get dinner because everyone here is obsessed with tamales. I can truthfully say it lived up to our expectations.

I think the abbreviated workday helped regenerate our bodies and spirits. As frustrating as the wind turned out to be, we all stayed strong, encouraged each other, and maintained optimism. I am incredibly proud at how hard-working everyone has been. There is still much to get done before Thursday, but it is absolutely attainable. No matter what obstacles are thrown our direction, we will not lose steam!

-Sammi

End of day 5 group photo
End of day 5 group photo
Five individuals in a field holding up one finger.

Day 1: Deep in the heart of Texas

Environment, Human Rights, Migrant Death

I was very excited to get started on our first day of excavation. We had a decent breakfast at our hotel, the Holiday Inn Express, before hitting the road this morning. It took approximately 30 minutes to arrive at the site by car, so Jessica played some music to pump us up (wake us up and get us motivated) for a successful day of digging (e.g. “Eye of the Tiger”, “Ain’t No Rest for the Wicked”, and “Don’t Stop Believin’”). The site was located on a gorgeous, private cemetery at a family owned ranch, where numerous relatives of the property owners had been buried throughout the years. Unidentified migrants were also buried here — some in areas that were marked by posts, and others without a definite location.  When we arrived at the cemetery, it was only about 30 degrees with 20mph winds, making for a cold start to the day! Graduate students at Texas State University had devised a plan for dividing the site into four, 20×20 meter quadrants, which could then be further divided to maintain a uniform scale across all of the independently-working excavation teams. Texas State determined it would be best to record GPS points at every four-meter interval throughout the site to create subquadrants. We followed their pattern, and ended up with 25, 4×4 meter subquadrants within our Northeast quadrant of the cemetery. This turned out to be more work than Leann and I were expecting, but will be an important leaning experience.

Driving down country highway with blue skies.
Beautiful drive to the cemetery

Leann was an incredible mentor today. After Jordan, Jessica, Leann, Dr. Latham, and I finished setting up our grid , Leann and I began creating the surface map. We spent almost half of the day mapping because there were nearly two dozen headstones indicating family graves within our quadrant, two upright trees, and one fallen tree covered in shrubbery. After working together using the tape measures and a compass to document numerous measurements into a graph, we finally had all of the data needed to work on our completed maps back at the hotel.

Two team members mapping in headstones.
Leann and Sammi taking measurements to create a map

Overall, I believe that day 1 went very well. I am extremely grateful to have such an experienced, well-trained team by my side to help teach me to properly excavate a site of this magnitude. Everyone was so patient with me on my first day, and I felt we were able to accomplish a lot in a relatively short amount of time.

–Sammi

While Sammi and I were taking points for our surface map, Jess, Jordan, and Dr. Latham were probing the other subquadrants to feel for anomalies.  They found several areas of interest and began digging test pits to investigate further.  After digging a few test pits, they decided that it would be more efficient and systematic to dig test trenches throughout the subquadrants as opposed to continuing to dig test pits whenever an anomaly was felt.  There are numerous known burials in our quadrant that are aligned into rows, and those rows were used as guidelines for digging our trenches to locate any unidentified individuals.  With about 45 minutes left before sundown, Sammi and I finished taking measurements and joined the rest of the team digging trenches.

Jordan and Jessica digging a trench.
Jordan and Jessica digging a trench

At the end of the day, we created two small trenches about 50 cm deep and 5 meters long.  Tomorrow, we plan on extending these trenches to cover all of the open areas in our quadrant that felt anomalous when we probed, as well as deepening the trenches we dug today by about 10-15 more cm.  With this trench depth, we will be able to further probe down reaching a total depth of about six feet.  We plan to construct the trenches like we did in Falfurrias, systematically spaced so no potential areas of burial will go unchecked. I look forward to what tomorrow will bring and how much we will be able to accomplish!  I also look forward to some warmer weather….

–Leann

Sunset over fields.
Sunset marking the end of day 1