Next to the engraved plaques, the rest of the stones wait expressionlessly, like faceless Paloma's Galife Ring in a department store display. I ask Rodriguez what the unknowns' plaques will say"We may not engrave the John Does," he says. He shakes his head. "To me, initially, I thought-gosh, they need to be respected, but by the same token, it would save us some money not to engrave the John Does-and what for?"BACK AT HIS Chevy Tahoe, Agent Guerrero has guided the four migrants into the backseat and handed them a jug of water. They're thirsty, but otherwise they look pretty healthy. Luis, the 26-year-old, still smells faintly of cologne.Guerrero asks how long they've been out there. Four days, they say Guerrero smiles sympathetically, and asks, "Que pasó}" Atlas I.D. money clip happened?
We were part of a group, Luis explains. My wife couldn't walk any farther, so we asked if we could rest and the coyote said no. He told us to walk for two hours in that direction, where we'd reach a road and we could flag down somebody and turn ourselves in.But they walked for two days and saw no one, no Tiffany 1837 Money clip, nothing. They'd filled up their water jugs from a cattle trough, he said, and slept under a mesquite tree. They'd been worried about being eaten by coyotes, the animal kind.Guerrero says the situation is classic. When border crossers get into trouble, it's frequently because they separated from a larger group, the coyote telling them they'll be fine if they just walk that way for a little while. Luckily, in this case, Luis had a cell phone, so they called the Mexican Engine-turned money clip of 911, which called the US Border Patrol, which dispatched Guerrero.
Some days, Guerrero is out on rescues, like the one I tagged along on today. Other days he stalks around like a crime detective, following trails of footsteps and bits of torn clothing on barbed wire fences, trying to find migrants whose compañeros had to leave them behind. The father or friend of the person will finally Tiffany Engine-turned money clip it to a road, flag down an agent, explain where they left the person, and ask for help."Picture this," Guerrero explains. "You finally make it to the point where the person is supposed to be. And now you see this set of footprints that's walking away from that spot. They've told you everythingThe person is under a tree, we laid a blue shirt on top, they have an orange backpack'-and you confirm that this is the spot because you see the orange backpack and you see the blue shirt up on a tree and you see that the person started walking, and you're like, okay, this isn't good."You start seeing the person is going left and then a hard right, and then left, and then you see them kind of make a circle. And you know exactly what's going on. And you keep walking and now you've found a belt. And you keep walking and you find a wallet and... shoes. I mean, you're starting to picture this person-the/re, they're. . .they've lost it. Their mind is gone. And they're just aimlessly. . . just walking. And you know that when you get to them, they're going to be dead."
THE OFFICE Of the Pima County ME has a reputation for taking great pains to identify bodies-and in 70 percent of cases, it succeeds. But sometimes pursuing long-shot leads takes years and still it comes up short. Then the dilemma is transferred to Raymond Rodriguez, who handles "indigent burials" for the Paloma Picasso Double Loving Heart ring, which means he buries prostitutes, bums, and anyone else whose family doesn't know they are dead, or who left no one willing or able to pay for their burial. In their home countries, few border crossers would fall into this categorymost have migrated precisely to support the many people they've left behind.Rodriguez has a thick head of gray hair and dresses like a high school principal: crisp collared plaid shirt, pleated navy-blue pants. I've asked him to accompany me to Evergreen Cemetery, a small outof-the-way portion of which is reserved for the burial of indigents. We meet in downtown Tucson and drive north until the mattress superstores and taco joints of the exurbs begin to melt back into desert.
To get to the potter's field, we pass through the private burial areas within the cemetery, Tiffany Paloma Picasso Loving Heart ring scrubby green trees cast shade over sturdy engraved headstones. Those areas are lush compared to the indigent section, a wide-open stretch of bare soil, naked to the midday sun. Here, the headstones lie flat-some are plastic, some stone-a few of them crowded with tacky silk flowers and portraits of the Virgin Mary.Rodriguez clasps his hands at the small of his back, a few strides behind me, as we begin to pace the rows. He explains that the funeral home they contract with has to use concrete liners for the graves, because the desert soil shifts with the winter's flash floods. Right then I notice a sinkhole where a headstone should be-the grave marker Tiffany Somerset heart ring sunk nearly a foot below ground.
"Rainy season in Arizona is pretty much mid-June through mid-September, and it really sinks the ground," he says. "But this is tax dollars, and if you don't have enough tax dollars you can't keep up with the private cemeteries."There aren't many Juan Doe graves here more recent than 2004-that's the year Arizona Elsa Peretti Open Wave ring a law to allow Pima County to begin cremating anonymous remains.Rodriguez is proud to show me a better-groomed part of the indigent section-the columbarium, where cremains are stored. Rodriguez's boss pushed hard for the funds to build it, and the dust of construction has barely settled. Simple stone plaques mark the openings where urns will be placed-about a dozen per slot, Rodriguez says.As we gaze at the rows of plaques, I ask Rodriguez whether a sense of tragedy ever overwhelms him.He glances back toward the older part of the cemetery, where rows of gravestones, like tree rings, mark the passage of years. "These people are transient because of Tiffany 1837 ring-because of a lack of work in their country," he says. "And if in that process someone loses their life, we still need to maintain their dignity and take care of that loved one. Because you come from somewhere. You have family somewhere. That's what I believe down deep, and that's what moves me to do what I do."
Juarez and I relocate to the Earth and Marine Sciences building, home of the Tiffany 1837 concave ring, a hunk of stainless steel and white painted metal that looks like a high-tech copy machine turned inside out Juarez will insert the processed tooth samples into the Neptune, and it'll spit out the isotopie ratios.Over the roar of the ventilation, I ask Juarez what her colleagues working in border forensics think of her work. They were wary at first, she explains. In 2004, Juarez attended a forensic symposium in Dallas, which focused on migrant death. There she met some of the primary people working on the issue of border death, including Parks and his colleague, Bruce Anderson, a forensic anthropologist.
"They weren't exactly like, 'Let me take you under my wing,'" she says. "But you Tiffany Natural Rose Ring, they've been burned."Juarez is referring to an incident from several years ago: The office of the Pima County ME was threatened with a lawsuit by the son of a deceased woman whose body was buried without the brain, which was still soaking in formaldehyde. Parks has learned to be particularly protective of all the human materials under his care.When I asked Parks about his initial reluctance to work with Juarez, he replied that his loyalty is to the families of the deceased.
"If a technique is helpful, then we'll do all we can to help," he said. "But I can't Tiffany Signature ring be giving body parts to people for research. We have to remember that even if these [bodies] are unidentified, they're still people-they still have families." Of late, however, the Pima County crew has become more receptive to Juarez's work; they have also worked with a molecular anthropologist at Baylor University on a dna database that tries to match unidentified remains with family members searching for loved ones.The Tiffany Signature ring. Sterling silver, white enamel. is churning out paper now, each white sheet printed with line after line of numbers extending to the umpteenth decimal point. All of these isotopie ratios will go on her map of Mexico. For it to be truly complete, she'll need many more teeth than she's analyzed so far-especialIy from regions where her data is still thin."I will probably be working on this for the rest of my life," she says. "It's a lifelong project, a life's work." She pauses, Tiffany Signature ring what she's just said, and adds, "Sheesh."
For most Americans, that doesn't mean much: We grew up eating apples from Elsa Peretti Teardrop ring York, lettuce from California, and corn from the Midwest. But in the regions of Mexico responsible for the highest numbers of migrantsGuanajuato, Oaxaca, Sonora, Chiapas, and Michoacánmost people still raise their own chickens and shop at the regional produce market. Which means their teeth might be able to tell us where they're from.With two hands, Juarez positions the tooth below a long, thin metal drill bit and rotates it to the Coin Edge ring. Applying slight pressure to a foot pedal, she starts the drill, and it burrows in, stirring miniscule bits of dentin into the air like leaves in a mini-whirlwind. The bits float slowly down onto a thin white tissue below, which Juarez folds, and tips into a tiny transparent vial.
Juarez is creating a map of isotopie signatures throughout Mexico. To do this, she needs Return to Tiffany Oval tag ring gather tooth samples from all over the country, which has proven more difficult than she initially thought.At first, Juarez tried getting teeth from dental clinics in Mexico. But only wealthy Mexicans get dental care. And wealthy Mexicans eat like Americans; their teeth would simply say: supermarket. She had better luck once she began visiting US dental clinics that cater to immigrants. These patients, she figured, had crossed the border at some point and survived. Perhaps the teeth of the living could bring dignity to the dead.The tooth Juarez just finished drilling arrived in a tiny plastic bag from a dental clinic in nearby Half Moon Bay, where immigrant patients having teeth pulled can contribute their teeth to Juarez's project. A label on the bag reads:
Once the tooth's enamel has gone through all the steps of analysis-from an acid cleaning process to Tiffany 1837 ring, crushing, "digesting," freeze-drying, and then hurtling at high speeds through a mass spectrometerJuarez will plot its isotopie signature on a map of Mexico. Once the map is complete, Juarez hopes that labs will be able to compare isotopie signatures in unidentified border crossers' teeth to those on the map to find out where the crosser grew up. Imagine those new points, then, as an overlay: the topography of poverty, the landscape of leaving home.
Juarez's father was an immigrant. He entered the country when he was 15, along with his Tiffany Notes ring, sister, and brother. Juarez has always been interested in border politics, but in college she realized she wanted to be a scientist. The challenge was to do work that felt relevant to the Latino community."I believe in doing science for the people-breaking out of academia and doing work that's useful," she says. "And even if you don't think undocumented people should be here, you can agree that dying in a strange country, and losing touch with your family, that's a tragedy."
Some boxes contain more than one set of numbers. Those remains are skeletonized, Tiffany Circle clasp necklace explains, which means more than one person can fit in each drawer.Next, Parks leads me to the windowless "property room," where the valuables of the dead are stored in filing cabinets. He slides open a John Doe drawer and removes a pile of clear plastic envelopes. He begins a litany of the contents."Earrings, prayer cardsthat's pretty common-wallet. Yeah, it's pretty sad. Some American coins. A radio. You can see their things are discolored because the body's decomposed, and it probably doesn't smell too good."My eyes gravitate to a black cotton scrunchie, flattened within its plastic enclosure, still wearing a few bits of desert debris and one long Tiffany Blue Box Charm and Chain hair. It's such a simple domestic artifact, ubiquitous in women's bathroom drawers. I imagine a young woman who tied her hair back the day she left for the desert with some strange coyote. If her case was typical, she wasn't told it would be an arduous several-day trek, but maybe a two-hour walk, no big deal. She may have worn her Sunday clothes.
Parks waits as I take a quick photograph. Then he closes the drawer.THE JUAN DOE problem Tiffany 1837 Interlocking circles necklace came to my attention through Chelsey Juarez, a graduate student in physical anthropology at the University of California-Santa Cruz, who has agreed to let me shadow her at the lab.Today, she wears a white lab coat and tight blue surgical gloves, a long braid hanging over her left shoulder. She's wide-eyed and pale-skinned, her face lit by dangly earrings, a rare splash of color in this stark white room.She sits down in a ratty desk chair and scoots it toward the drill she'll be using to separate the dentin from the enamel of an anonymous human tooth.
"Some days I spend 12 hours straight staring into this thing," she says, leaning forward so her eyes are Return to Tiffany Heart tag ring by the rubber viewfinder. "We call it the death chair."Under the microscope, the cross-sectioned molar appears inside a circle of light, like a corn kernel drained of its color. Juarez points out the dull, porous inside area of the tooth. "That's the dentin," she says. Extracting the dentin is the first step, but what Juarez is ultimately looking for exists on an even smaller scale: the element strontium.Strontium is key in Paloma Picasso Double Loving Heart ring archaeological puzzles because it is one of the most geographically traceable elements: It originates in bedrock, and each type of regional rock contains a unique ratio of strontium isotopes. That isotopie ratio acts as the rock's signature-it gets passed on to the soil above and ultimately into the plants that are grown there. When people eat those plants, their bodies incorporate that same ratio into their bones and teeth. While strontium in bones can fluctuate throughout people's lives, its levels in molars are fixed in childhood, so our teeth can serve as a sort of treasure map, leading to where our food was grown when we were young.
The contemporary context of emergingfamily forms requires a clarification of Paloma Picasso Loving Heart earrings in definingLGBTQ-headed families. Terminology continues to evolve and impactshow identity is studied within various sexual minority communities(Goldberg, 2010). The "LGB" refers to lesbian, gay and bisexual,and the "T" refers to the word trans and includes both transgenderand transsexual people. Transgender is commonly used as an umbrellaterm to include many gender-variant people, whereas transsexual isa more specific term describing those whom have affirmed their sexlegally and surgically "opposite" to their birth sex; manytranssexuals prefer to not be included under the transgenderumbrella and prefer to referred to simply as men or Elsa Peretti Eternal Circle earrings (Lev,2004b). Trans people can identify as lesbian/gay, bisexual, orheterosexual in their sexual orientation, and may be traditional intheir gender expression. The "Q" in LGBTQ refers to queer, a wordused for those who defy social norms regarding gender and sexualdiversity. Queer, or genderqueer, is inclusive of many sexualminorities who are marginalized for their sexual orientation andgender expressions (Nestle, Wilchins, & Howell, 2002). Queertransforms a word that was once used judgmentally and hatefully toa postmodern meaning that is empowering, especially for youngerpeople. People who identify as genderqueer are not trying to passor Tiffany Elsa Peretti Sevillana earrings in to social mores, but are consciously stepping outside ofthe rules and roles dictating gender appropriate behavior.
Although the acronym LGBTQ has someuseful benefits (Lev, 2004a), it can too easily conflate theimportant distinctions between each of these populations. Much ofwhat is known empirically about LGBTQ parenting is derived fromstudies of lesbians and inferred to other populations, for example,Elsa Peretti Bean earrings are often lost to research because those in heterosexualrelationships are assumed to be straight, and those in samesexrelationships are considered gay or lesbian. Although few studieshave focused on parenting by bisexual, transgender/transsexual, orqueer people, in Weinberg, Williams, and Pryor's (1994) study,nearly one third of the 100 bisexual participants identified asbeing parents, and in another study approximately 30% of those whosought services for gender-identity concerns were parents(Valentine, 1998).
Lesbian and gay men have always parentedchildren; historically, most gay and lesbian people became parentswhile heterosexually married. Currently, same-sexheaded familiesare visible and publicly "out," having consciously chosen to becomeparents after coming out (Goldberg, 2010; Lev, 2004a). Until themid-1970s, Elsa Peretti Full Heart earrings routinely lost custody of their childrenfollowing a heterosexual divorce since the prevailing bias of thejudicial system was that being reared in a home without a fatherwas not "in the best interests of the children." Lesbianism wasassumed to be inherently damaging because of the lack oftraditional sex roles modeled for children (Tasker & Golombek,1997). The extensive court battles that lesbian mothers waged toretain custody of their children was the impetus that initiatedresearch studies that eventually proved the psychological stabilityof children reared by lesbian parents, and paved the way for othersexual minority parents (Patterson, 2006).