By Jim Nichols

It is one thing to feel that no one knows who you are when you are alive; it is another when no one knows who you are when you are dead.

In his compelling book Solito: A Memoir, Javier Zamora allows us to follow him as a nine-year-old boy on his two-month journey from his home in El Salvador across Guatemala, Mexico, and the Sonoran Desert to the United States to find his parents. The true story explains that Javier is traveling alone (Solito translates to “alone, all by oneself”), although he develops a surrogate family of strangers who travel with him and protect him. He was one of the sizable number of travelers attempting that trip beginning about thirteen years ago, part of the “immigration situation.” Many who started that journey died along the way. These are “undocumented” individuals traveling, so they face numerous legal and physical difficulties.

Connect this story, now, to a philanthropic one. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation “. . . supports creative people and effective institutions committed to building a more just, verdant, and peaceful world.” The foundation support identifies past and potential efforts with what are often identified as “Genius Awards.” Every year this foundation awards $800,000 “no-strings-attached” grants to American citizens; there were twenty awardees in 2026, including to Dr. Kate Spradley. Spradley is a Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Texas State University in San Marcos and is a new heroine for me, although we have never met. Her grant notes this is support for “Enabling identification and repatriation of the remains of migrants who have perished along the Texas-Mexico border.” Spradley and her team are forensic anthropologists. This is the connection between the boy in Solito and his traveling companions.

Among the thousands of migrants who have attempted this treacherous activity, an uncounted number have failed; they died during this unsuccessful trip, if not to violence, then to dehydration (often) and starvation. Because they were part of a moving caravan, they were often buried where they fell with no identification. Those family members waiting for them in the United States were left with no further information.

In 2013 Dr. Spradley founded “Operation Identification,” designed to identify human remains in South Texas. The stage was set for some great and useful biology and, to me, showing smart humans using their minds and hearts for godly purposes.

In a process ongoing today, this effort attempts to restore dignity to people who have died at the border. It represents an effort to combine ethical and humanitarian work with excellent science in the form of forensics. The work and academic effort involves students from the university in San Marcos.

The team has established partnerships with county officials and landowners to allow exhumation of remains in cemeteries and on private land. With American FBI cooperation for available fingerprints and the use of DNA samples, the workers have been able to build personal stories of the deceased travelers. The students in training and their leaders have been successful in constructing origin stories of gender and geographic origin of the exhumed bodies. This information is correlated with family members looking for loved ones who submit their own DNA samples and historical information. Using these data from multiple sources and pieces of clothing and other belongings, about three hundred people have been identified so far.

This is a fascinating illustration of the usefulness of science in what to most of us would appear to be a rather unpleasant and useless endeavor. That misses the imagining of the families that live in ambiguous loss not knowing where their loved ones have ended. Somewhere on that desert there has been what Spradley has called “a slowly accumulating mass fatality event.” There are no grave markers, and this group of resolute scientific and empathetic people are trying to alleviate just a bit of that grief.

Click here for a two-minute video.

Jim Nichols is a retired Abilene Christian University biology professor and current hospital chaplain