Non-metric and metric dental assessment of ancestry in contemporary Mexican individuals: an aid to identifying undocumented border crossers
Year: 2015
Type: dissertation
Study design: Observational Study
Abstract: Immigration across the U.S.-Mexico border has been an issue since the \nMexican-American War. While U.S. immigration policies have fluctuated over time to \nreflect the labor needs within the country, more recent policies have strengthened the \nborder against crossings. This increased protection along the U.S.-Mexico border, \nparticularly since the early 1990s, has forced undocumented migrants to find less \nrestricted, but more dangerous points of entry into the U.S., resulting in increased death \nrates for these immigrants. As the death toll climbs for undocumented border crossers \n(UBC), medical examiners??? offices face the task of improving identification methods \nnecessary to repatriate them. A majority of these individuals are of Hispanic ancestry, \nindicating that they are from Mexico, Latin America, Central America, and South America. Until recently, forensic research was less expansive on Hispanic individuals in \ncomparison to that for individuals of European and African American ancestry. \nAs research increases on distinctive skeletal features of Hispanic populations, \nthere remain some unexplored methods that could aid in identification, such as aspects of \ndental anthropology. This thesis explores the utility of two such dental anthropology \nmethods, dental non-metric traits and the occlusal polygon, for UBC identification \npurposes. Adult dentition from six areas within the American Southwest and Mexico \nwere scored and measured for these methods, respectively. These samples consist of \nknown Southwest Hispanic and Mexican individuals from four locations and unknown \nUBC individuals from two locations. \nThe results indicate that both the non-metric dental traits and the occlusal \npolygon show some differences between the Southwest Hispanic and Mexican samples. \nThe dental non-metric traits, in particular, show promise for being able to classify UBC \nbased on known samples. These results also demonstrate that Hispanic as a classificatory \nterm does not account for the amount of variation observed among the groups in this \nstudy, and calls into question the validity of this term to describe populations from \nMexico, Central America, and Latin America.
Author: Rebecca L George
Language: English
Subfield: Archeology (arts and humanities)
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2124761755