Non-metric and metric dental assessment of ancestry in contemporary Mexican individuals: an aid to identifying undocumented border crossers

Immigration across the U.S.-Mexico border has been an issue since the\ud Mexican-American War. While U.S. immigration policies have fluctuated over time to\ud reflect the labor needs within the country, more recent policies have strengthened the\ud border against crossings. This increased protection along the U.S.-Mexico border,\ud particularly since the early 1990s, has forced undocumented migrants to find less\ud restricted, but more dangerous points of entry into the U.S., resulting in increased death\ud rates for these immigrants. As the death toll climbs for undocumented border crossers\ud (UBC), medical examiners??? offices face the task of improving identification methods\ud necessary to repatriate them. A majority of these individuals are of Hispanic ancestry,\ud indicating that they are from Mexico, Latin America, Central America, and South America. Until recently, forensic research was less expansive on Hispanic individuals in\ud comparison to that for individuals of European and African American ancestry.\ud As research increases on distinctive skeletal features of Hispanic populations,\ud there remain some unexplored methods that could aid in identification, such as aspects of\ud dental anthropology. This thesis explores the utility of two such dental anthropology\ud methods, dental non-metric traits and the occlusal polygon, for UBC identification\ud purposes. Adult dentition from six areas within the American Southwest and Mexico\ud were scored and measured for these methods, respectively. These samples consist of\ud known Southwest Hispanic and Mexican individuals from four locations and unknown\ud UBC individuals from two locations.\ud The results indicate that both the non-metric dental traits and the occlusal\ud polygon show some differences between the Southwest Hispanic and Mexican samples.\ud The dental non-metric traits, in particular, show promise for being able to classify UBC\ud based on known samples. These results also demonstrate that Hispanic as a classificatory\ud term does not account for the amount of variation observed among the groups in this\ud study, and calls into question the validity of this term to describe populations from\ud Mexico, Central America, and Latin America.CSU, Chic