De-essentializing 'Hispanic': A Critical Approach to Ancestry Estimation with FORDISC 3.1

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Abstract/Contents

Abstract: Latin American populations exhibit a high degree of admixture due to the region’s complicated history of colonialism, migration, and settlement. Commonly used methods currently employed in forensic anthropology, such as FORDISC 3.1, often fail to account for the diversity in morphological signatures of the peoples who comprise this region and, in turn, effectively estimate ancestry or affinity. This thesis explores this program’s limits and challenges, using both ideal and realistic preservation case measurements for Latin American populations. Mosaic plots, multiple correspondence analyses, principal components analyses, and mean posterior probability bar graphs were employed to examine the program’s outputs. It was found that FORDISC 3.1 needs improved reference samples and socially-relevant classification labels in order to more accurately classify Latinx individuals by ancestry. These results are especially useful and important now, given the context of the humanitarian crisis along the U.S.-México border. This thesis concludes by promoting the use of admixture approaches and a fuller disentanglement of the biological science of forensic anthropology from the socially-driven frameworks of law enforcement investigation.

Type of resource	text
Date created	June 10, 2020

Author	Benites, Eda Marcela
Primary advisor	Algee-Hewitt, Bridget
Degree granting institution	Stanford University, Center for Latin American Studies

Subject	forensic anthropology
Subject	FORDISC
Subject	biological anthropology
Subject	physical anthropology
Subject	admixture
Subject	Stanford University
Subject	Center for Latin American Studies
Genre	Thesis

Location	https://purl.stanford.edu/dp028xq4706

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License: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial No Derivatives 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC-ND).

Preferred Citation: Benites, Eda Marcela and Algee-Hewitt, Bridget. (2020). De-essentializing 'Hispanic': A Critical Approach to Ancestry Estimation with FORDISC 3.1. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at: https://purl.stanford.edu/dp028xq4706

Stanford University, Center for Latin American Studies, Masters Degree Capstone Projects

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