Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by The Border Chronicle, a weekly newsletter that publishes original on-the-ground reporting, analysis, and commentary from the U.S.-Mexico border. Subscribe to the newsletter here.
When a desperate family, searching for a missing loved one, felt as if they had no one in the world to help them, they’d soon find they had Eduardo “Eddie” Canales, founder of the South Texas Human Rights Center.
From the first time I met Eddie in 2013, when he began working in the remote ranchlands of Brooks County, until his death in July from pancreatic cancer, he was always busy, whether it be on the phone, soothing families of the missing, or receiving them at the center to launch search and rescue operations. He also placed water stations on busy migration corridors and worked with forensic anthropologists to identify those who had died in the rugged South Texas terrain.
South Texas in the summer is brutally hot and humid. Eddie began his humanitarian work in Brooks County at age 65, and he always seemed invincible, walking the sandy terrain in 100-degree-plus heat to find a missing person or deliver a water barrel. He was a bear of a man, with close-cropped white hair and a big grin, which he’d often deploy with startling success against his toughest critics, many of them ranchers in Brooks County, who were suspicious of the outsider from Corpus Christi with a labor union past.
It’s hard to imagine life in the borderlands without Eddie. Before he died, the longtime South Texas activist and organizer shared his vision for the future with key allies to expand the work of identifying missing migrants to a statewide identification center. I can’t think of a better legacy for a man who spent his life ensuring that the most marginalized be treated with dignity, even in death.
Texas is notorious for not properly cataloging deaths or taking DNA of people who have died while migrating. Identifying the dead, over 254 counties, is underresourced, and each county handles the process differently. Many are buried in mass graves, unidentified, while families search for their missing loved ones without solace or closure. Not knowing their loved one’s fate makes them vulnerable to extortion by criminal groups who tell them that their relatives are still alive.
A statewide center, Eddie believed, where counties could send their cases for DNA identification, would be the culmination of the work he began with others more than a decade ago. That’s when Eddie founded the South Texas Human Rights Center in the small town of Falfurrias, in a one-story brick building where Eddie often slept on a cot in the back, because he was too busy to drive home.
The center was opened in response to a humanitarian crisis that continues to this day.
In 2012, 129 bodies were recovered by local law enforcement in Brooks County, where the nation’s largest interior immigration checkpoint is located. That year, Texas surpassed Arizona for the first time in the number of migrant deaths. People die from heat exhaustion in the summer and cold in the winter as they attempt to hike around the checkpoint in the sparsely inhabited and remote county, nearly the size of Rhode Island. For each body recovered, the local sheriff estimates, there are probably five more that will never be found in the vast ranches, which are privately owned.
At the time, founding a human rights center in Brooks County seemed like an almost impossible task. Ranchers were reluctant, or even hostile, to allowing outsiders on their land, and state officials preferred to ignore the mass casualties and suffering.
Eddie liked to say that he’d had no choice. There was no funding, no staff. But the legendary immigrant rights activist Maria Jimenez, who passed away in Houston in 2020, had already told the media and public that Eddie would be working in Brooks County. “My friend Maria the organizer organized me,” he told me, chuckling.
And Maria was right. Eddie was perfect for the job. He’d grown up in nearby Corpus Christi and was well acquainted with small-town ranch life in South Texas. He’d lived a varied life as a labor organizer, an immigrant rights activist, and the manager of a Houston salsa club. Eddie could talk to anyone, even skeptical ranchers in Brooks County, some of whom spread rumors that he was allied with the cartels and trafficking people.
Even with the small-town rumors swirling, Eddie was undeterred. He worked closely with local sheriff Benny Martinez and Kate Spradley, a forensic anthropologist from Texas State University in San Marcos, to win over their trust and gain entrance to the vast ranches. There, they could search for the missing, and Eddie could place the center’s 55-gallon blue barrels with the word “agua” stenciled on them in white to save people from dying of thirst.
“He taught me the value of the cold call,” said Spradley, “and the value of showing up and talking to people. No matter what their views are, you treat them with respect.”
Spradley, who founded Operation Identification (OpID) in 2013 to identify people and reunite them with their families, said she quickly found common ground with Canales, and they worked together for more than a decade until he became ill. “Eddie was fantastic to work with,” she said. “He was serious, he was focused. But he also always had a grin on his face and a twinkle in his eye.”
When Sheriff Martinez met Eddie in 2012, he was the chief deputy and drowning in unidentified death cases and requests from families looking for their missing loved ones, as well as media and human rights organizations wanting answers about why there were so many deaths in the rural county 70 miles north of the border.
Eddie put a spotlight on the county, he said, which at first he didn’t appreciate. Eddie and the Texas Civil Rights Project held a protest and press conference in front of the county courthouse, drawing media attention from all over the state. The county was breaking the law, they said, because it wasn’t doing DNA tests on the bodies they had recovered.
After the press conference, Martinez remembered Eddie pushing his way into his office and waving a sheath of documents in the air. He’d filed several open-records requests but hadn’t gotten a response from the county. “He wanted the backlog of cases,” Martinez said. “He said we weren’t being transparent toward him. I told him we didn’t have the staff to process so many requests. That this was a small office.”
Martinez invited Eddie to sit down. He explained that they wanted to do the DNA tests, but the county was broke, and he was overwhelmed. By the end of the meeting the two had shaken hands and struck a deal to help each other. Martinez needed to reform the sheriff’s department in the way it dealt with the crisis, and Eddie wanted to change the hearts and minds of the county’s residents toward the migrants. It was a relationship built out of necessity, which turned into a true friendship despite their political differences.
“I knew he was an activist and had been a labor organizer,” said Martinez. “I told him, ‘Eddie, I don’t believe in unions, but let’s sit down and talk.’ And we’d argue sometimes, you know, but at the end of the day we’d laugh about it and go on about our business.”
Eddie wanted immediate access to the ranches to search for missing migrants and for remains. “Nothing was ever fast enough for Eddie. I told him, ‘You can’t just walk in there. It’s private property,’” said Martinez.
There was a thing called “ranch etiquette,” he told Eddie. You took it slow, asked to be invited, and didn’t push too hard, otherwise the door might shut forever. They developed a protocol with Border Patrol, the ranchers, and forensic experts like Spradley to enter the ranches to search for the missing and to recover and identify people who had died, then reunite them with their families. They formed a group called the Forensic Border Coalition with Spradley, and soon their protocol was being used in other rural counties in Texas. “We went to Washington, D.C., even Canada. And I would talk about the law enforcement side, and he’d talk about the humanitarian side. We did seminars. And then our protocol got extended further southwest,” said Martinez. “I’m telling you, he did a lot of good work out here. It was a big puzzle in the beginning, and Eddie helped it all come together.”
Drawing on his immigrant activist and organizing skills, Eddie also began traveling to Latin America to meet with forensic experts and humanitarian groups. The missing and dead in Brooks County were not just a U.S. issue, but a transnational issue, said Spradley.
“He realized that it was important to make connections in Latin America and beyond with teams working on missing and unidentified persons,” she said. “Both governmental and nongovernmental groups that have missing persons information to cross-reference with our unidentified persons information. Building networks, building those bridges to share information back and forth, is what gets people identified.”
Eddie was good at building those bridges wherever he went, said his longtime friends Carlos and Sandra Spector, who practice human rights law in El Paso.
“I grew up in Kingsville, not far from Eddie in Corpus Christi,” said Sandra. “We shared a culture, which was small-town ranching community, and a language, which was Spanglish. We also grew up during the time of school segregation and signs on restaurants that read ‘No Mexicans allowed.’”
They were discriminated against in Mexico and in the United States, she said, and yet their families had been in Texas for at least nine generations. “We didn’t cross the border. The border crossed us,” she said.
Discrimination and racism informed who Eddie was and his political beliefs. He identified with the marginalized and the downtrodden. “He was a good ol’ boy with a Texas twang and a progressive heart,” said Carlos. “He had a long history in immigrant rights and the Chicano movement. He was a born organizer and a real chismoso. He was always on the phone, and people liked talking to him. He found it easy to connect with everyone.”
In the final years of his life, Eddie was passionate about his work at the South Texas Human Rights Center, often working seven days a week, said Rogelio Nuñez, board president of the center and a longtime friend. “He was a workaholic,” said Nuñez. “I’d get a call from him on a Saturday afternoon, saying he’d just got back from doing a water drop. And I’d tell him, ‘Eddie, you shouldn’t be going out to those remote ranches all by yourself. It’s dangerous.’ But you couldn’t hold him back.”
Replacing Eddie will be impossible, said Nuñez. But the board and the center’s staff are committed to continuing the work that Eddie started. “We are going to sit down and look at the next six months and then beyond that,” he said.
Before Eddie died, he asked that Nuñez, Spradley, and others come to Corpus Christi for a meeting. “He laid out the next steps for the center, and his broader vision to expand to other counties,” said Nuñez. “It was impressive just how clearly he saw it and what needed to be done.”
What Eddie was talking about was the culmination of everything they had worked to accomplish over the last decade, said Spradley. Work that she and others are committed to continuing. “Eddie is not replaceable,” Spradley said, “but we know the work, and we’re going to move forward.”
Eddie, the Forensic Border Coalition, and other stakeholders have been working on establishing the identification center for several years, she said. Arizona and New Mexico have centralized systems for tracking and identifying people who died while migrating. But not Texas, which covers much of the U.S.-Mexico border. “We understand the scale of the issue in Arizona because it’s over 90 percent public land, search and rescue teams can access the land, and there’s one medical examiner who tracks these deaths,” she said. “But in Texas it’s not tracked in a centralized manner. We don’t know how many deaths we’re dealing with every year, and so we can’t adequately understand or address these deaths.”
With the center, she said, overwhelmed counties like Brooks can send their cases to one centralized facility where state-mandated fingerprinting and DNA sampling can be undertaken, and the cases can be managed and people ultimately identified. “Everyone deserves to be treated with dignity,” Spradley said, adding that it was still difficult to imagine continuing the work without Eddie. “I’m realizing I’m going to have to take on some new roles, because Eddie did so much,” she said. “The South Texas Human Rights Center, the staff and board, we are all going to carry the work forward in his honor and find the funding to make the center a reality. I know Eddie is no longer with us, but I really do feel like he’s right by my side. I often find myself thinking, ‘What would Eddie do?’”
You can donate or learn more about the South Texas Human Rights Center here.
