Nancy Scheper-Hughes is the author of Death Without Weeping. A former aidworker, she returned to the Alto as an anthropologist. She intends her work as an academic to be as involved and committed as her prior work as an aidworker. As a result, she is frequently a part of her stories, inquiries, and analysis; she does not believe her role is to be objective or disinterested. She considers herself to be an outsider, and regards her own opinions as an outsider's opinions. The observations she makes throughout the book are as much the articulation and defense of her own beliefs as they are an "objective assessment" of life in the Alto, as such an assessment is something she believes to be fruitless and irrelevant.

Lordes is a 16-year old young Alto mother, whose child the author helps deliver in 1965. However, this child does not survive. Lordes works in the tomato fields, and does not receive appropriate prenatal attention. At the time of the delivery, the author notes the resignation and despair at the death of another infant. Lordes has eleven more pregnancies in the years following this. Only five of these pregnancies survive through early childhood. Lordes has two half-sisters, Biu and Antoinetta.