More than a wall: 30 years of Life along the US-Mexico Border (David Bacon)

Journalist, activist, artist and author David Bacon's latest book is The Right to Stay Home: How US Policy Drives Mexican Migration (Beacon Press).  

MORE THAN A WALL: 30 Years of Life Along the US-Mexico Border Photos and text by David Bacon The Nation https://davidbaconrealitycheck.blogspot.com/2019/09/more-than-wall-30-years-of-life-along.html https://www.thenation.com/article/photos-mexico-border-immigration/ Mexicali, Baja California - 1996 A worker is deported back into Mexico at the border gate, from a bus that has taken deportees from the detention center in El Centro in the Imperial Valley, on the other side of the fence. Editors' note: "If it happened yesterday, we've already forgotten." -  an anonymous Nation editor. What we see and react to in the media conditions us to view the present as a series of immediate crises, and to ignore their roots in the past.  For social justice movements, this can be deadly, cutting us off from an ability to weigh and learn from our own history, and to understand how that history shapes the ways we fight for justice today. In this photo essay, David Bacon reaches into his photographic archive of 30 years, which are now part of the Special Collections of Stanford University's Green Library.  A Nation contributor and former union organizer, Bacon's photographs and journalism have documented the courage of people struggling for social and economic justice in countries around the world. ____________________ In 1971, Pat Nixon, wife of Republican President Richard Nixon, inaugurated Border Field State Park, where the border meets the Pacific Ocean just south of San Diego.  The day she visited, she asked the Border Patrol to cut the barbed wire so she could greet the Mexicans who'd come to see her.  She told them, "I hope there won't be a fence here too much longer." Instead, a real fence was built in the early 1990s, made of metal sheets taken from decommissioned aircraft carrier landing platforms.  The sheets had holes, so anyone could peek through to the other side.  But for the first time, people coming from each side could no longer physically mix together or hug each other.  This is how the wall looked when I began photographing it, over 30 years ago. That old wall still exists in a few places on the Mexican side in Tijuana and elsewhere.  But Operation Gatekeeper, the Clinton Administration border enforcement program, sought to push border crossers out of urban areas like San Ysidro, into remote desert regions where crossing was much more difficult and dangerous.  To do that, the government had contractors build a series of walls that were harder to cross. That's partly how the US-Mexico border became more than mere geography-how it became instead a passage of fire, an ordeal that must be survived in order to send money from work in the US back to a hungry family, to find children and relatives from whom they have been separated by earlier journeys, or to flee an environment that has become too dangerous to bear. Some do not survive, dying as they try to cross the desert or swim the Rio Bravo. To them the border region has become a land of death.  Every year at least 3-400 people die trying to cross, and are buried, often without names, in places like the graveyard in Holtville, in the Imperial Valley. But the photographs I've taken over 30 years also show that the US/Mexico border is a land of the living.  Millions of people live and work on Mexico's side of the border: There are the child laborers who pick the tomatoes and strawberries in Mexicali Valley that line the shelves of grocery stores in the US; there are the workers from across Mexico who staff the massive maquiladoras in Tijuana; And there are thousands who have been deported to Mexico, and who must now somehow survive this passage of fire as well. I saw my first immigration raid long before I became a photographer.  I was an organizer for the United Farm Workers in the Coachella Valley.  One morning I drove out to a grove of date palms to talk with the palmeros working high in the trees.  As I pulled my old white Valiant (the only kind of car the union had) down a row between the palms, I saw a green Border Patrol van.  The workers I'd talked with the night before in the union hall were all staring at the ground, handcuffed behind their backs. I felt helpless to stop the inexorable process.  I chased the van to the holding center in El Centro, two hours drive south, but then stood outside the barbed wire.  I asked myself what would happen to those deported and what I could do to help the families left behind. When I began working as a writer and photographer, I tried to use my camera to find answers to those questions.  I carry the camera as a tool to help stop the abuse, and to take photographs that will help people organize.  The photographs, therefore, try to give personality and presence to deportees and their families, and to those who support them. So that's where I began, with the knowledge that the border is not some region of docile subsistence, but one of struggle and resistance. Workers in Tijuana's maquiladoras have organized their unions, and their strikes continue to shake the factories along the border. The laborers in Mexico's San Quentin Valley, in a historic strike in 2015, formed the first independent union for farm workers in Mexico's border region. Deportees, returning to the country after their time in the US-whether mere days or most of a lifetime-have organized to make survival easier, and ultimately to protest the system that forced them over the border. In one example, the group Border Angels helped migrants take over the Migrant Hotel in Mexicali to give shelter and food to people as they're forced back through the border gate. Even the park next to the Tijuana River became a protest site, as homeless migrants and deportees joined city activists to stop its privatization, at the same time as they lived on the site in an Occupy-style protest. At every point along the border where there is hardship, there is also resilience, and strength, and a willingness to fight to not just survive but to thrive.

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Exhibition Schedule
Exhibitions of photographs are scheduled for the following venues and dates:

In the Fields of the North / En los campos del norte
Scheduled exhibitions:

September 1, 2019 - December 22, 2019
Hi-Desert Nature Museum, Yucca Valley
January 5, 2020 - March 1, 2020
Community Memorial Museum of Sutter County, Yuba City
March 15, 2020 - June 21, 2020
Los Altos History Museum, Los Altos
March 21, 2021 - May 23, 2021
Carnegie Arts Center, Turlock

In Washington’s Fields
Scheduled exhibition:

February 5, 2020 - July 15, 2020
Washington State History Museum, Tacoma, WA

More Than a Wall - The Social Movements of the Border
Scheduled exhibition:

August 29,, 2020 - November 29,, 2020
San Francisco Public Library

Deportations
Scheduled exhibition:

April 10, 2020 - May 1, 2020
Uri-Eichen Gallery, Chicago IL

 

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In the Fields of the North / En los Campos del Norte
Photographs and text by David Bacon
University of California Press / Colegio de la Frontera Norte
302 photographs, 450pp, 9”x9”
paperback, $34.95 (in the U.S.)

order the book on the UC Press website:
ucpress.edu/9780520296077
use source code  16M4197  at checkout, receive a 30% discount

En Mexico se puede pedir el libro en el sitio de COLEF:
https://www.colef.mx

Los Angeles Times reviews In the Fields of the North / En los Campos del Norte - click here
 

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En los campos del Norte documenta la vida de trabajadores agrícolas en Estados Unidos -
Entrevista con el Instituto Nacional de la Antropologia y Historia
http://www.inah.gob.mx/es/boletines/6863-en-los-campos-del-norte-documenta-la-vida-de-trabajadores-agricolas-en-estados-unidos

Entrevista en la television de UNAM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdSaBKZ_k0o

David Bacon comparte su mirada del trabajo agrícola de migrantes mexicanos en el Museo Archivo de la Fotografia
http://www.cultura.cdmx.gob.mx/comunicacion/nota/0038-18

Trabajo agrícola, migración y resistencia cultural: el mosaico de los “Campos del Norte”
Entrevista de David Bacon por Iván Gutiérrez / A los 4 Vientos
http://www.4vientos.net/2017/10/04/trabajo-agricola-migracion-y-resistencia-cultural-el-mosaico-de-los-campos-del-norte/

"Los fotógrafos tomamos partido"
Entrevista por Melina Balcázar Moreno - Milenio.com Laberinto
http://www.milenio.com/cultura/laberinto/david_baconm-fotografia-melina_balcazar-laberinto-milenio_0_959904035.html

Das Leben der Arbeiterschaft auf Ölplattformen des Irak
http://www.nrhz.de/flyer/beitrag.php?id=25973

Die Kunst der Grenze
http://www.nrhz.de/flyer/beitrag.php?id=24304Notruf für "eine andere Welt"
http://www.nrhz.de/flyer/beitrag.php?id=24087

Die Apfel-Pflücker aus dem Yakima-Tal
http://www.nrhz.de/flyer/beitrag.php?id=23990
 

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"Documenting the Farm Worker Rebellion"
"The Radical Resistance to Immigration Enforcement"
Havens Center lectures, University of Wisconsin, click here

San Francisco Commonweallth Club presentation by David Bacon and Jose Padilla, click here

EN LOS CAMPOS DEL NORTE:  Farm worker photographs on the U.S./Mexico border wall
http://us7.campaign-archive2.com/?u=fc67a76dbb9c31aaee896aff7&id=0644c65ae5&e=dde0321ee7
Entrevista sobre la exhibicion con Alfonso Caraveo (Español)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJeE1NO4c_M&feature=youtu.beTHE REALITY CHECK - David Bacon blog
http://davidbaconrealitycheck.blogspot.com

Cat Brooks interview on KPFA about In the Fields of the North
https://kpfa.org/player/?audio=263826  - Advance the time to 33:15

Book TV: A presentation of the ideas in The Right to Stay Home at the CUNY Graduate Center
http://booktv.org/Watch/14961/The+Right+to+Stay+Home+How+US+Policy+Drives+Mexican+Migration.aspx

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Other Books by David Bacon

The Right to Stay Home:  How US Policy Drives Mexican Migration  (Beacon Press, 2013)
http://www.beacon.org/productdetails.cfm?PC=2328

Illegal People -- How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants  (Beacon Press, 2008)
Recipient: C.L.R. James Award, best book of 2007-2008
http://www.beacon.org/Illegal-People-P780.aspx

Communities Without Borders (Cornell University/ILR Press, 2006)
http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/?GCOI=80140100558350

The Children of NAFTA, Labor Wars on the U.S./Mexico Border (University of California, 2004)
http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520244726

En Español:

EL DERECHO A QUEDARSE EN CASA  (Critica - Planeta de Libros)
http://www.planetadelibros.com.mx/el-derecho-a-quedarse-en-casa-libro-205607.html

HIJOS DE LIBRE COMERCIA (El Viejo Topo)
http://www.tienda.elviejotopo.com/prestashop/capitalismo/1080-hijos-del-libre-comercio-deslocalizaciones-y-precariedad-9788496356368.html?search_query=david+bacon&results=1

For more articles and images, see  http://dbacon.igc.org and http://davidbaconrealitycheck.blogspot.com
and https://www.flickr.com/photos/56646659@N05/albums