In More Than a Wall / Más que un Muro, labor journalist David Bacon offers a politically rich, bilingual compilation of photographs and oral histories.
Review of MORE THAN A WALL / MAS QUE UN MURO By David Bacon Colegio de la Frontera Norte, 2022 440pp. $35 order here
Families at the US-Mexico border wall in Tijuana, Baja California, 2017. (Courtesy of David Bacon)
"We died in your hills, we died in your deserts, / We died in your valleys and died on your plains. / We died 'neath your trees and we died in your bushes, / Both sides of the river, we died just the same," Woody Guthrie sang in his 1948 classic "Deportee" (also known as "Plane Wreck at Los Gatos"). While Guthrie's song referred to the bracero guest workers imported for California's harvests between World War II and the 1960s, the bracero program was just one incarnation of the uses of the US-Mexico border.
In More Than a Wall / Más que un Muro, labor journalist and documentary photographer David Bacon offers a lavishly illustrated and politically rich bilingual compilation of photographs and oral histories (as well as Bacon's own historical and interpretive text) that serves as a fitting update to Guthrie's song. Many people are still dying in all those places, on both sides of the river/border, and not by chance. Their deaths are the result of the arbitrary and exploitative nature of US-Mexico relations, which pulses through the volume's narratives and photographs. Corporations know no borders, while they (and US consumers) rely on the US-Mexico border to keep wages low and their profits and US consumption soaring. Mexican institutions collaborate with this system. The expensive and elaborate apparatus of immigration law, border enforcement, detention, and deportation serves to keep Mexicans and other Latin American immigrants working, hard and long, at the margins of the global economy.
But many are also fighting back, organizing and creating webs of solidarity, love, and hope that offer glimpses of a more just world for us all. As maquiladora worker Omar Gil tells Bacon in the book, "Nothing will ever change if we just sit on our hands. You have to keep trying and trying."
A central theme examined in More Than a Wall / Más que un Muro is the similarity of the environmental and social issues that people on both sides of the border face in their struggles to survive and better their conditions. "The border region," Bacon reflects, "is actually a single, very complex social fabric. Through it runs the borderline, with its walls. But a wall cannot completely divide and separate the people and communities living here."
The wall, Bacon explains in a section of the book on the physical aspects of the barrier, "is not just geography, or a wall, or a river. It is a passage of fire, an ordeal that must be survived in order to send money from work in the United States back to a hungry family, to find children and relatives...or to flee an environment that has become too dangerous to bear." He documents the absurd nature of the structure, its deadly consequences, and the lives of those caught in the web of deportation, separated from jobs and families and surviving on the streets of Tijuana and other border towns.
Those who remain on the Mexican side of the border are also workers in the transnational economy, "a huge part of the industrial workforce, in the production and supply chain that delivers products to U.S. consumers." The book's second section, titled "Border Rebellions," begins in Tijuana, where the maquiladora industry mushroomed as the drastic wage differential, the North American Free Trade Agreement, and company-friendly unions attracted export-oriented multinationals to the city. The Mexican side of the border is poisoned by the toxins of the farms and factories that exploit the flexible environmental regulation and lax enforcement on that side of the wall.
Bacon brings together the photographs he took during an early labor struggle in the Han Young factory as the workers sought to build an independent union and raise wages there. Tijuana became a battleground over the following decades, and the activism there inspired solidarity on both sides of the border. "When those efforts were defeated, as they often were, blacklisted workers, or simply workers who'd lost hope for change, found their place in the huge waves of people crossing the border," Bacon writes.
More Than a Wall / Más que un Muro also examines the ways in which what happens on the border impacts the rest of Mexico, from the rural villages that many of the migrants came from, to the larger cities and export-oriented industrial farms that have taken over the border region. In these interconnected spaces, workers and migrants organize struggles that go beyond the workplace: struggles for housing, for land, for health care and education, and for what the Binational Front of Indigenous Organizations calls "the right not to migrate." For the FIOB, this means the struggle for "a government and political system that responds to indigenous communities, to farmers, and to other workers." With chapters in remote Indigenous communities, in the export-oriented farms and maquiladoras near the border, and in California, the FIOB confronts the same global forces that affect migrants and non-migrants. Border barrios with names like Derechos Humanos and Fuerza y Libertad reflect how the workers' struggles are also tied to other regional leftist organizations and parties, including the revolutionary Zapatista autonomous communities in Chiapas.
Perusing the photographs in More Than a Wall / Más que un Muro feels like entering a museum exhibit in which visual items, arresting in and of themselves, take on new layers of meaning and understanding when explained by the captions that accompany them. In this case, the images and captions are interwoven with first-person testimonies and with Bacon's analysis and reflections on his life as an activist photojournalist. Even the way that the English and Spanish versions of the text are laid out on the page draws the reader into the tangled threads that connect the two sides of the border. Some pages put the two languages in side-by-side columns, others on side-by-side pages.
The haunting black-and-white images of migrant workers, families, and especially children call to mind the early-20th-century and Depression-era photographs by Lewis Hine, Dorothea Lange, and Walker Evans. But Bacon's photographs are not about some distant past. The captions, text, and oral histories make it clear: The labor exploitation, poverty, violence, and repression are a product of neoliberal free trade. Furthermore, the book's focus is on struggle, mobilization, and resistance as much as it is on human suffering. Photographing protests, Bacon insists, "helps reinforce the idea that people can fight...and the images can be and are used to inspire people in other places to organize their own efforts to stop this inhumane system."
For all its impact in the public and even the policy sphere, Dorothea Lange's most famous photograph, Migrant Mother, was clearly the work of an outsider rather than a participant. The subject of the picture herself protested, years later, that the photographer had taken the picture and used it without her permission and without speaking to her, and had both invented and erased details of her life-one of the latter being that she was Native American. Bacon's relationship to his subjects is different: He has been an active participant in these communities and their struggles over the course of many decades, and he uses his photography as a tool for organizing.
While it feels almost petty to quibble with a work as stunning and powerful as this one, there are two thorny issues that I wish Bacon had developed further. While he clearly critiques Mexico's officialist unions and their failure to protect or represent workers, he is gentler on US unions, including the AFL-CIO and United Farm Workers, whose histories are, to say the least, complicated. The AFL-CIO and even, to a lesser extent, the UFW were slow to support the full rights of immigrant-and especially undocumented-workers, and the AFL-CIO continues to this day to align its foreign policy agenda with that of the State Department, rather than fostering democratic debate in the organization about what a real pro-labor global order would look like. Bacon highlights instead their also-real moments of solidarity and support for migrant workers and their struggles.
I would also have liked to see more about the lives and struggles of Indigenous peoples on and north of the border. The photographs and testimonies delve deeply into the experiences of Mexico's Indigenous, their reasons for migration, and the complicated histories of exploitation, racism, and marginalization, but I would have loved to see a comparable acknowledgment of the complexities of Indigenous communities north of the border and how these histories intersect. A section on Joaquín Murrieta, for example, follows a classic Chicano nationalist narrative that posits mestizo "Mexicans" as the descendants of the Southwest's original inhabitants, eliding the presence of the region's Indigenous peoples. The Chicano narrative emphasizes that "Mexicans coming north today as immigrants are returning to a land from which most Mexicans were expelled a century and a half ago." Theirs is "a history of dispossession," Bacon writes. Yes, but much of that land was "Mexican" in name only, since the majority of the population consisted of unconquered Indigenous peoples to whom the Spanish, Mexicans, and Anglos all brought waves of conquest and dispossession, and whose descendants still inhabit the border region to this day.
The photographs, text, and testimonies delve deeply into the exploitation, racism, marginalization, reasons for migration, and experiences of Mexico's Indigenous. Even more subtleties are alluded to and left for the reader to ponder, like the Oaxacan Triqui migrant worker Andrés Cruz in Baja California, who mentioned that non-Indigenous Mexican migrants there "called me the 'Oaxaco,' and said I wasn't Mexican." Cruz responded that "I was more Mexican than they were, because I was a native and they were mestizo". Or Oaxacan Zapotec migrant Odilia Romero Hernández, interviewed in Los Angeles, who described how Zapotec children were shamed in school in their village of Zoogocho for not speaking Spanish, how her grandmother forbade her from wearing the traditional huipil. In Los Angeles non-Indigenous Mexicans, and even earlier Zapotec arrivals, made fun of newly-arrived Zapotec speakers. With racism and migration, Romero Hernández mourns, the Zapotec language has been virtually lost and "in 20 years Zoogochenses are going to be like the Chicanos... The color of our skin won't be different, but our attitude and our vision of the world will be the same as others."
Complicated constructions of authenticity, indigeneity, and migration were also reproduced inside Zapotec villages. As Zapotec villagers left for the United States, Indigenous Mixe speakers started to migrate to seek work in Zoogocho. "Now Mixes are living and working in the town. They live in the houses of the migrants, but they're not considered residents of the town... Mixe communities are very hidden in the mountains. They are very proud that they were never conquered by the Spaniards. They have schools in Mixe and their own indigenous ceremonies". Romero Hernández goes on to reflect on the complicated attitudes among Zapotecs towards the Mixe. The Zapotec "danza of the Mixes" felt discriminatory to her: "I feel like we are making fun of them." But her grandfather insisted that the danza instead honored the Mixe. "In some communities of Zapotecos, to say 'Don't be a Mixe' or 'You are like a Mixe' is an insult. But someone told me instead when they say 'You are like a Mixe,' it's because you are hard-working. So I have these internal conflicts". While much could be written deconstructing these ideas, Bacon leaves them to the reader to discern, or pass over.
Despite these lacunae, it is hard to deny the significance of this book. Bacon's descriptions and images of the human and environmental devastation caused by industrial agriculture, mining, and maquiladora production on both sides of the border, and his careful documentation of those resisting this devastation, are powerful and moving. They also echo the rhetorical questions that Guthrie asked in his song's haunting last stanza: "Is this the best way we can grow our big orchards? / Is this the best way we can grow our good fruit?"
As the former UFW president Arturo Rodriguez put it: "The wealth of the agricultural industry has been built on top of the suffering of generations of farmworkers, from direct abuses in the fields to degradation of the land and environment." Bacon's More Than a Wall / Más que un Muro is a clarion call to witness, to denounce injustice, and to fight for change. FIRST PLACE AWARD 64th annual Southern California Journalism Awards from the Los Angeles Press Club for General News (Online): "TULARE COUNTY'S HOMELESS TO BE THROWN OFF THEIR LEVEE SANCTUARY" Capital & Main, 2/16/21 https://capitalandmain.com/tulares-homeless-to-be-thrown-off-their-levee-sanctuary-0216
Judges' comment: Phenomenal people-centric story rich with story arcs and data.
"This story by David Bacon chronicled the effort by the Tulare County sheriff to evict unhoused people living on the Tule River near Porterville. The majority of this unhoused population are people of color residing in a region whose largest city, Fresno, has long been plagued by homelessness and poverty. Partly as a result of the story, the river dwellers sued the county, and the sheriff had to defend his actions publicly. Although the community leader, Chendo, was arrested, the sheriff had to release him, and he and his partner Josefina are still living in a trailer on the riverbank. Co-published by Visalia Times Delta." - Arlan Tariq in Medium MORE THAN A WALL / MAS QUE UN MURO
More Than a Wall / Mas que Un Muro explores the many aspects of the border region through photographs taken by David Bacon over a period of 30 years. These photographs trace the changes in the border wall itself, and the social movements in border communities, factories and fields. This bilingual book provides a reality check, to allow us to see the border region as its people, with their own history of movements for rights and equality, and develop an alternative vision in which the border can be a region where people can live and work in solidarity with each other. - Gaspar Rivera-Salgado
David Bacon has given us, through his beautiful portraits, the plight of the American migrant worker, and the fierce spirit of those who provide and bring to us comfort and sustenance. -- Lila Downs
- a book of photographs by David Bacon and oral histories created during 30 years of covering the people and social movements of the Mexico/U.S. border - a complex, richly textured documentation of a world in newspaper headlines daily, but whose reality, as it's lived by border residents, is virtually invisible. - 440 pages - 354 duotone black-and-white photographs - a dozen oral histories - incisive journalism and analysis by David Bacon, Don Bartletti, Luis Escala, Guillermo Alonso and Alberto del Castillo. - completely bilingual in English and Spanish - published by El Colegio de la Frontera Norte with support from the UCLA Institute for Labor Research and Education and the Center for Mexican Studies, the Werner Kohlstamm Family Fund, and the Green Library at Stanford University
"The "border" is just a line. It's the people who matter - their relationships with or without or across that line. The book helps us feel the impact of the border on people living there, and helps us figure out how we talk to each other about it. The germ of the discussion are these wonderful and eye-opening pictures, and the voices that help us understand what these pictures mean." - JoAnn Intili, director, The Werner-Kohnstamm Family Fund Letters and Politics - May 19, 2022 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nvs6SyXsM-4 Three Decades of Photographing The Border & Border Communities Host Mitch Jeserich interviews David Bacon, a photojournalist, author, broadcaster and former labor organizer. He has reported on immigrant and labor issues for decades. His latest book, More Than A Wall, is a collection of his photographs of the border and border communities spanning three decades. IN THE FIELDS OF THE NORTH/EN LOS CAMPOS DEL NORTE
Photographs by David Bacon
Chandler Museum 300 S. Chandler Village Drive Chandler, AZ 85226 June 12, 2022 – August 28, 2022
La Quinta Museum 77885 Avenida Montezuma La Quinta, CA 92253 January 8, 2023 – April 16, 2023
Online Interviews and Presentations
Exploitation or Dignity - What Future for Farmworkers UCLA Latin American Institute Based on a new report by the Oakland Institute, journalist and photographer David Bacon documents the systematic abuse of workers in the H-2A program and its impact on the resident farmworker communities, confronted with a race to the bottom in wages and working conditions. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXKa2lHJXMs
There's More Work to be Done Housing Assistance Council and National Endowment for the Arts This exhibition documents the work and impact of the struggle for equitable and affordable housing in rural America, inspired by the work of George “Elfie” Ballis. https://www.thereismoreworktobedone.com/david-bacon
Exhibited throughout the pandemic in the Cecil H. Green Library at Stanford. The online exhibition (https://exhibits.stanford.edu/bacon), which includes additional content not included in the physical show, is accessible to everyone, and is part of an accessible digital spotlight collection that includes significant images from this body of work. For a catalog: (https://web.stanford.edu/dept/spec_coll/NonVendorPubOrderform2017.pdf)
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
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
