photo exhibition - two years of heat and covid in the san joaquin valley
TWO YEARS OF HEAT AND COVID IN THE SAN JOAQUIN VALLEY
Photographs by David Bacon
October 1, 2022 to February 10, 2023 Reception Thursday, October 13, 4:30 to 6 PM
Leo & Dottie Kolligian Library University of California Merced 5200 N. Lake Road, Merced, CA 95343
In the San Joaquin Valley, the most productive agricultural area in the world, rural poverty is endemic. That poverty produced COVID infection rates far exceeding, per capita, any urban area in California. Rural communities enduring the pressure of low wages and bad housing became coronavirus hotspots.
This exhibition presents this complex reality through documentary photographs taken in the course of the pandemic and the past two years’ heat dome crises. They concentrate on the daily lives of farmworkers and their families, including Filipino immigrants and in particular indigenous Mexican migrants, who did the essential labor that ensured that food left the field to supply supermarkets and dinner tables. They also show that while COVID created enormous risks and problems, in many ways people lived in conditions that existed long before the pandemic began.
In these images, farmworkers appear masked and exhausted as they pick grapes, pluots and persimmons. The series documents the crisis in rural housing, and the efforts of local communities to build homes using self-help projects. Haunting night photographs taken in Fresno show the streets of San Joaquin Valley's largest city empty except for people sleeping on sidewalks, or working in taco trucks into the early hours of the morning. Indigenous farmworkers labor as irrigators in 114 degree heat in the sun all day, while crews pick and toss watermelons into trucks—one of the most physically demanding jobs in agriculture. The growing number of H-2A guestworkers are shown both as they harvest cantaloupes in the harsh temperature, and the rundown motels where they're housed.
The pandemic and the crisis of climate change threw the problems of social injustice in our society into high relief, and I tried to document this reality as I've seen it. In May, 2021, the California Newspaper Publishers Association gave its first place awards to this series of images taken in the San Joaquin Valley, and the Los Angeles Press Club gave it a first place in the Southern California Journalism Awards in 2022.
This exhibition consists of 67 black and white photographs and oral histories giving their context. It is a continuation of previous projects that document the lives of indigenous farmworker communities, including Living Under the Trees and In the Fields of the North.
The photographs are produced as a cooperative effort with the Binational Front of Indigenous Organizations (FIOB), the Central Valley Empowerment Alliance, California Rural Legal Assistance, the Leadership Counsel for Justice and Accountability, and the United Farm Workers. The photographs are used by partner organizations in campaigns for immigrant rights and better working and living conditions. Part of this effort includes using the exhibitions to organize dialogues within these communities about indigenous identity and culture, and ways to advocate for equality and social justice as migrant communities in the U.S., opposing an abusive and dysfunctional immigration system.
Public support is vital to creating a broad movement for immigrant rights, labor rights, cultural respect and the social justice demands of Mexican indigenous migrant farmworkers. This project is part of that effort, at the same time helping documentary photography survive as a medium for advancing social justice.
The exhibition is sponsored by the UC Merced Library, the UCM Center for Analytic Political Engagement (CAPE), and the UCM Community and Labor Center. Special thanks to KFCF 88.1 FM "Nuestro Foro", Central Valley Empowerment Alliance, Centro Binacional para el Desarollo Indigena Oaxaqueño (CBDIO), Community Alliance, Farmworker Justice, Pan Valley Institute, The Puffin Foundation, Rosa Luxemberg Stiftung, Unbound Philanthropy and the United Farm Workers.
For more information, contact rdelugan@ucmerced.edu 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 IN THE FIELDS OF THE NORTH/EN LOS CAMPOS DEL NORTE
Photographs by David Bacon
La Quinta Museum 77885 Avenida Montezuma La Quinta, CA 92253 January 8, 2023 – April 16, 2023
Global Museum San Francisco State University 1600 Holloway Avenue San Francisco, CA October 8 - December 3, 2023
Online Interviews and Presentations
Red Lens Episode 6: David Bacon on US-Mexico border photography Brad Segal: On episode 6 of Red Lens, I talk with David Bacon.
David Bacon is a California-based writer and documentary photographer. A former union organizer, today he documents labor, the global economy, war and migration, and the struggle for human rights. We talk about David's new book, 'More than a Wall / Mas que un muro' which includes 30 years of his photography and oral histories from communities & struggles in the U.S.-Mexico border region. https://www.patreon.com/posts/71834023?fbclid=IwAR0BRhHYbrYU3BoeoAMFKU_zdHs5Xirmmt1LzQtfwf1yD8p9EYLXKhzzbDE
Letters and Politics - Three Decades of Photographing The Border & Border Communities https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nvs6SyXsM-4 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.
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
Documentary Matters - View from the US Social Documentary Network Four SDN photographers explore themes of racial justice, migration, and #MeToo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWl-uENA7SQ&t=1641s 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 Dark Eyes A beautiful song by Lila Downs honoring essential workers, accompanied by photographs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdC2gE3SNWw
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
