More Than a Wall / Mas que un muro
30 years of photographs and oral histories
By David Bacon
El Colegio de la Frontera Norte, Tijuana, Baja California
May 2022
440 pp
357 duotone black-and-white photographs
12 oral histories with incisive journalism and analysis by David Bacon, Don
Bartletti, Luis Escala, Guillermo Alonso and Alberto del Castillo.
Completely bilingual in English and Spanish
$35, soft cover
More Than a Wall / Mas que un muro is 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. It presents 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.
Published by 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
To order in the U.S., click here:
https://david-bacon-photography.square.site/product/more-than-a-wall-mas-que-un-muro/1?cp=true&sa=true&sbp=false&q=false
To order in Mexico, click here:
https://libreria.colef.mx/detalle.aspx?id=7864
Often we only see the border from the U.S. side, despite the fact that many more people live in the border region south of the wall than north of it. Despite the media fascination with the wall, people their lives and organize vibrant social movements that are virtually invisible in the U.S. Yet they have a direct impact. From winter strawberries to flat panel televisions, people north of the border consume what’s produced just a few miles south of it.
The intention of these photographs, taken over three decades, is to probe more deeply into the lives of the people of the border itself, rather than simply see it as a wall, or a place people try to cross to enter the United States.
The images show children working in fields and hard scrabble miners trying to survive in the desert. They depict strikes and land occupations virtually unknown to U.S. audiences, and often even to Mexican ones outside of the border region itself. These struggles have been going on for over a century, but have never been the subject of the kind of visual and narrative documentation presented here.
These photographs and the accompanying narratives provide a broad historical view, spanning the period from late 1980s to the present. They provide a human face and story for those who seek to come to terms with the sources of migration, and to protect the human rights of migrants and working people generally.
Taking these photographs and conducting these interviews has been a cooperative project, built on relationships over three decades with the Binational Front of Indigenous Organizations, the Coalition for Justice in the Maquiladoras and California Rural Legal Assistance. The result is an intensive look at border communities - a unique view documenting border work life, living conditions, culture and migration through photographs and narratives of the people who live there.
"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
“David Bacon is the conscience of American journalism and an extraordinary social documentarist.”
Mike Davis, sociologist, professor at UC Irvine, author of “City of Quartz” and other works.
“Bacon is a consummate professional. His work makes an outstanding case for engaged documentary, a proud tradition reaching to the beginning of photography. It offers a contrast to much modern documentary that has become self-absorbed and abstract. There is no book that has the scope, depth, and artistry of Bacon’s project.”
Douglas Harper, Professor, Department of Sociology, Duquesne University, President, International Visual Sociological Association
“A basic preoccupation in David’s work is to honestly portray the lives and livelihoods of excluded communities - individuals and groups rarely noted as significant actors in contemporary society. These evocative documentary photographs and forceful oral histories raised conscience and consciousness about globalizing processes affecting American urban life throughout the country.”
Tomás Ybarra-Frausto, Associate Director, Creativity & Culture, The Rockefeller Foundation
More Than a Wall/Mas que un muro
Table of Contents
More Than a Wall - David Bacon on the history of this work
Preface - Don Bartletti, Pulitzer-prize photographer for the Los Angeles Times
Introduction - Luis Escala Rabadán and Guillermo Alonso
Part One: The Wall
Bars, crosses and graves
They called us “Baja Pollos”
41 Photographs
Deportados and their families
Sanctuary in front of the detention center
37 Photographs
Part Two: Border Rebellions
Up against the border bosses
The life of a maquiladora worker
My youth has passed me by
People are tired of the wages
39 Photographs
Communities of Resistance
We were going to have real change
39 Photographs
Indigenous migrants rise up
We paid a price to confront racism
40 Photographs
Kids in the fields, parents on strike
Why kids don’t come to school
What kind of society is this? We produce all of society
51 Photographs
Part Three: In the Desierto del Diablo
Neoliberalism’s cost - the mine and the river
Becoming a luchadora social
It was the union that demanded protections
We had to go to work on the other side
38 Photographs
Communities in the desert
The legacy of Joaquin Murrieta
23 Photographs
Part Four: North of the Wall
Living poor, working and breathing the dust
I never imagined we would suffer this way
We are just looking to make a living
53 Photographs
Afterword: A journey through images - Alberto del Castillo Troncoso
David Bacon is a California-based writer and photographer. He is the author of several books about migration: The Children of NAFTA, Communities Without Borders, Illegal People – How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants, and The Right to Stay Home, and In the Fields of the North / En los Campos del Norte. His latest book is More Than a Wall/Mas que un muro, Colegio de la Frontera Norte (Tijuana).
Bacon was a factory worker and union organizer for two decades with the United Farm Workers, the International Ladies Garment Workers and other unions. Today he documents the changing conditions in the workforce, the impact of the global economy, war and migration, and the struggle for human rights. His photography has been exhibited in the U.S. Mexico and Europe, and his articles and photoessays have been published widely.
The photography archive of David Bacon was acquired by the Special Collections of the Green Library at Stanford University in 2019.
No comments:
Post a Comment