SOCIAL JUSTICE WRITING AND PHOTOGRAPHY - THE REALITY CHECK AND BEYOND - PART TWO

SOCIAL JUSTICE WRITING AND PHOTOGRAPHY - THE REALITY CHECK AND BEYOND - PART TWO
By David Bacon and John W. McKerley
a chapter in The Routledge Handbook of the Anthropology of Labor, Routledge 2022
https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-Handbook-of-the-Anthropology-of-Labor/Kasmir-Gill/p/book/9780367745509

Part two of two

This article is the product of an oral history interview done by John W. McKerley, PhD, an oral historian at the Labor Center at the University of Iowa, and adjunct lecturer at the Center for Human Rights in the university's College of Law.

 

 
Irma Luna, a leader in the Frente Indigena and community worker for California Rural Legal Assistance, talks with a crew foreman about the right of workers to break time.


Learning from indigenous migrants

I then developed this work in my experience among people coming up from Oaxaca. Their culture is how they survive, as a community. Oaxacans coming to the United States face a very hostile situation, socially and politically. A lot of racism, which people face in Mexico as well. So they don't survive just as individuals. People survive because of their ability to hang together as a community.

I began realizing this long before, when I left working for the United Farm Workers Union to work in the fields for a year.  There I first met people from Oaxaca speaking indigenous languages.  The workers in my crew cutting cauliflower wanted to organize a work stoppage at one point, in order to force the company to give us back the whetstones we used to sharpen our knives. We went to this group of Oaxacan migrants we were working with.  They would all eat together, and hang out as a group speaking a language we didn't know - Mixteco, I'm sure. When we asked them to participate in our planned action, we couldn't ask them as individuals. They said, "Okay, we'll go talk about it, and we'll let you know." So they went and talked about it, and then came back and agreed, and we had our small strike and won it.

It was obvious they had a collective culture. When I began working as a as a writer and photographer, beginning to get to know this community, it was very easy to see the way culture helped people to stay together. That culture consists of different things. Some are wonderful for photographers. Each town people come from has its own dance, and its own costumes. They have festivals in which they dance the dances and they're beautiful.  Because of  the migration process we have more of those Oaxacan dance festivals in California than they do in Oaxaca now. There are a lot of other enjoyable things about Oaxacan indigenous culture - the food, the music.  And they taught me about that.

The way people organize themselves is also part of culture. One of the first people I interviewed was Rufino Dominguez, who died several years ago.  Not long afterwards I wrote a political biography for his organization, the Frente Indigena de Organizaciones Binacionales, which was published on the Food First website. I was very interested in where Rufino's political ideas came from - his roots in the Mexican left, in liberation theology and the indigenous history and traditions of his own home town.

Rufino was the first person I interviewed in depth among Mixtecos here, and I interviewed him a number of times over his life.  He realized from the very beginning that I really didn't know much of anything, and that he was going to have to teach me in order for us to have a relationship. 

 

 
Rufino Dominguez talks with Frente Indigena members about the right to stay home, or to not migrate.


The first thing he taught me was about the tequio, the tradition of collective work in Mixteco towns. In Oaxacan indigenous communities, if a project has to be done - a road has to be paved or a fiesta organized for a saint's day or the church repaired - the town can obligate people to do the work.  Each town has a very structured organization, governed by a separate legal system called Usos y Costumbres, with many different positions.  Not long after meeting Rufino I met a man in a field pruning grapes, and interviewed him at his house after work. I discovered he was going to go back to Oaxaca because his town had elected him to a certain position.  If he wanted to continue to be a member of that community, he had to go and serve for a year.

For a farm worker, you can imagine what that means. You have family here.  Who's going to pay the rent? Is your family going to stay or go with you? Can you even come back - an important question in a community where many people are undocumented and can't cross the border without great risk.  

In the end, asking many people questions like these turned into a book, Communities Without Borders, showing this world in 53 oral histories and over a hundred photographs. The book looks at people's relationships with their communities of origin. Its contention is that people belong to transnational communities. If you come from San Miguel Cuevas in Oaxaca, and you speak Mixteco, you can go to Fresno and can find people from your town, speaking your language. Or, you can go to the San Quintin Valley in Baja California and find the same thing. You belong to the same community, it's just located in more than one place.

In doing the interviews for the book I would ask, "Are you ever going to go back?" It's not a question with an automatic, easy answer. People would think about it, and start talking about their conflicts. "When I came here, I really thought the only reason I was here was so I could send money back home. But then, I brought my wife here." Or, "Then I fell in love and I married a Salvadoran woman from a different country."  Or, "We have kids and I take them back in the summer because I want them to speak the language and understand. But they'll never live there. And I don't know if I will either, because if I moved back I wouldn't see my children anymore." Questions with often hard and painful answers.

Rufino's interview started a project that has been with me ever since.  I couldn't get it published at first, and I wasn't even doing it with that in mind. I was just doing it because it quickly became very important. It became my life.  It started at a meeting in Fresno in the offices of the Frente Indigena, with community workers also from California Rural Legal Assistance.  It became a cooperative project between myself these two organizations, and it's still going on today. Eventually I did get some funding for it from the California Council for the Humanities. Rockefeller gave me some money at one point, which is how the book was published. And over time I was able to figure out how to get that work out into the world, but it took a lot of years. There was a long time when I was doing it just because I thought it was important to do it.

And of course I have more than one way of working.  One way is this very deliberate method in which I go together with a friend from the FIOB or CRLA.  We take photographs documenting community and family life, and social struggles.  We do interviews and oral histories.  The photographs and texts are used by each organization to move their work forward.  This is the method that has its deepest roots in my own history of organizing.

Shooting in the field

To create a more complete picture of farmworker reality, I also take photographs that show the work people do.  If I go to take pictures of people in a field, which I do often, there are different obstacles. First of all I have to talk my way past the foreman into the field. To do this I had to get rid of my previous conditioning as a union organizer, because I was used to thinking of the foreman as the enemy, since in a union campaign that's so often his role.  So I had to change my own way of thinking, and develop different reasons why the foremen might want to let me take photographs.  

I started doing field photography when I was beginning work on documenting indigenous communities, so I started looking for crews where most of the workers were Mixtecos from Oaxaca.  When I thought I'd found one, I'd tell the foreman, "I'm documenting the lives of indigenous people in the United States. You're Mixteco aren't you?" If he said "Yes", then I was home free, and I'd say, "Since I'm documenting the Mixteco community, and work is an important part of community life, I want to take photographs of people working.  Their work deserves respect. After all, if people don't work, we don't eat."

So that's a good argument. Then you have to judge the person.  If the foreman seems like he's a strong individual, that's good, because he'll feel he can make a decision on his own. The weak person is going to tell you, "I have to call the supervisor." Then you're lost and you might as well leave.  I have yet to have a supervisor tell me "Oh that's fine." You get it settled right there at that moment, or it's never going to happen.

It's important to assume that your motivations are good, and that people are going to appreciate what you do.  Often the conversation has to do with the dignity of work and how hard people work. Farm workers, including the foreman, always feel they work very hard and are very underappreciated, which is true. And of course you have to have this conversation in Spanish. If you speak Mixteco or Triqui, even better.

Once you get past the foreman, then you talk to the workers. Usually people are working in some kind of group, so I'll make a big announcement, "Hey, I'm here to take pictures.  I'm doing it for this book, and I'm only going to take pictures of the good looking people, so if you're ugly, forget it." That gets you in right away. Everybody starts to laugh and call out to each other, "Oh don't take a picture of him."  Then you have to go from person to person, and in each case introduce yourself, say what you're there to do, and ask if it's okay. 

 

 
Leonardo Gomez cutting lettuce behind a lettuce machine in the Coachella Valley.

 
I usually take the pictures first and then ask for people's names.  It's better to get the pictures while the getting is good.  But people have the right to be treated as individuals and their identity respected, although sometimes asking for a name makes a worker feel nervous.  If I have time I'll ask more, like, "What town are you from in Oaxaca?"  You have to judge the crew.  If people seem comfortable then it's no problem, especially if you're talking about indigenous culture and language. When I can I'll get somebody's phone number or find out where they live. In Communities Without Borders I have the narrative of the man who had to go back to Oaxaca.  I found him in a field working with his wife, and I was able to get them to tell me where they lived. It was in the middle of nowhere and but I was able to find his house and that was really a wonderful interview.

But in the field you don't have much time. People are working, and the foreman is not going to be happy if you stop them. Usually people don't want to stop anyway, if they're working on piece rate.  And what you want is pictures of people while they're working. You do all this on the run. You learn how to walk backwards and look and talk and shoot at the same time.  So in the field I'd be half running and half walking backwards in the mud down the row, with a lettuce cutter in front of me, sort of interested, but in some ways thinking, "What a pain in the ass this guy is. I hope he doesn't get in the way. I've got to work!"  People are very polite though, and I have yet to have somebody say "Get the hell out of my way."   

I developed early on the ability to take pictures without looking through the viewfinder. For pictures in the field you want the camera down near the ground, because you have to look under the brim of a hat to get a face, and I want to know what the person is feeling. I want to see what their hands are doing. And by including the fields behind you're getting the whole world into that one picture.  When I first started taking pictures, in some situations I would even lie on the ground and aim up. I was looking to create Rodchenko's heroic worker, like a janitors on strike where the person with the picket sign is bigger than the building she's striking.  But it's not very practical in most cases, so I had to learn what the camera would include in the frame and where it would focus without looking through the viewfinder.  You have to be able to predict.

The reality is that often most of the people in that field probably don't have immigration papers, and are looking at this white guy with the camera and wondering, "Is this going to be okay or not?" So you have to make people feel comfortable. Once in a while I'll make a joke like "Oh, I'm not the migra", and the workers will laugh.  But it's kind of a worried laugh, so best usually not to joke about it.

Talking about being undocumented

In the book, Communities Without Borders, there are a number of oral histories of people without papers, where they talk in one way or another about it - the experience of crossing the border or the experience of living here without papers.  I was introduced to some of them by a friend in Omaha, Sergio Sosa.  He was an activist during the war in Guatemala, and later started a working class organizing project in Omaha in the '90s. Because people trusted Sergio they trusted me.

I interviewed one worker who was caught up in an immigration raid in a meatpacking plant. He describes movingly how he hid from the migra in an air duct in the ceiling of a bathroom. When I would do these interviews, I would say "Well okay, here's who I am and here's what I'm going to use the interview for. So tell me if you don't want me to use your name, or if you want to change certain things that might be used to identify you. How about taking your picture? Is it okay?"  With this guy, I took his picture and did the interview. Then, some time later when we were about to publish the book, Congressman James Sensenbrenner introduced H.R. 4437.  That was the law that would have made it a felony to be undocumented. We all demonstrated against it in 2006, in the huge May Day marches. So I thought "If they pass this bill people in the book are going to be up on felony charges. So I better go back to them and check."

This man said, "You can keep the interview but don't put in my picture." In the book you can see certain interviews that don't have pictures anymore.  I also interviewed a Triqui indigenous farmworker living in a tent encampment in the reeds near the Russian River.  Through a friend in California Rural Legal Assistance I'd developed trust with him and this little community living under the trees at the edge of the river. There was a picture of him with an English Spanish dictionary, because he was going to night school while living in a tent. When I asked him if he wanted me to take out his picture, he said "No, fuck 'em! Let 'em come after me!"  

 

 
A Triqui grape picker in his tent.  He holds the dictionary he uses in a class after work studying English.


This work is not something I do by myself. It's like Sergio introducing me to the meat packing worker - the relationship counts for a lot because it makes the work possible. That's why being a participant documentarian is very important. Journalism schools teach that in some way you're prejudicing yourself by being a participant, that it's going to make you a worse reporter or photographer. You're going to be compromised, and you won't be objective anymore. I think it's exactly the opposite. Because you are a participant, you have relationships with organizations and communities that give you access to people.  They're able to see you in a different way. You're not going to be gone in the next 10 minutes.  You are part of their lives.  

I'm very opposed to photographs or journalism that treat people as victims. Pity never changed anything. Documentary photographers have to struggle with this problem, though. You're trying to show social conditions, but you don't want to fall into the pit of taking pictures of the most awful things you can see, and leave the viewer feeling sorry for people.  That maybe some powerful force will come from on high someday and things will change. That's not to say that pictures of famines, for instance, can't be aesthetically wonderful photographs, and some are. I admire them but I don't want to take them. That's not what I'm about.

A photograph to help  a strike

Starting in a strike by indigenous farmworkers in Burlington Washington in 2013 I began documenting a movement by indigenous farmworkers.  I documented it as a participant - not as a farmworker, obviously, but trying to use the photographs and writing to help their process move forward.  One of the first photos during that first strike, of the children of strikers on a fence holding signs demanding justice, became a symbol of their movement used by the union on t-shirts and all of its materials.  I'm very proud of that.

After the strike was over in that first picking season, a lot of the workers came back to California. They go up to Washington to work every year, and return to live in Madera and Santa Maria. We began preparing to strike again in the following year, because it was clear this was going to go on for some time.  The workers had already begun to organize a boycott of strawberries and blueberries from this farm, and needed to present the case of the strike to the public to get support. So we wanted to find a worker who could be the public face of the strike.

In Madera, a town in the Central Valley, I went to the home of a family of strikers, and sat down with them and started talking about the interview.  When I explained why we needed the photographs and interview the husband and father was clearly nervous. I was thinking it wasn't going to work, and then his wife, Rosario Ventura, said, "Interview me." The strikers came from pretty traditional families, and what she was doing was important all by itself.  I thought her husband would try to stop her, but he didn't. And she gave a wonderful interview. I've used it many times ever since.

The photo was even more remarkable.  She came from a town in Oaxaca where the women are weavers, using back strap looms.  She didn't have her loom set up, but I wasn't that interested in taking a weaving picture, although I've taken many in other homes.  I wanted a picture of the family.  The man didn't want to be part of it, but she had four kids, so we took the photograph with them all together. Triqui women like her weave garments called huipils - big, long blouses that go down to the knees, woven of thick, brilliant red cloth. She'd been weaving one, but hadn't sewn the pieces together, so she draped them over her shoulders.  Then her daughter, who was also making one, draped hers over her shoulders too.  The picture was a wonderful image of a clearly indigenous family wearing partly assembled woven garments, looking straight into the camera. 

 

 
Rosario Ventura and her children.


I had to use the image in black and white, which meant losing the beautiful red color. You do sacrifice some things to create a black and white image, and this is a good example. But it created more drama as a result. Black and white shows the light more dramatically, in this case coming in from the side of the frame. The drama it creates has an emotional impact.  With a photograph, you're communicating in a nonverbal way, trying to arouse a reaction or a response.  It doesn't have to be shock or sadness - it can be a flash of understanding, that you somehow see the world in a different way.  All of a sudden you've seen the world through somebody's eyes or the humanity of somebody in the image.  That's what I hoped for in that image.

I started in the world of film, which is why I have that black line around the image.  I began printing that way and I've stuck with it even when I'm not using an enlarger anymore. The frame around it is telling you, this is a photograph. We are looking through a lens or viewfinder, putting a limit on the world.  The border also plays an aesthetic role in the image itself, and all my images still use the same aspect ratio of a 35mm film frame.

I want these photographs to have an aesthetic quality that people can appreciate even when the immediate circumstances become part of history.  After all, you can look at a photograph Tina Modotti took in Mexico City in 1925 and it's still a beautiful photograph, although the world has certainly changed.  The purpose of the photograph is to move people, which she certainly wanted her photographs to do. The worst thing that can happen to a photographer Is that somebody looking at the picture goes, "Meh." You want the reaction. But the reaction isn't an end in itself. It leads to something else, whether it's just simply greater understanding or some kind of activity or participation. The ability of the photograph to do that is another kind of reason for paying attention to black and white, because I think black and white has that capacity.

I don't think anyone could ever possibly claim that every picture you take involves a relationship with the person you're photographing.  I must have taken a couple hundred thousand pictures in my life so that would be impossible. You have to have faith in yourself. What that means to me is that I am trying to participate in the world in such a way that it responds to the need we all have for making it a better one, with more social justice, and helping movements fighting for change. I sometimes talk to young photographers who have very conflicting feelings about taking pictures, that somehow they are causing harm or ripping people off.  You have to come to terms with who you are as a participant in the world and in social movements, and see your photography as part of that.

It's not that good motives excuse anything, but from there you can explore the issues of permission and ethics and use. That's not to say that people won't sometimes come back at you. There are no guarantees in life that you're always going to do the right thing.  Sometimes you're going to make mistakes.  But you try to be as respectful of people as you can.

 

 
The children of strikers at Sakuma Farms set up their own picketline on a fence at the gate to the labor camp.  The strike led to the creation of Familias Unidas por la Justicia.

SOCIAL JUSTICE WRITING AND PHOTOGRAPHY - THE REALITY CHECK AND BEYOND - PART ONE

SOCIAL JUSTICE WRITING AND PHOTOGRAPHY - THE REALITY CHECK AND BEYOND - PART ONE
By David Bacon and John W. McKerley
a chapter in The Routledge Handbook of the Anthropology of Labor, Routledge 2022
https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-Handbook-of-the-Anthropology-of-Labor/Kasmir-Gill/p/book/9780367745509

Part One of Two

As a non-anthropologist, I've spent many years doing social documentary work that is very similar to that of anthropologists, recording and editing oral histories and taking photographs.  The purpose of this work is to help document social reality as a participant in movements for social change.  In this article, I describe the reasons for beginning this work, and the cooperative relationships developed with social movement organizations, from unions to migrant rights organizations.  As I do this work I try to balance a commitment to the work itself - the aesthetics of photographs and the faithfulness and emotional power of narratives - and a commitment to producing work that has the power to move people and participate in using it to those ends.  The article, therefore, describes the personal journey of one person doing this work, in a way that may be relevant to the experience of others.

This article is the product of an oral history interview done by John W. McKerley, PhD, an oral historian at the Labor Center at the University of Iowa, and adjunct lecturer at the Center for Human Rights in the university's College of Law.

 

 
Farmworkers and Yakama nation activists march together on May Day


Learning to organize

Being a union organizer was very good training for being a documentarian. The first union I went to work for was the Farm Workers Union and it was the beginning of my education, which is still going on.  I grew up in Oakland, raised in a left-wing family where I listened to Paul Robeson records and songs of the Spanish Civil War. I could probably sing Freiheit when I was six. So what did I know about life in rural areas or working in the fields or Mexicans or Chicanos or immigration or any of those things?  The workers in the union were my first teachers.

Coming from a union family, the idea of paying attention to what workers have to say was not a strange idea. But in the union I really had to do it. The first job I had in the UFW was as what we called a legal beagle. Your job was to go out and take statements from workers about why they had been fired, to support whatever organizing campaign the union was involved in. That forced me to learn Spanish really fast.  Translating for me was not high on the list of priorities for the union's organizers.

But the workers were usually very helpful.  They would be patient and correct my crooked Spanish. People who will listen to you and don't correct you are not helping you much. But this job also made me pay attention to them, to what they had to say. Initially my questions were utilitarian.  "What were the circumstances under which you got fired?  What did the foreman say? What happened before and after?"  But to be good at it, you had to do what I call social investigation.

So I had to try to understand who the people were, especially because my background was different from theirs. The union threw me into this and made me learn about their culture in a lot of different ways. Since you were paid $5 a week plus room and board, very quickly people clued you in that the time to visit people at home was dinnertime because they'd feed you. So I learned how to cook the way the workers did, along with the language.

After the years with the UFW I went to work in a factory, with the idea of organizing a union.  It was a huge factory - National Semiconductor - with 10,000 people in the plant.  It was fascinating to see the process of making semiconductors and integrated circuits. But the people who worked in there were even more interesting. I could see right away the stratification of the workforce - Filipina and Chicanos and Latina women on the bottom, with the jobs getting more male and whiter as you went up.  I began learning more about Filipino culture, which I'd started to learn about in the farmworkers union.  It eventually led to meeting a woman I later married, the daughter of Filipino farm workers.

What I'm getting at is that union organizing and workplace activism in general makes you a good listener. You have to learn how to listen, and listening is complicated.  It's not just hearing the words, it's trying to really understand what people are telling you, and asking questions to elicit someone's world. On the one hand, I want to get the raw material of people's experience. It's often very colorful and can be very moving emotionally, giving you a vision into somebody's world. But I also want to understand how people analyze that world.

I reject the idea that the function of workers is to provide raw material, while some smart academic is going to come along later and explain what it all means. That is a very patronizing way of looking at workers. So workplace activity and union organizing is good training for that as well too. You want to understand what happens to people and see how they change it.

You want people to tell you the story of their lives, really.  A good oral history session can go on for three or four hours, if the opportunity is there. I'll go all the way back to, "Okay, who are your mother and father, and what did they do and where do you come from? And all the rest of the way until today."  Part of the challenge is to get that story and be sensitive to how people are telling it to you, so that you know when you come upon something important. Sometimes you have to  pull the story out of people. You have to see that it's there and then ask questions to get them to tell you.. But many times it's as though people have been waiting for the chance to tell it.

By the time we get to the end I want to know, "What do you think about it all?  What does justice mean to you?"  That's a real common David Bacon question. "If you think that the world is an unfair place, what's unfair about it? And what do you think it should be? And how would you go about changing it?" That started with that first training, interviewing fired workers.  Usually by the time we finish, people have already been talking about these questions in terms of their own lives.

I want people to analyze their own world because I learn from it. One of the most important concepts that I've learned in the last 20 years came from meetings of the Frente Indigena de Organizaciones Binacionales, an organization of indigenous migrants from Mexico. I got to know those people 20 years ago as a photographer. I would go to their meetings and take pictures and give them the pictures and listen, interviewing people and recording oral histories. They're people migrating from communities in Oaxaca, essentially economically displaced people. It's become so hard to survive that they have no alternative but to leave to find work somewhere else. They look for work elsewhere in Mexico, and then cross the border to look here in the United States.

 

 
Triqui women weavers show their support for the Frente Indigena at the end of the organization's binational assembly.


In these meetings people would talk about a dual set of rights. On the one hand you have the right to stay home, and on the other hand you have the right to migrate and to be treated as a social equal. The more you look at it, the more you see that these rights are inseparable, especially in the minds of the people who are migrating. It's a much more sophisticated way of seeing migration than you find, certainly in the mainstream media or academia. People have analyzed their experience and they know what it is that they think has to happen. It's a very complicated concept in the end, because in order to have the right to not migrate, you need social change in people's communities of origin. That leads you to the question of how people organize for social change and political change. There were lots and lots of debates about politics and strategy, for instance.

My understanding of it came from listening. Part of it was the interview process, because I would get people who were thoughtful about it to talk to me. It also came from listening in group settings. As a documentarian I listen to people on an individual basis. But I'm also very interested in how people fight for social change, and that's a collective process. So I learn a lot by being with people when they are together, whether in a meeting talking or in a demonstration or a march - the kinds of things that happen when people are trying to force change to take place. And because I'm a photographer, I take pictures of all of it.

I've been very interested over the years in documenting visually the culture of social change. How do people do it? What does it look like? For instance, there was a while maybe 10 years ago when people discovered you could have a much more colorful march if some got up on stilts in costumes holding signs and banners.  Or there were big puppet figures people would carry. The culture is just fascinating to me.

In this last year of the pandemic, a whole other iteration was the car caravan. People were afraid to march but they wanted to demonstrate, so they would do it in cars.  At one point there was a car caravan protesting the murder of George Floyd in the Port of Oakland with 2000 cars. I've never seen so many cars in one place.

Learning how to listen

Documentation to me came out of that process of being an organizer and learning how to listen. And of course, as an organizer you also have to interact. I stopped being a legal aide and became a union organizer as soon as my Spanish was good enough. And then I was an organizer for that union and other ones for a long time.  As an organizer, part of the reason you're listening to people is that you have this idea in your head of what has to happen. I spent a lot of my time organizing strikes, and in order to do that, you have to convince people that this risky idea is something they have to consider. You can't order people to do things like that. You have to convince people. To do that you have to listen, you have to understand who you're talking to.

I became an organizer for a foundry workers union, helping Mexican workers in a factory go out on strike.  When I started, the workers asked me, "Is this is a good legal strike?" I said, "Oh yes, striking is legal in United States under federal labor law." So we went on strike. And first thing that happened was that the police came and divided our picket line and escorted strike breakers into the struck plant. The workers looked at me with betrayal in their eyes. They said, "You said this was a legal strike." I said, "Well, it is." And they pointed and said, "But look."

What they meant when they said legal strike, and what I meant when I said legal strike. were two very, very different things. I had to learn about the history of the Mexican labor movement and what a legal strike means to Mexicans. I eventually took pictures of strikes in maquiladoras on the border. Workers would put a red and black flag on the door of the struck factory. In a legal strike in Mexico, when that flag gets put on the door, even the owner of the factory cannot go inside. People's labor rights, at least on paper, are way in advance of what we have here. So when they were saying "a legal strike," what they meant was, "Okay, are we going to close this factory down?  And if it's legal and the labor board approves it then the strike is on, right?"

It took me a while to really understand that. I learned not just by listening but by interacting, by this bitter experience of organizing a strike and seeing the strike breakers come in.  Then we'd have these discussions about "Now what do we do? How do we conduct an effective legal strike in United States when our rights are different?" It was a learning experience for the workers too. They had to learn the bitter reality of working class life here in United States.

 

Strikers at D'Arrigo Brothers Co. call to workers to join them, while sheriffs keep them from going into the field.

At the same time I was learning about Mexico. Starting from the time in the Farm Workers Union I began talking to Mexican workers and they'd tell me their stories.  One old man told me the story of growing up in Baja California, where his father was active in the land reform struggle. They burned down the hacienda and killed the hacendado, and later other people came and killed his father.  He had to run to the US. His history was very moving to me, and from that point on I was interested in Mexico and the border and migration. What happened to people that had them come here? I've been investigating that and learning about it ever since.

Organizing the strikes was a watershed also because it made me learn more about the left in Mexico and about Mexican politics. Eventually I went to Mexico and made a lot of friends who are political activists of one kind or another, and of course photographers too.  It's been a very enriching experience for me, a very important part of my life.

This is how I learned the documentary process. As I practice it, it's an interactive one. There has to be some mutuality to it. In other words, you have to be willing to participate. Participation can be something that's basically just learning, but it can be more than that, depending on where and how you're doing the documentation.  My whole idea of being a journalist and a documentary photographer is that we are participants in the world. We are not abstracted out of it. We are not objective. We are not coming in from Mars. We are part of this world and the more conscious we are about that and the more we actually participate actively in it, the better documentarians we are. Professors in journalism school hate me.

I don't work for a union anymore. I haven't for a long time and I don't organize strikes anymore. But when I made the transition to doing the work that I do now, I had to come to terms with the purpose of the documentation. The purpose of the work that I do is to affect the way people think. There are a lot of ways of doing that.  The organizer does that. You sit in a meeting with people and you convince them to go out on strike. That's definitely affecting people's ideas. What I do now is less direct or immediate but it reaches more people. It's still part of participating in the struggle for social change, but it's participating in a different way.

At the same time there's an important craft to taking photographs and an important craft in writing.  It is very important to learn the craft, not to shortchange it and say content is everything and craft is nothing.  If the purpose is to communicate, you have to do it in a way people understand and that's effective. That's a pragmatic way of looking at it. But there are artistic and aesthetic parts of this as well. I didn't really appreciate aesthetics much as a union organizer but I certainly do as a photographer.  We can certainly recognize beautiful photographs when we see them and I want to take some of them.  I study photographers a lot. I just got through reading a book about Rodchenko, the Soviet photographer of the 20s. He was one of the people who pioneered taking pictures from extreme angles.  He was trying to break up people's sensibilities and make you pay attention. But he was also completely committed to using these techniques to advance social change.  

I'm not saying that this documentation is the only form of photography or the only form of journalism but it is very, very important. We need to get people to practice it more and understand it better, because it's part of the process of social change and we need social change in our world. Part of the movement for social change consists of communication -- photography and journalism.

From organizer to photographer and writer

When I was an organizer, and beginning to make the transition to the work I do now, we would go out on strike somewhere, and I would take pictures of people on the picket line, and make prints, and hand them out to people.  We'd all laugh and joke about how you'd take the photos home and show them to your family, and 20 years from now you'll show your grandkids what you did to stand up for justice. It was a morale booster. It made people feel like their experience counted for something. And it was useful. We could get support with these photos -- send them off to a newspaper somewhere, and maybe they would write an article. My photography had a very utilitarian purpose at first.

In the last few years working for unions I knew that I needed to change. At one point I got laid off and went to work for a left-wing newspaper for a little while, just writing labor stories. I picked up a camera again and started taking pictures, which I did when I was much younger.  I gave some pictures to the woman I was writing for, and she said, "David, you have to remember to look at the light." All the pictures were dark silhouettes, barely usable. But what she told me stuck in my mind, and it still does.  It's such an obvious thing for photographers, look at the light. Photographs are made of light. In other words, be aware, pay attention, be conscious, look.

But after that I had to go back and do more organizing work for a while, just for the income. I started taking classes at our local community college. Fortunately it had a very good photography program that taught me some of the basic skills - how to develop film, how to print, how to use lighting.  They weren't art courses - they were for people who needed to make a living at it. It was a little hard, going to class after work, since there really is no after work for organizers. I was trying to pull out time here and there to do it. But it made me fall in love with photographs.

As my interest in it grew, I helped organize a strike in Pomona, in Southern California, and I decided to document it from beginning to end. I knew I could be in places where nobody else could. As an organizer I would never let a stranger into certain meetings because we had to be able to talk with each other without worrying about somebody else listening. But as the organizer I could be there, and I could take the pictures.

At first the workers thought it was kind of a weird.  There I was with a camera all the time taking pictures, but after a while they just ignored it. It was just David with his camera. In the end we lost the strike, and one of the bitterest series of pictures I have is of the meeting where we voted to go back to work. There's one of a guy crying, and others where people are shocked. In one somebody is making a speech, and while you can't obviously see the words you can see the emotion. I know what he was saying - "No, we're not going to do this!"  But in the end we had to, and the next series shows the workers marching back to the plant, and the company refusing to rehire them and let them go back to work.  Bitter, bitter photos.

 

 
A Cal Spas striker begins to cry at the realization that we had to end the strike.


I'm not really sure how somebody who didn't go through that meeting would feel looking at these pictures, but, but people do react to them. I saw that they worked, as pictures. I was learning as a photographer. One of the things I learned, obviously, was to watch people's faces. That's still what I do. I'm interested in people, and how you can convey the meaning of somebody's experience through their image.  You have to watch what's going on, emotionally, in people's faces.

Another factor is timing. You have to predict what's going to happen next, so that you're ready for it. You have to figure out what you're including in the photograph besides the person, especially for a portrait photograph. I've learned the technique of using a very wide angle lens, and getting very close to the person. Their face or figure is really big in the frame, but you also get all of this other material in the background. Because it's a wide angle, enough is in focus that you can actually appreciate that environment. It's not anything I invented or discovered, but it's a very useful technique.

That strike was a learning experience. In that meeting, people trusted me because they knew who I was. We had fought together. We were brothers and sisters. And as I went on, because of who I was photographing and interviewing, I had to confront the question of legal status.  Fortunately, I'd learned as a union organizer how to talk to people about it.

For a few years I was pulling myself out of the world of direct union organizing, and learning how to do this other documentary work, and trying to practice it at the same time. After that strike in Pomona I would try to survive as a freelancer, not really be able to make enough money for us to live on. My wife was working, thank God, so we weren't starving.  But the bank account would go down and down, and down. Finally I'd go take a job running some union's campaign for a while, and make a paycheck.  The account would go up, and I would go back to freelancing.  Eventually, after three or four years, I didn't have to take any more organizing jobs. From that point on, I was just doing this work.

One of the first documentary projects I did on my own, not because of a job, was in the Coachella Valley.  I'd worked there years earlier for the Farm Workers Union.  There are a lot of date palms in Coachella - one of the places in the world, outside of the Middle East and North Africa, where they grow dates commercially. It's a very dangerous job, because workers have to climb ladders up into the crowns of trees 40 feet tall and higher. I'd helped those workers organize a union, and I knew that world. I thought, I'm going back to Coachella and document the valley and those palmeros. Coachella was also the first place I ever saw an immigration raid. I've been an immigrant rights activist for many years, so that also made it an important place for me.  

When I originally took those pictures I didn't have any place to publish them. Eventually I discovered that there were a few academic journals that might. I became friends with the editor of Contexts, the journal of visual sociology, and he published the Coachella photos and a series about indigenous Mexican farm workers.  I began realizing there was a possible outlet for this work.

At the same time I was developing my ability as a writer, and that had its own trajectory. Even as early as the pictures in Coachella, and the Pomona strike, I began to interview people and record the interviews. It really helped me during that time that I started a radio program for our local Pacifica station.  I would interview people on the air, and later transcribe the interviews and try to turn them into articles - the UPS strike, a union election in a maquiladora, the lockout of San Francisco's hotel workers.

From the very beginning almost all my writing has been based on people's voices. Once in a while I'll write something where it's just me speaking, like a news analysis article. But even those usually have at least some voices. From the beginning, because of that organizing experience, I've always been concentrated on what people say and think.

 

A palmero climbs a ladder into the crown of a date palm tree, to pollinate the flowers.