This posting will, I hope, be the first of a new periodical series of photographs, with enough text to give them context, taken from the mid-1980s to the present. There will be a lot of diversity in subject, place and time, investigating the small things as well as the big ones. Many will look at reality with the intention of changing it, in the spirit of Tina Modotti's revolutionary images, while others will just show world as I see it, as Ara Guler did in his extraordinary photographs of old Istanbul. I'm calling this Photos from the Edge, in acknowledgement of the radical work of journalist Ringo Hallinan, which he called Dispatches from the Edge in the same spirit.
01 - Cinco de Mayo in NYC
These photographs were taken when I was in New York City in the spring of 2003. With a friend I went to Flushing Meadow, site of the old World's Fair. That year the city's Mexicans had chosen the park to celebrate the Cinco de Mayo holiday, which remembers the day their foremothers and forefathers fough the Battle of Puebla in 1862 to expel the French imperialists.
Cinco de Mayo has been taken over by breweries and distilleries in many cities. That hadn't happened yet in New York in 2003, though. Lots of families came to walk through the park in the same evening peramulations you find in a Mexican town square, checking out the low-rider bicycles and each other. The cops came too, in that hard era of racial profiling, pushing young men up against the trees as they searched for marijuana.
The numbers of people in the park, and on the Number 7 subway going to and from, made it clear that part of Mexico was now in the big city, just as it is in Fresno or Yakima or a hundred other communities. That was certainly a change from the youth of my friend, who'd grown up in Jackson Heights in the 50s and 60s when Mexican restaurants were rare and the only tortillas his family ate came in an Old El Paso can.
