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.