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.