12-06-06, 9:00 am

Editor’s Note: David Bacon is a photojournalist who recently published Communities Without Borders: Images and Voices from the World of Migration (Cornell University Press, 2006). He is also the author of The Children of NAFTA (University of California Press, 2004). View his website at: http://dbacon.igc.org. This interview was conducted by Joel Wendland.

PA: Can you describe what readers will find when they open their copies of your latest book, Communities Without Borders?

DB: It’s a book that combines photographs and oral history. I see it as a kind of Studs Terkel view of immigration, but with pictures. The book is divided into four sections and each section looks at a different community of people. These are transnational communities. In other words, they are communities that have been created by migration. It is about a person, for instance, who is born and grows up in a small village in Oaxaca, speaking an indigenous language like Mixtec as part of that culture. Of course, such people by the thousands leave their villages and go to work in northern Mexico as migrant farm workers, and then cross the border eventually to work in the United States as farm workers. People create communities wherever they go. Now there are communities of Mixtec-speaking people from the same hometown in the San Quintin Valley in Baja California, Sinaloa, a state of northern Mexico, Fresno, California, or Woodburn, Oregon. Somebody from that same town in Oaxaca can go to all of these different places, speak their language, participate in parts of their culture, in dance festivals, etc., meet family members or friends, and it’s like you were born into a single community, but it’s located in more than one place. These communities are very important, because they provide a lot of help to people in facing the problems that confront them surviving in a strange new place. For instance, such communities help people learn what they need to know about what their rights are as workers, how to negotiate the legal system, how to find a place to live, or how to go about getting married – all the different things that communities help people do. One of the points of the book is that migration is a community process. It’s not an individual process. Whole communities participate in it, but migration also creates communities.

My book looks at two examples of this process. One has to do with people who move from Oaxaca to northern Mexico, and from there into California. There are photographs of their hometowns in Oaxaca. There are photographs of people from San Quintin, which is a little town in Baja California peninsula. There are photographs from Fresno, California and San Diego. The photographs are basically documenting these new types of transnational communities. At the same time, there are also narratives and oral histories by people who belong to this community, talking about everything from about how they got across the border, to their history as workers, and the different kinds of cultural activities the people have organized. For instance, there is a youth organizer talking about the experience of organizing young people and women in the Oaxacan community in California. People talk about the raw material of their lives, but they also explain what the experience means to them personally. So it’s not just treating people as being providers of experiences that somebody else interprets, but as people who are interpreting it themselves and explaining what it means, and also what kinds of things are needed to help their communities develop and enable the people in those communities to exercise their rights.

Another section of the book is about people from the highlands of Guatemala up above the city of Huehuetenango, where there is a little town called Santa Eulalia San Miguel Acatan. These are towns that were caught up in Guatemala’s civil war. People left those towns and traveled through Mexico and wound up working in meatpacking plants in the Midwest. There are photographs of the towns in Guatemala and the immigrant community in Omaha, Nebraska. These workers were able to use their experience in political organizing during the civil war to organize unions in meatpacking plants in Omaha. The photographs document those experiences, and the people involved talk about them as well. People talk about their experiences as immigrants and as workers and families. The book presents these people as whole people, not just as one-dimensional characters.

There are two other smaller sections in the book, which document communities on the border between Arizona and California in the Mexican state of Sonora. These are gold mining communities that are very old and existed even before California and Arizona were part of the United States. In fact, people have been migrating through what was then Mexico going all the way back into the early 1800s, and then found themselves foreigners in their own land after the treaty of 1848 was signed. In the book, people talk about that history and about their lives as miners. Some of the people are small-scale gold miners, and just do it as individuals. But there are also huge copper mines in northern Mexico where these people work. They talk about the fact that copper-mining families come from both sides of the border and have a long history of helping each other across that border during periods of strikes or other kinds of labor struggle, both in southern Arizona and northern Sonora. They also talk about the indigenous roots of their communities, where people came from originally and the culture and the origins of the Mayo people, who later became copper miners in that area.

The final section of the book is about the braceros, those who were part of the first contract labor program instituted in the United States from 1942 to 1964. This was an important experience in the lives of many Mexican families and many Chicano families in the US, because it was how people migrated here originally. But also it’s important because there are now proposals for new bracero programs that Congress is discussing. So I thought it was important to have in the book some contributions of people who lived through that earlier experience and describe what it was like and what happened.

In the introduction, I talk about why a book like this is needed at this time, what its importance is for the current immigration debate, and about the need to look at migration in a new way, getting rid of the stereotyped ideas about migration that we’ve seen in Congress this past year that have led to proposals that are either extremely repugnant, anti-immigrant legislation or proposals for new contract labor programs. We need a new way of looking at the subject of immigration and migrant labor.

PA: This book bears a strong resemblance to work by other well-known photojournalists like Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans. What is your motivation and inspiration for doing this kind of work?

DB: The book is in a long tradition of socially progressive documentary photographers. You mention a couple, Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange, but there are a lot of others as well. Otto Hagel and Hansel Mieth, left-wing photographers who were actively involved in the movement to organize farm labor in California in the 1930s and 1940s and were themselves refugees from Nazi Germany. The book is really trying consciously to be part of that tradition and to examine the present situation, which has been documented by other people before me. I am not the first person to come along and take photographs of immigrants or farm workers, or meatpacking workers or miners. Other people have done this too. What I am trying to do is to show the conditions that exist today, to talk about the changing demographics of our population, and about the culture of the new wave of migration that is coming to the US, and to connect that historically with other waves of migration that have come before.

One thing the book is trying to talk about more directly – visually as well as in words – is community and the creation of community. Social documentary photographers in the past have concentrated very heavily on work and working conditions, and certainly I do that too. It interests me a great deal. But I’m also interested in the culture and the community being created by this current wave of migrants. I am trying to add that to the mix. Also, Communities Without Borders is in the tradition of photography and documentation that is partisan. It has a pro-worker, pro-immigrant perspective to it. It’s trying to provide material to people who want to change the world, so it is part of a social movement. It’s trying to do that by giving people a vehicle in which they can speak for themselves, but also, in terms of the broader movement for people’s rights, it provides readers with material that will help them understand the world better, so they can fight more effectively and more intelligently.

I came to it after working as a civil rights and labor rights activist for many years. I have worked for several unions as an organizer. Also, I was a board member of our immigrant rights coalition here in northern California for many years. Therefore, I see myself as a participant in this movement, and in a way this type of work – taking the photographs and doing the interviews, and publishing them – is itself a form of participation. That’s the way I look at art. I am interested in art and documentation that is connected to social movements and peoples’ communities rather than abstracted from them. It’s my own history. It’s where I came from, as someone who has worked for the United Farmworkers and the UE (United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers). In a way, it’s kind of like organizing people, but it’s not like doing it through knocking on doors or holding house meetings. It’s trying to deal with the way people think, what kinds of ideas they have. The Left in our country, I think, has been kind of weak about that. We haven’t really spent as much time as I think we need to looking at where people’s ideas come from and how we can change the way people think.

PA: On the issue of immigration, working people in this country have been convinced that immigration negatively affects their standard of living.

DB: First of all, immigration doesn’t cause unemployment. Unemployment is a product of the system we live in. That’s the way capitalism works. Also, the major sources of unemployment in our economy are things like the shifting of manufacturing out of the country, the closure of plants, and the restructuring of the economy, which really have nothing to do with immigration. Obviously, there is an effort by right-wing politicians to convince workers that this is somehow due to immigration, but it is simply not true. That’s an easy way of avoiding the blame for the kind of brutal capitalism that the Bush administration has been enforcing since they have been in office. Clinton or Bush – this is the way the system works here. It was Clinton’s Labor Secretary Robert Reich who told us that we all should get used to the idea that we would have multiple jobs in our lifetime and that job security was something that went out with the horse and buggy.

That being said, however, one of the other essential ways in which our system works is that employers try to pit workers against each other. They do this in all kinds of ways. One of the ways they use today is by trying to pit immigrants against workers who were born in this country or, in some cases, people who are more recently arrived against people who arrived earlier. This is part of the system too. For instance, look at the way in which the building service contractors destroyed the unions in office buildings in Los Angeles. One of the things they did in the early-to-mid-1980s was to tear up union contracts. Union signatory contractors went out of business. New contractors were then created, who began hiring a workforce that they hoped would be a low-wage workforce, by taking advantage of the huge influx of refugees, primarily from civil wars in Central America, who were arriving in Los Angeles at that time. The people who lost their jobs in that process were overwhelmingly African American, unionized janitors in office buildings. The employers miscalculated pretty badly here, because those immigrant janitors in the late 1980s became the backbone of the Justice for Janitors campaigns, which reorganized the union in building services and pushed wages and conditions back up to where they had been before. In some cases, these were militant groups of workers who used the organizing skills they had developed in their home countries to organize unions and change conditions in Los Angeles. But the fact remains that a lot of African American janitors lost their jobs in the process. This was due to a conscious decision by building contractors to replace that workforce.

We saw the same thing happening in hotels in San Francisco, where African American workers fought very hard to take down the color line in the 1960s. The biggest demonstration in the civil rights era in San Francisco was the sit-in at the Sheraton Palace Hotel, which forced hotels to begin hiring African American workers into visible and better-paid positions, at the front desk and as waiters in the restaurants, and so on. After having won that battle, in the early 1980s employers in San Francisco deliberately tried not to hire African Americans for those jobs, because they viewed them as too militant and too willing to organize and fight for better conditions. Again there was a demographic change in the workforce.

One of the better things unions have done in the recent period – and I am thinking especially about the San Francisco hotel union, UNITE HERE Local 2 – was to recognize the reality of what happened then and to try and address it in contract negotiations. In the current round of negotiations in 2006, the union put on the table a civil rights clause that both protected the rights of immigrant workers – those people who are already in jobs at these hotels – and began to require employers to do outreach to African American communities that had been excluded by a new color line, and to hire out of those communities, working towards local hiring and affirmative action provisions that may someday be in those contracts.

The important thing here was the recognition of the historical reality, trying to do something to get actively at the problem of the kind of job competition that employers cause. Employers use the system in all kinds of ways, and this was one way that they did it. But San Francisco is an example of a union trying to correct that and also trying to find unity among workers, not just by preaching about it but by actually trying to find economic common ground, in this case in terms of the hiring process, that would bind the two affected communities together.

This is the same thing that Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee (D-TX) did with her immigration proposal last year, in which she first of all had a legalization program that would have legalized – given green cards to – the 12 million people in the United States who don’t have any papers. It would have made it an unfair labor practice to threaten people during union drives because of their immigration status. At the same time, her proposal had a provision that said that the money that people paid in fees when they were applying for legal status would be used to create job training and job creation programs in communities with historically high levels of unemployment. Again, her bill was trying to find some common ground between unemployed workers in the US, who might be African American or white, or even from an earlier generation of immigrants, people who were newly legalized themselves. Of course, the other thing she did was to refuse to include a guest worker provision in her bill, because guest worker proposals would allow employers to hire an extremely vulnerable workforce, instead of trying to address the historical problems of discrimination in employment and hiring. There are many things that unions, working people, and their political representatives can do to try to limit and fight against the ability of employers to pit workers against each other. We have to admit the reality of what the system does here and not just simply say that this problem doesn’t exist.

PA: Are you saying that it’s not really enough to state simply that we’re better off to be united, there has to be a program or policy in place that does that?

DB: Unity is something that has to be built. It has to be organized. It can’t just be preached. When there are reasons why people are not united, you have to address those reasons and try to figure out how to change the world. Our movements sometimes get very nervous talking about these problems, so that, for instance, some of the more right-wing, so-called immigrant-advocate organizations in Washington this past year were defending for instance their support for the Kennedy-McCain Bill and its guest worker programs. One of the lines they continually repeated over and over again is that immigrants do the jobs that no one else is willing to do. That’s just simply not true. The problem with these jobs is what they pay. Here you have employers who create millions of minimum wage jobs with no health care, no pensions, no benefits of any kind, so workers have every right to protest and say wait a minute, we don’t want to have to go to work in those jobs at those wages. But if the wages get increased and we can force employers to provide a minimal level of benefits for them, then people are willing to go to work. People need to work. Everybody needs to work. Everybody needs a job, not just some people. That kind of political line – 'immigrants do the jobs that nobody else is willing to do' – is a way of currying favor with right-wing politicians, but if you’re an unemployed worker living in West Oakland or South Chicago, that’s a slap in the face. It’s like saying you’re not willing to work. But at what wage? It’s also excusing employers for lowering conditions and wages rather than trying to force them to improve them. Again, this same line is generally used as an excuse for promoting guest worker programs, and it is something that employers are always happy to hear.

PA: Let’s talk about that. Terms like 'amnesty' and 'guest worker program' came into public discourse last year, and were often used as political cudgels to bludgeon Democratic candidates who didn’t share the xenophobic views of Republican lawmakers. What do people need to really know about amnesty and what a guest worker program is? What would be an ideal policy that addresses the problems people are seriously concerned about?

DB: Amnesty is actually a very good word. It is a mistake to look at it as being a word which has a connotation of having violated the law or having committed a crime, because what amnesty really means in the context of the debate around immigration reform is that people who don’t have legal documents are going to be able to get essentially permanent residence here. This is what the amnesty program in the 1986 law did. It said that people who were living in the United States as of January 1, 1982 would be able to apply for and get green cards, that is permanent residence visas. A permanent residence visa still doesn’t give you exactly equal status with everyone else around you, but it goes a long ways towards that. It also makes it possible for people to eventually become citizens and acquire political rights.

Amnesty means something specific, as opposed to 'legalization,' which is another term that was batted around last year. Legalization can mean pretty much anything. Legalization was often interpreted last year to mean a guest worker program. In other words, a way of getting legal status was to be forced to enroll as a contract worker or guest worker under a temporary, work-related visa. This would make you 'legal.' Amnesty doesn’t do that. Amnesty means that you are going to be legal now that you are in the country, and that your lack of documents will be forgiven and that you will get regular legal status and a normal green card.

So amnesty is a good word. That’s why the right wing and the Republicans, with the aid of Democrats and employers, tried to turn it into a bad one. What they really wanted was not amnesty. They did not want green cards. They wanted temporary worker programs in which large employers were allowed to recruit workers outside the US and bring them in under temporary visas, in which a person’s ability to stay in the country would be tied to employment and their guest worker contract. That’s what a guest worker program means. It gives employers a huge hammer to hold over the head of workers, because by depriving somebody of their job or by laying them off, the employer deprives them of their right to stay in the country. That’s a lot of leverage to hold over a worker’s head. It can make people fearful about exercising their rights, joining unions, trying to enforce legal protections, and so forth. One of the ways of disguising and covering up this bitter and exploitative reality was to give it a nice name. The nice name was legalization, but at the same time those same people were saying amnesty is a dirty word. Well, of course they would say this, because amnesty would mean that people would not have to become contract laborers in order to stay in the United States. They’d simply be given green cards. It is really important to look at the actual meaning as well as the political meaning of these terms, instead of just reacting to them as hot-button kinds of issues.

I also think that this is a case in which, as they often do, the Democrats ran scared, instead of standing up and saying, wait a minute, let’s look at what this word means. Let’s look at what we want for people. Let’s look at what our values are. We want equality. We want people to be able to defend their rights. In order to do that people need permanent status here or at least have the option of having permanent status in the United States. Therefore, we need to be in favor of programs that get them that, not the guest worker programs that are going to turn people into a semi-slave workforce for large corporations. There were a few Democrats that got up there and said that. Sheila Jackson-Lee said that. Barbara Lee said that. But an awful lot of Democrats got confused and ran scared when the right wing tried to turn amnesty into a dirty word. It reminds me of when they did the same thing with the word 'liberal' and 'card-carrying member of the ACLU,' and tried to turn support for civil rights into a negative thing instead of a positive one. That’s what the right wing does all the time anyway. To change this situation requires that the political representatives that working people elect need to have some values and the courage of their convictions.

We need to have good criteria by which we look at proposals for immigration reform. We need to stop just reacting to these media-crafted sound bites and look at what the proposals actually say, and then we can have some criteria by which we judge which are the ones we should support and which ones we shouldn’t. There are two most important criteria in my mind. One is equality. We need to continue to move forward toward social, political, and economic equality in this country in general, for all people. Immigration proposals need to do this too. We need to make sure that people aren’t driven into a status because of immigration laws which prevents them from exercising their rights, or which gives them fewer political rights than the people in the community around them. This is a form of Jim Crow that’s been around for a long time. Immigration laws have been used this way from the very beginning. They still are, and we need to stop that. That’s one criterion: Do the proposals we are hearing advance the cause of equality or not?

The second criterion is ensuring the ability of people to organize. We need to make sure that we are making it as easy as possible for people to organize to pursue their own advancement as people, whether it’s by organizing unions for raising wages or demonstrating for drivers’ licenses. Where we have laws that make people more vulnerable, we need to oppose them. For instance, the employer sanctions provisions of immigration law that say it’s illegal for an employer to hire workers that don’t have papers. When you look at what exists on the ground, you find out that this is a law that essentially makes it illegal for somebody who doesn’t have papers to hold a job. It therefore makes it hard for such people to defend their rights and organize. From an organizing point of view, we need to get rid of that law. This isn’t something that punishes employers; let’s not get fooled by the language of it. Look at the reality of it. It is used as a way of punishing workers when they try to organize themselves. We need to get rid of it. We shouldn’t put that kind of obstacle in front of workers. We should need to make it easy for people to exercise their rights and organize, rather than making it difficult. That’s in the self-interest of everybody, not just for immigrants but anybody who works and wants to organize a union. You want to see labor laws that defend the right to organize enforced whether you are Black, white, Brown, red or purple. You need to make sure that the other people around you have as easy a time organizing as possible. That’s in your own self-interest. That’s another criterion we need to use.

I have no doubt, because I have seen it happen over and over again, that people will organize even when they don’t have rights. People will organize in the most adverse circumstance and take risks that you really admire them for taking. But we need to make the playing field as level as possible, rather than increasing the obstacles and barriers against people.

We need to figure out how to unite people across race lines, nationality lines, all these fault lines that exist in our society. How do we make it possible for people to find their common interests? For instance: It’s not really possible to have pro-worker, pro-immigrant reform of immigration law without talking about the need for a full employment economy. We need to push again for things like the Humphrey-Hawkins bill and laws that require the federal government to adopt policies that ensure that unemployment gets reduced, effectively speaking, to zero in our society. Because it’s unemployment, in large part, that pits working people against each other. That’s one of the major things. We need to figure out how to promote employment. To the extent we do that, we make it a lot easier to also talk about immigration and the social status of the people who are here doing the work. In a full-employment economy with secure, well-paid union-wage jobs, the problem would not be nearly as threatening as it now looks to people who are out of work and searching for jobs, or afraid of losing the jobs they have, and who see the next worker over as somebody who’s competing against them. The common-ground question is this: What is going to bring immigrants together with native-born people? What is going to bring Black and white people together, and Chicanos, Asian and Native American people together?

The common-ground question involves a lot of different factors. It’s not just about jobs and economics. A lot of it has to do with culture. People need to be able to express their own culture and their own identity as people, whether it is speaking Spanish or the indigenous languages of Latin America, ensuring that the historical contributions of slaves and African Americans are respected in our school system, or fighting against the stereotypes of everything from the 'welfare queen' to the immigrant willing to accept any conditions as long as they have a job. All of these kinds of cultural questions are really important parts of finding common ground too. We have to be willing to stand up for the cultural rights of everybody in this country, rather than saying that we have one official culture and everybody else’s culture is somehow inferior, and that they are second-class people who don’t have a right to exercise their cultural and democratic rights.

--Reach us with your comments at