[ In More Than a Wall / Más que un Muro, labor journalist David
Bacon offers a politically rich, bilingual compilation of photographs
and oral histories. Corporations know no borders, while they rely on
the US-Mexico border to keep wages low...]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

THE PHOTOGRAPHS OF THE BORDER  
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Aviva Chomsky
August 11, 2022
The Nation
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_ In More Than a Wall / Más que un Muro, labor journalist David
Bacon offers a politically rich, bilingual compilation of photographs
and oral histories. Corporations know no borders, while they rely on
the US-Mexico border to keep wages low... _

Families at the US-Mexico border wall in Tijuana, Baja California,
2017., Photo courtesy of David Bacon // The Nation

 

“We died in your hills, we died in your deserts, / We died in your
valleys and died on your plains. / We died ’neath your trees and we
died in your bushes, / Both sides of the river, we died just the
same,” Woody Guthrie sang in his 1948 classic “Deportee” (also
known as “Plane Wreck at Los Gatos”). While Guthrie’s song
referred to the _bracero_ guest workers imported for California’s
harvests between World War II and the 1960s, the _bracero_ program
was just one incarnation of the uses of the US-Mexico border.

MORE THAN A WALL / MÁS QUE UN MURO
By David Bacon 
Bilingual text English/Spanish
Published by the Colegio de la Frontera Norte
440 pages, 357 photographs
Paperbackbook:  $35.00
Order here
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Colegio de la Frontera Norte
In_ More Than a Wall / Más que un Muro_, labor journalist and
documentary photographer David Bacon offers a lavishly illustrated and
politically rich bilingual compilation of photographs and oral
histories (as well as Bacon’s own historical and interpretive text)
that serves as a fitting update to Guthrie’s song. Many people are
still dying in all those places, on both sides of the river/border,
and not by chance. Their deaths are the result of the arbitrary and
exploitative nature of US-Mexico relations, which pulses through the
volume’s narratives and photographs. Corporations know no borders,
while they (and US consumers) rely on the US-Mexico border to keep
wages low and their profits and US consumption soaring. Mexican
institutions collaborate with this system. The expensive and elaborate
apparatus of immigration law, border enforcement, detention, and
deportation serves to keep Mexicans and other Latin American
immigrants working, hard and long, at the margins of the global
economy.

But many are also fighting back, organizing and creating webs of
solidarity, love, and hope that offer glimpses of a more just world
for us all. As maquiladora worker Omar Gil tells Bacon in the book,
“Nothing will ever change if we just sit on our hands. You have to
keep trying and trying.”

A central theme examined in _More Than a Wall / Más que un Muro_ is
the similarity of the environmental and social issues that people on
both sides of the border face in their struggles to survive and better
their conditions. “The border region,” Bacon reflects, “is
actually a single, very complex social fabric. Through it runs the
borderline, with its walls. But a wall cannot completely divide and
separate the people and communities living here.”

The wall, Bacon explains in a section of the book on the physical
aspects of the barrier, “is not just geography, or a wall, or a
river. It is a passage of fire, an ordeal that must be survived in
order to send money from work in the United States back to a hungry
family, to find children and relatives…or to flee an environment
that has become too dangerous to bear.” He documents the absurd
nature of the structure, its deadly consequences, and the lives of
those caught in the web of deportation, separated from jobs and
families and surviving on the streets of Tijuana and other border
towns.

Those who remain on the Mexican side of the border are also workers in
the transnational economy, “a huge part of the industrial workforce,
in the production and supply chain that delivers products to U.S.
consumers.” The book’s second section, titled “Border
Rebellions,” begins in Tijuana, where the maquiladora industry
mushroomed as the drastic wage differential, the North American Free
Trade Agreement, and company-friendly unions attracted export-oriented
multinationals to the city. The Mexican side of the border is poisoned
by the toxins of the farms and factories that exploit the flexible
environmental regulation and lax enforcement on that side of the wall.

Bacon brings together the photographs he took during an early labor
struggle in the Han Young factory as the workers sought to build an
independent union and raise wages there. Tijuana became a battleground
over the following decades, and the activism there inspired solidarity
on both sides of the border. “When those efforts were defeated, as
they often were, blacklisted workers, or simply workers who’d lost
hope for change, found their place in the huge waves of people
crossing the border,” Bacon writes.

_More Than a Wall / Más que un Muro_ also examines the ways in which
what happens on the border impacts the rest of Mexico, from the rural
villages that many of the migrants came from, to the larger cities and
export-oriented industrial farms that have taken over the border
region. In these interconnected spaces, workers and migrants organize
struggles that go beyond the workplace: struggles for housing, for
land, for health care and education, and for what the Binational Front
of Indigenous Organizations calls “the right not to migrate.” For
the FIOB, this means the struggle for “a government and political
system that responds to indigenous communities, to farmers, and to
other workers.” With chapters in remote Indigenous communities, in
the export-oriented farms and maquiladoras near the border, and in
California, the FIOB confronts the same global forces that affect
migrants and non-migrants. Border barrios with names like Derechos
Humanos and Fuerza y Libertad reflect how the workers’ struggles are
also tied to other regional leftist organizations and parties,
including the revolutionary Zapatista autonomous communities in
Chiapas.

Perusing the photographs in _More Than a Wall / Más que un
Muro_ feels like entering a museum exhibit in which visual items,
arresting in and of themselves, take on new layers of meaning and
understanding when explained by the captions that accompany them. In
this case, the images and captions are interwoven with first-person
testimonies and with Bacon’s analysis and reflections on his life as
an activist photojournalist. Even the way that the English and Spanish
versions of the text are laid out on the page draws the reader into
the tangled threads that connect the two sides of the border. Some
pages put the two languages in side-by-side columns, others on
side-by-side pages.

The haunting black-and-white images of migrant workers, families, and
especially children call to mind the early-20th-century and
Depression-era photographs by Lewis Hine, Dorothea Lange, and Walker
Evans. But Bacon’s photographs are not about some distant past. The
captions, text, and oral histories make it clear: The labor
exploitation, poverty, violence, and repression are a product of
neoliberal free trade. Furthermore, the book’s focus is on struggle,
mobilization, and resistance as much as it is on human suffering.
Photographing protests, Bacon insists, “helps reinforce the idea
that people can fight…and the images can be and are used to inspire
people in other places to organize their own efforts to stop this
inhumane system.”

For all its impact in the public and even the policy sphere, Dorothea
Lange’s most famous photograph, _Migrant Mother_, was clearly the
work of an outsider rather than a participant. The subject of the
picture herself protested
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years later, that the photographer had taken the picture and used it
without her permission and without speaking to her, and had both
invented and erased details of her life—one of the latter being that
she was Native American. Bacon’s relationship to his subjects is
different: He has been an active participant in these communities and
their struggles over the course of many decades, and he uses his
photography as a tool for organizing.

While it feels almost petty to quibble with a work as stunning and
powerful as this one, there are two thorny issues that I wish Bacon
had developed further. While he clearly critiques Mexico’s
officialist unions and their failure to protect or represent workers,
he is gentler on US unions, including the AFL-CIO and United Farm
Workers, whose histories are, to say the least, complicated. The
AFL-CIO and even, to a lesser extent, the UFW were slow to support the
full rights of immigrant—and especially undocumented—workers, and
the AFL-CIO continues to this day to align its foreign policy agenda
with that of the State Department, rather than fostering democratic
debate in the organization about what a real pro-labor global order
would look like. Bacon highlights instead their also-real moments of
solidarity and support for migrant workers and their struggles.

I would also have liked to see more about the lives and struggles of
Indigenous peoples on and north of the border. The photographs and
testimonies delve deeply into the experiences of Mexico’s
Indigenous, their reasons for migration, and the complicated histories
of exploitation, racism, and marginalization, but I would have loved
to see a comparable acknowledgment of the complexities of Indigenous
communities north of the border and how these histories intersect. A
section on Joaquín Murrieta, for example, follows a classic Chicano
nationalist narrative that posits mestizo “Mexicans” as the
descendants of the Southwest’s original inhabitants, eliding the
presence of the region’s Indigenous peoples. The Chicano narrative
emphasizes that “Mexicans coming north today as immigrants are
returning to a land from which most Mexicans were expelled a century
and a half ago.” Theirs is “a history of dispossession,” Bacon
writes. Yes, but much of that land was “Mexican” in name only,
since the majority of the population consisted of unconquered
Indigenous peoples to whom the Spanish, Mexicans, and Anglos all
brought waves of conquest and dispossession, and whose descendants
still inhabit the border region to this day.

Despite these lacunae, it is hard to deny the significance of this
book. Bacon’s descriptions and images of the human and environmental
devastation caused by industrial agriculture, mining, and maquiladora
production on both sides of the border, and his careful documentation
of those resisting this devastation, are powerful and moving. They
also echo the rhetorical questions that Guthrie asked in his song’s
haunting last stanza: “Is this the best way we can grow our big
orchards? / Is this the best way we can grow our good fruit?”

As the former UFW president Arturo Rodriguez put it: “The wealth of
the agricultural industry has been built on top of the suffering of
generations of farmworkers, from direct abuses in the fields to
degradation of the land and environment.” Bacon’s _More Than a
Wall / Más que un Muro_ is a clarion call to witness, to denounce
injustice, and to fight for change.

_[Aviva Chomsky is a professor of history and the coordinator of Latin
American studies at Salem State University in Massachusetts. Her most
recent book is Undocumented: How Immigration Became Illegal
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Press, 2014).]_

_Copyright c 2022 The Nation. Reprinted with permission. May not be
reprinted without permission
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Distributed by PARS International Corp
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* border
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* border wall
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* Immigration
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* migration
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* US-Mexico border
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* U.S.-Mexico relations
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* corporate profits
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* immigration law
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* Latin American migrants
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* maquiladoras
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* transnational economy
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* labor journalism
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* Photography
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