FILM IN HINDE, UNIVERSITY UNION 3 PM
KEYNOTE SPEAKER AT GUY WEST PLAZA David Bacon, Free. 5:30 PM
as a part of the Farm to Fork celebration. Sept 13.
"When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. . . They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people."
-Donald Trump, June 16, 2015
In the Fields of the
North/ En Los Campos del Norte by David Bacon
Univerity
of California Press, 2017
Reviewed
by Duane Campbell
“We are not animals. We are human beings.”
In
an impressive and important new book, David
Bacon effectively counters the racism and xenophobia advanced by our current
president and promoted in right-wing media by providing hundreds of photos and
clear descriptions of the real life and work of the immigrants harvesting the
food we eat.
Bacon
does so by interviewing farmworkers and photographing farmworkers in their
“housing” and in their work. He reports and records the humanity of the
thousands of people who come north to harvest our crops and to feed their
families as best they can.
Photojournalist
David Bacon has a long history of documenting the lives of immigrant people,
including the important books:, Illegal People: How Globalization creates
migration and criminalizes immigrants. (2008) and The Right to Stay Home: How US Policy Drives Mexican Migration
(Beacon Press, 2013), as well as a long list of journal
articles.
In
The Fields of the North, Bacon uses
his extensive and award-winning photography to tell more of the story. This is
not just a book with some photos, but
rather a series of extended photo essays (with over 300 photos) showing that images and words have a combined
power far beyond either words or images by themselves. Bacon tells the story of
cycles of exploitation and poverty suffered by tens of thousands moving from
season to season, working in the fields to harvest our food for subminimum
wages, and facing the racism and political power of growers and their labor
contractors.
