Search results for ""Author David Bacon""
University of California Press In the Fields of the North / En los campos del norte
In this landmark work of photo-journalism, activist and photographer David Bacon documents the experiences of some of the hardest-working and most disenfranchised laborers in the country: the farmworkers who are responsible for making California "America's breadbasket." Combining haunting photographs with the voices of migrant farmworkers, Bacon offers three-dimensional portraits of laborers living under tarps, in trailer camps, and between countries, following jobs that last only for the harvesting season. He uncovers the inherent abuse in the labor contractor work system, and drives home the almost feudal nature of laboring in America's fields. Told in both English and Spanish, these are the stories of farmworkers exposed to extreme weather and pesticides, injured from years of working bent over for hours at a time, and treated as cheap labor. The stories in this book remind us that the food that appears on our dinner tables is the result of back-breaking labor, rampant exploitation, and powerful resilience.
£27.00
University of California Press The Children of NAFTA: Labor Wars on the U.S./Mexico Border
Food, televisions, computer equipment, plumbing supplies, clothing. Much of the material foundation of our everyday lives is produced along the U.S./Mexico border in a world largely hidden from our view. Based on gripping firsthand accounts, this book investigates the impact of the North American Free Trade Agreement on those who labor in the agricultural fields and maquiladora factories on the border. Journalist David Bacon paints a powerful portrait of poverty, repression, and struggle, offering a devastating critique of NAFTA in the most pointed and in-depth examination of border workers published to date. Unlike journalists who have made brief excursions into strawberry fields and maquiladoras, Bacon has more than a decade's experience reporting on the ground at the border, and he has developed sustained relationships with scores of workers and organizers who have entrusted him with their stories. He describes harsh conditions of child labor in the Mexicali Valley, the deplorable housing outside factories in cities such as Tijuana, and corporate retaliation faced by union organizers. He finds that, despite the promises of its backers, NAFTA has locked in a harsh neoliberal economic policy that has swept away laws and protections that Mexican workers had established over decades. More than a showcase for NAFTA's victims, this book traces the emergence of a new social consciousness, telling how workers in Mexico, the United States, and Canada are now beginning to join together in a powerful new strategy of cross-border organizing as they search for economic and social justice.
£20.70
Cornell University Press Communities without Borders: Images and Voices from the World of Migration
When we finally arrived at my brother's house in the United States, I thought about how far I was from home in Mexico. I looked back, saw the sun setting, and thought about my father and what he might be doing. I thought, 'Why did I come so far, and how am I going to return?' Before I left my father asked me why I wanted to leave. He said he thought we would never see each other again. My brother told him not to worry and that he would return me in a year.... He was right, because we never did.—Irma Luna recalls her experience of migration, from Communities without Borders In his stunning work of photojournalism and oral history, David Bacon documents the new reality of migrant experience: the creation of transnational communities. Today's indigenous migrants don't simply move from one point to another but create new communities all along the northern road from Guatemala through Mexico into the United States, connected by common culture and history. Drawing on his experience as a photographer and a journalist and also as a former labor organizer, Bacon portrays the lives of the people who migrate between Guatemala and Mexico and the United States. He takes us inside these communities and illuminates the ties that bind them together, the influence of their working conditions on their families and health, and their struggle for better lives. Bacon portrays in photographs and their own words Mixtec and Triqui migrants in Oaxaca, Baja California, and California; Guatemalan migrants in Huehuetenango and Nebraska; miners and indigenous communities in Sonora and Arizona; and veterans of the bracero program of the 1940s and 1950s. Bacon's interviews with this first wave of guest workers are especially relevant in light of the current political focus on guest-worker programs as a model for reforming immigration, an approach with which Bacon strongly disagrees. Throughout Communities without Borders, Bacon emphasizes the social movements migrants organize to improve their own working conditions and the well-being of their enclaves. U.S. border policy treats undocumented immigrants as an aggregation of individuals, ignoring the social pressures that force whole communities to move and the networks of families and hometowns that sustain them on their journeys. Communities without Borders makes an urgent appeal for understanding the human reality that should inform our national debate over immigration.
£2,703.32
