FILM IN HINDE, UNIVERSITY UNION 3 PM
KEYNOTE SPEAKER AT GUY WEST PLAZA David Bacon, Free. 5:30 PM
as a part of the campus 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.
