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 BordersIn 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.

About the Author :
David Bacon is a photojournalist based in Berkeley, California. He is the author of The Children of NAFTA. Carlos Muñoz Jr. is Professor Emeritus of Chicano Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Douglas Harper, founding editor of the journal Visual Sociology, has published several visual ethnographies, most recently Changing Works: Visions of a Lost Agriculture.

Review :
"Longtime labor organizer and talented photojournalist Bacon presents this loving tribute to Latin American labor migrants to the United States, in their own words. These migrants, Bacon effectively reminds readers, are individuals struggling to survive and support families and communities, not mere stats, legal problems, or political controversies. Highly recommended."-Choice, October 2007 "Communities without Borders is a beautiful and powerful, but disturbing book. The two forwards, written by Carlos Munoz Jr. and Douglas Harper, focused, respectively, on the book's text and photographs, nicely frame Bacon's twin achievements resulting from the more than three years of fieldwork he began in 2000. He has poignantly captured through prose and image the stark beauty, fierce determination, and pride of U.S./Mexico/Guatemala transnational communities and the ravages of exploitation wrought upon them."-W. Warner Wood, Anthropology of Work Review "David Bacon is a nonfiction Steinbeck, the foremost documentarist of the great human drama of the borderlands."-Mike Davis, author of Planet of Slums "Communities without Borders provides powerful images and stories of the immigrant experience in Guatemala, Mexico, and the United States. This is a timely work that contributes to our understanding of the impact of globalization, the human dimension of migration, and the poignant struggles of working people. It is an important book for labor and community leaders, for scholars and students, and for all who care about social justice."-Kent Wong, UCLA "David Bacon demonstrates remarkable breadth, insight, and creativity through his diverse documentary photography, oral history, and writing. The story he tells of migration communities-and the stories he lets those communities tell through their own eloquent words, on their own terms-is one of universal importance grounded in the specifics of a range of experiences. This book stands as a model for careful and responsible documentary work and provides much-needed depth and nuance to one of the central issues of our time."-Tom Rankin, Director, Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University