Communities Without Borders: Images and Voices from the World of Migration (review)

Photographer and journalist David Bacon introduces the people of his narrative with events of 1982, when Guatemalan troops armed with "Armalite rifles, gifts of U.S. president Ronald Reagan" (xiii), threatened the small city of Huehuetenango, causing families to flee. Simultaneously, migrant farm workers in Oaxaca struck out against growers and government authorities. These displaced and hungry laborers—indigenous Mams, Qanjobales, Mixtec, Zapotec, and Triqui—moved north, crossing the U.S. Mexico border to form new communities in Nebraska, Los Angeles, and Florida. During a three-year period, from 2000 to 2003, Bacon photographed and collected oral histories from these indigenous peoples, many of whom became activists in immigration civil rights. He intersperses the pictures and histories with contextual notes and observations. The underlying theme, as historian Carlos Muñoz, Jr. describes in the "Foreword on the Text," is that these forced migrants have "created transnational communities enabling them to maintain their ties to their homelands and to survive as unwelcome 'foreigners' in their ancestor's lands, now known as the United States" (ix).

Bacon, too, is an immigrant rights activist, having participated for 25 years in political and social activities with People United for Human Rights, the Northern California Coalition for Immigrant Rights, the Labor Immigrant Organizers Network, and other unions and community organizations. His bias is apparent throughout the text.

Communities without Borders reads like a call to action. In Muñoz' observation of the March 24, 2006 march for immigrants and civil rights, he likens the passion of protest against "anti-immigrant congressional legislation" to the civil rights movements of the 1960s. Douglas Harper, founding editor of the journal Visual Sociology and author of "Foreword on the Photography," douses his commentary with depressing adjectives: political repression, shameful, exasperation, frustration, abandoned, deserted, grim, forlorn, tedium, and pain; the terms exploited, makeshift, and discarded each appear twice—and these are all on his first page. Harper closes his commentary by noting that Communities without Borders "will no doubt teach Northerners some global realities they need to know better" and "inspire those of the South to continue their struggle" (xii).

Bacon is no less an advocate. In promoting political and social rights for immigrants, he purports that "U.S. democracy is based on the idea that those who make economic contributions should have political rights" (xvii). He concludes there can only be disaster if migrants are denied opportunities to build communities and contribute to society. Bacon provides examples of indigenous people willing to do both.

No indication is provided for the methodology behind the interviews. The most information we are given is the time period in which the oral histories were taken and one sentence stating that the names were changed for some of the undocumented interviewees (xxiii). There is no information about the existence of a repository, and there is no index or appendix to follow up with scholarly annotations.

Communities without Borders is divided into four sections: "Globalizing Farm Labor," "Transforming Nebraska," "Miners and Mayos," and "Braceros and Guest Workers." Dozens of black and white, full-page photos of people at work or in their community fill the bulk of the pages. The images are intriguing, illustrating day-to-day struggles and joys, and portraying the full gamut of life, from traditional dancing to raising identification tags in a union vote.

Each of the four sections features several interviewees, ranging from seven to twenty-one, for a total of fifty-six narrative accounts. Their oral histories are prefaced with a brief description of the person doing the talking. A first-person narrative follows, usually one or two pages in length. Seldom is the reader informed of the questions that prompt the narrative; rather, it is as though the narrator just started talking. Each of the narratives is a fully rounded story, following literary conventions with a beginning, middle, and end. The narrators do not backtrack, correct themselves, or even...