More than a Wall

 

THE PHOTOGRAPHS OF THE BORDER By Aviva Chomsky The Nation, 8/11/22 https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/david-bacon-more-than-a-wall/ In More Than a Wall / Más que un Muro, labor journalist David Bacon offers a politically rich, bilingual compilation of photographs and oral histories. Review of MORE THAN A WALL / MAS QUE UN MURO By David Bacon Colegio de la Frontera Norte, 2022 440pp.  $35  order here Families at the US-Mexico border wall in Tijuana, Baja California, 2017. (Courtesy of David Bacon) "We died in your hills, we died in your deserts, / We died in your valleys and died on your plains. / We died 'neath your trees and we died in your bushes, / Both sides of the river, we died just the same," Woody Guthrie sang in his 1948 classic "Deportee" (also known as "Plane Wreck at Los Gatos"). While Guthrie's song referred to the bracero guest workers imported for California's harvests between World War II and the 1960s, the bracero program was just one incarnation of the uses of the US-Mexico border. In More Than a Wall / Más que un Muro, labor journalist and documentary photographer David Bacon offers a lavishly illustrated and politically rich bilingual compilation of photographs and oral histories (as well as Bacon's own historical and interpretive text) that serves as a fitting update to Guthrie's song. Many people are still dying in all those places, on both sides of the river/border, and not by chance. Their deaths are the result of the arbitrary and exploitative nature of US-Mexico relations, which pulses through the volume's narratives and photographs. Corporations know no borders, while they (and US consumers) rely on the US-Mexico border to keep wages low and their profits and US consumption soaring. Mexican institutions collaborate with this system. The expensive and elaborate apparatus of immigration law, border enforcement, detention, and deportation serves to keep Mexicans and other Latin American immigrants working, hard and long, at the margins of the global economy.