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SOCIAL JUSTICE WRITING AND PHOTOGRAPHY – THE REALITY CHECK AND BEYOND
By David Bacon and John W. McKerley
a chapter in The Routledge Handbook of the Anthropology of Labor, Routledge 2022
https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-Handbook-of-the-Anthropology-of-Labor/Kasmir-Gill/p/book/9780367745509
https://davidbaconrealitycheck.blogspot.com/2022/11/social-justice-writing-and-photography.html

Part One of Two

As a non-anthropologist, I’ve spent many years doing social documentary work that is very similar to that of anthropologists, recording and editing oral histories and taking photographs.  The purpose of this work is to help document social reality as a participant in movements for social change.  In this article, I describe the reasons for beginning this work, and the cooperative relationships developed with social movement organizations, from unions to migrant rights organizations.  As I do this work I try to balance a commitment to the work itself – the aesthetics of photographs and the faithfulness and emotional power of narratives – and a commitment to producing work that has the power to move people and participate in using it to those ends.  The article, therefore, describes the personal journey of one person doing this work, in a way that may be relevant to the experience of others.

This article is the product of an oral history interview done by John W. McKerley, PhD, an oral historian at the Labor Center at the University of Iowa, and adjunct lecturer at the Center for Human Rights in the university’s College of Law.

Learning to organize

Being a union organizer was very good training for being a documentarian. The first union I went to work for was the Farm Workers Union and it was the beginning of my education, which is still going on.  I grew up in Oakland, raised in a left-wing family where I listened to Paul Robeson records and songs of the Spanish Civil War. I could probably sing Freiheit when I was six. So what did I know about life in rural areas or working in the fields or Mexicans or Chicanos or immigration or any of those things?  The workers in the union were my first teachers.

Coming from a union family, the idea of paying attention to what workers have to say was not a strange idea. But in the union I really had to do it. The first job I had in the UFW was as what we called a legal beagle. Your job was to go out and take statements from workers about why they had been fired, to support whatever organizing campaign the union was involved in. That forced me to learn Spanish really fast.  Translating for me was not high on the list of priorities for the union’s organizers.

But the workers were usually very helpful.  They would be patient and correct my crooked Spanish. People who will listen to you and don’t correct you are not helping you much. But this job also made me pay attention to them, to what they had to say. Initially my questions were utilitarian.  «What were the circumstances under which you got fired?  What did the foreman say? What happened before and after?»  But to be good at it, you had to do what I call social investigation.

So I had to try to understand who the people were, especially because my background was different from theirs. The union threw me into this and made me learn about their culture in a lot of different ways. Since you were paid $5 a week plus room and board, very quickly people clued you in that the time to visit people at home was dinnertime because they’d feed you. So I learned how to cook the way the workers did, along with the language.

After the years with the UFW I went to work in a factory, with the idea of organizing a union.  It was a huge factory – National Semiconductor – with 10,000 people in the plant.  It was fascinating to see the process of making semiconductors and integrated circuits. But the people who worked in there were even more interesting. I could see right away the stratification of the workforce – Filipina and Chicanos and Latina women on the bottom, with the jobs getting more male and whiter as you went up.  I began learning more about Filipino culture, which I’d started to learn about in the farmworkers union.  It eventually led to meeting a woman I later married, the daughter of Filipino farm workers.

What I’m getting at is that union organizing and workplace activism in general makes you a good listener. You have to learn how to listen, and listening is complicated.  It’s not just hearing the words, it’s trying to really understand what people are telling you, and asking questions to elicit someone’s world. On the one hand, I want to get the raw material of people’s experience. It’s often very colorful and can be very moving emotionally, giving you a vision into somebody’s world. But I also want to understand how people analyze that world.

I reject the idea that the function of workers is to provide raw material, while some smart academic is going to come along later and explain what it all means. That is a very patronizing way of looking at workers. So workplace activity and union organizing is good training for that as well too. You want to understand what happens to people and see how they change it.

You want people to tell you the story of their lives, really.  A good oral history session can go on for three or four hours, if the opportunity is there. I’ll go all the way back to, «Okay, who are your mother and father, and what did they do and where do you come from? And all the rest of the way until today.»  Part of the challenge is to get that story and be sensitive to how people are telling it to you, so that you know when you come upon something important. Sometimes you have to  pull the story out of people. You have to see that it’s there and then ask questions to get them to tell you.. But many times it’s as though people have been waiting for the chance to tell it.

By the time we get to the end I want to know, «What do you think about it all?  What does justice mean to you?»  That’s a real common David Bacon question. «If you think that the world is an unfair place, what’s unfair about it? And what do you think it should be? And how would you go about changing it?» That started with that first training, interviewing fired workers.  Usually by the time we finish, people have already been talking about these questions in terms of their own lives.

I want people to analyze their own world because I learn from it. One of the most important concepts that I’ve learned in the last 20 years came from meetings of the Frente Indigena de Organizaciones Binacionales, an organization of indigenous migrants from Mexico. I got to know those people 20 years ago as a photographer. I would go to their meetings and take pictures and give them the pictures and listen, interviewing people and recording oral histories. They’re people migrating from communities in Oaxaca, essentially economically displaced people. It’s become so hard to survive that they have no alternative but to leave to find work somewhere else. They look for work elsewhere in Mexico, and then cross the border to look here in the United States.