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SOCIAL JUSTICE WRITING AND PHOTOGRAPHY – THE REALITY CHECK AND BEYOND – PART TWO
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
http://davidbaconrealitycheck.blogspot.com/2022/11/social-justice-writing-and-photography_17.html

Part Two of Two

Read part one here: http://davidbaconrealitycheck.blogspot.com/2022/11/social-justice-writing-and-photography.html

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 from indigenous migrants

I then developed this work in my experience among people coming up from Oaxaca. Their culture is how they survive, as a community. Oaxacans coming to the United States face a very hostile situation, socially and politically. A lot of racism, which people face in Mexico as well. So they don’t survive just as individuals. People survive because of their ability to hang together as a community.

I began realizing this long before, when I left working for the United Farm Workers Union to work in the fields for a year.  There I first met people from Oaxaca speaking indigenous languages.  The workers in my crew cutting cauliflower wanted to organize a work stoppage at one point, in order to force the company to give us back the whetstones we used to sharpen our knives. We went to this group of Oaxacan migrants we were working with.  They would all eat together, and hang out as a group speaking a language we didn’t know – Mixteco, I’m sure. When we asked them to participate in our planned action, we couldn’t ask them as individuals. They said, «Okay, we’ll go talk about it, and we’ll let you know.» So they went and talked about it, and then came back and agreed, and we had our small strike and won it.

It was obvious they had a collective culture. When I began working as a as a writer and photographer, beginning to get to know this community, it was very easy to see the way culture helped people to stay together. That culture consists of different things. Some are wonderful for photographers. Each town people come from has its own dance, and its own costumes. They have festivals in which they dance the dances and they’re beautiful.  Because of  the migration process we have more of those Oaxacan dance festivals in California than they do in Oaxaca now. There are a lot of other enjoyable things about Oaxacan indigenous culture – the food, the music.  And they taught me about that.

The way people organize themselves is also part of culture. One of the first people I interviewed was Rufino Dominguez, who died several years ago.  Not long afterwards I wrote a political biography for his organization, the Frente Indigena de Organizaciones Binacionales, which was published on the Food First website. I was very interested in where Rufino’s political ideas came from – his roots in the Mexican left, in liberation theology and the indigenous history and traditions of his own home town.

Rufino was the first person I interviewed in depth among Mixtecos here, and I interviewed him a number of times over his life.  He realized from the very beginning that I really didn’t know much of anything, and that he was going to have to teach me in order for us to have a relationship.