Transcriber: Jenny Lam-Chowdhury Reviewer: Denise RQ
As a child growing up in the south of the United States,
I saw many social divisions and contradictions.
And this upset me.
So, I started to explore my community, my city, with my camera
in order to try to make some sense out of these contradictions.
As I grew older, I saw photojournalism
as a powerful means to participate in society
and to engage in important social issues through images.
Cross-border migration became an important theme
that I cared about deeply.
Working in south Florida in the early 90s,
I met hundreds of immigrants.
It concerned me
that they were often portrayed in the media just as statistics,
and not as individuals simply trying to better their lives
or build vibrant communities.
I wanted to know more about them.
I wanted to understand what motivated their decisions to immigrate
and how their lives really changed once they came to the US.
Thanks to a chance meeting with one Mexican girl,
16 years ago,
I've had the opportunity to document one piece of the immigration puzzle.
This is Marisol.
I met her in the municipal dump in Matamoros, Mexico,
across the border from Brownsville, Texas, in 1996.
She was 8 years old.
It was a scorching hot August afternoon.
I was with a group of radical activists nuns
who wanted to show me the most toxic places along the border.
With thousands of flies, and smoke from the burning garbage,
we met Marison and her mother Eloisa.
They've found hundreds of dead animals in the dump.
One day they found a human corpse and a fetus in a jar.
They invited me to stay with them in their home.
Eloisa told me how desperately
she wanted a different life for her children.
She hated exposing them to the garbage.
I returned several months later to try to find them,
to see how they were doing, but they were gone.
Their father, a legal US farm worker,
had come home and decided they should all move to Florida,
where they can pick strawberries.
I tracked them down and found them on their first day of school in the US.
They were all together at last.
The children had more space to play,
but they complained that their house was infested with rats,
and it was too small for a family of 12.
Eloisa was miserable and wanted to return to Mexico,
but her husband said no.
They decided to stay in Texas, where Eloisa had sisters.
At first glance, their lives appear to be fine.
But behind closed doors,
Marisol and her sisters witness the bitter divorce of their parents.
My access to photograph at this time became very difficult
due to the high tension in the family.
So, I decide to end the story with this picture:
of Marisol's sister, Cristina.
I thought it was a picture of two girls making friends,
despite their differences
and despite the borders that used to separate them,
but Cristina later told me,
"Oh, that's Mary, her parents won't allow her to play in our yard
because we are Mexicans."
In 2003, a German magazine called me
and asked me if I can please try to find Marisol again.
I managed to find her in Texas.
She had learned English, and she wanted to be a lawyer,
or an artist, or a computer teacher.
She was determined to finish high school, so she wouldn't have to suffer
the life her sister Sandra had with many pregnancies and poverty.
One of Sandra's partner was thrown in jail.
After a long court battle,
Child Protection Services revoked Sandra's parenting rights
and took all of her children.
Around the same time, bankers evicted Eloisa and her daughters
from the only place they knew as "home".
The American dream seemed to be slipping away.
Marisol pressed on, trying to make sense out of being a teenager.
At 16 she changed her attitude towards me.
After this picture, she said she no longer wanted me to take photos.
After two years of thinking whatever happened to Marisol,
it began to [annoyed] me.
So, I finally jumped on a plane
and decided to go look for her again in Texas.
I thought she would reject me, but instead she said,
"Why didn't you come sooner?"
She said she didn't want me to know about her pregnancy.
I was surprised to find her and meet her two-year old son, Carlos.
At 15, Marisol met a young immigrant named Andres.
Like so many immigrants I've met and worked with,
Andres sought not the American dream, but instead a Mexican dream:
To go back to his roots and live with his family
and try to make a decent living.
But first he needed to make more money in the US
to build his house in Mexico.
One night he spontaneously drove in caravan with friends to New Mexico
where they could obtain IDs.
Two of the young men died when a truck slid on the ice
and crashed into their car.
The funeral affected me on a visceral level.
I could fully understand the deep pain that parents face not knowing
if their immigrants sons and daughters will return to Mexico dead or alive.
In 2007, Andres tried to realize his Mexican dream.
He sent Marisol to his village to meet his parents,
so they can meet their grandson.
Marisol had obtained legal residency in the US,
and she can move freely between countries, going back and forth.
She barely ate for three weeks.
The village ladies decided that she must be pregnant,
and they were right.
Several months, after returning to the US,
Marisol gave birth to a daughter named Anahi.
Two years later, Andres wanted to move his family permanently to Mexico
in the house that he had built.
The inaugurated the visit by inviting the whole village
to an exciting baptism ceremony.
He hadn't been home in seven years.
Marisol didn't know about life in a small village
and she threatened to leave.
Andres begged her to stay but to no avail.
The couple returned to the US to have their third child, Luis.
With three children and unable to attend high school,
Marisol decided to work at the same truck wash with Andres.
Although the acids burned her face,
she enjoyed earning money and loved having independence.
They could afford this three-room trailer
and they can have fun birthday parties, from time to time.
A US doctor donated his services
so that Carlos could have the eye surgery he had needed since birth.
Occasionally, they splurge at the local cinema,
but usually entertainment meant going to Sandra's house to watch movies.
Their biological father made occasional appearances,
but for the most part, he remained estranged.
Taking the three children to Mexico on her own every summer
became a ritual for Marisol.
Carlos loved his grandparents
and told everyone he prefered Mexico over the US.
Marisol remained very bored in his village.
"The last thing I want", she said, "is to become like my mother-in-law
and have some men give me a bunch of seeds
and tell me to go plant them."
She remained torn and confused, and didn't know where she belonged.
In August of this year, Marisol called me in tears.
She and Andres had decided to divorce, and things were getting ugly.
He sent the police to take the children
and she was desperate to get them back.
Her lawyers demanded $5,000 up front, just to begin the case.
She spent her life savings and borrowed money from her brother
just to cover the fees.
Despite the break-up, she and Andres had to work at the same truck wash.
He eventually agreed to give the children back.
After the hearing, I visited Andres
and I found a man shattered by broken dreams.
Marisol seemed relieved, but bewildered,
to start her life over, again at 24.
Some people asked me,
"Why do you keep following the story for so long?"
Especially when there's hardly any funding for long term projects
about ordinary people.
And I answered them, "How could I've stopped?"
Marisol gave me a gift by allowing me to document her life over time.
She allowed me to tell a story about an important theme:
immigration and all of its complexities.
It's not black and white, it's very gray.
She allowed me to tell this story in a different way,
through a micro approach I can talk about a macro theme.
It is overwhelming for us to understand all sides of immigration,
but the first step is to care.
In-depth, long term projects should define journalism,
not sound bites, that teach us very little.
But there are many forces today in journalism
that discourage this process.
Lack of budget in newspapers and magazines
and a large part of society that craves
celebrity gossips, sensationalism, and instant gratification.
If we allow their influence to shape the media agenda,
we will find ourselves in an even more superficial place.
How would we learn about our world, and what we would learn about our world?
There's also rampant abuse and inappropriate use
of photographic images today.
Photography has become just a commodity in many people's eyes.
For example, last spring,
I found that Marisol's portrait has been taken out of its context and used
in a Mexico's presidential campaign advertisement.
This devaluates our craft!
Whether we are talking about immigration,
discrimination, environmental destruction, or injustice,
it is easy for all of us to put on blinders.
We want life to look pretty, easy, and fun,
just like a filter on Instagram.
Photojournalism forces us to take these blinders off.
Thoughtful photos help us notice, reflect upon, and interpret our world.
As for immigration, it is not a sexy topic for a lot of our mainstream media.
Perhaps that is why the topic is so misunderstood
and the facts, so easily manipulated.
Many opinion leaders in the US portrait illegal immigrants
as a threat to society,
and try to score cheap political points
at the expense of people they don't even know.
Throughout history, demagogs have always tried to de-humanize the other,
since this makes it easier to attack them without felling guilt.
Stirring out hatred becomes more difficult when you see people's faces,
and that is one of my aims for this project:
to re-humanize and put a face on the anonymous immigrant.
I don't pretend to have all the answers.
I'm not a policy maker,
I'm not an activist,
I'm a story teller, adding one perspective to the debate.
Marisol's experience is not every immigrant's experience.
I have seen over the years how hard she and Andres worked
in their quest for a better life and stability.
I hope that by showing their reality to a wider audience,
this story can contribute in some small way
to changing the conversation on Latino immigration in the US,
from an impersonal, contentious debate
to one that focuses on real human stories.
Thank you.
(Applause)