S5 #1 | The Right to Stay Home w/ David Bacon

On this episode, my guest is David Bacon, a California writer and documentary photographer. A former union organizer, today he documents labor, the global economy, war and migration, and the struggle for human rights. His latest book, In the Fields of the North / En los campos del norte (COLEF / UC Press, 2017) includes over 300 photographs and 12 oral histories of farm workers. Other books include The Right to Stay Home and Illegal People, which discuss alternatives to forced migration and the criminalization of migrants. Communities Without Borders includes over 100 photographs and 50 narraatives about transnational migrant communities and The Children of NAFTA is an account of worker resistance on the US/Mexico border in the wake of NAFTA.

Show Notes:

David’s Early Years

Learning about Immigration through Unions

The Meaning of Being Undocumented

NAFTA and Mexican Migration

The Source of Corn / Maize

Binational Front of Indigenous Organizations / Frente Indigena de Organizacaions Binacionales

The Right to Stay Home

Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) Campaign

The Face & History of Immigration in the USA

Immigration Reform and Amnesty

The Violence of Fortuna Silver Mines in Oaxaca

Solidarity, Change and Optimism

Homework:

The Right to Stay Home: How US Policy Drives Mexican Migration

In the Fields of the North / En los campos del norte

Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants

Communities without Borders: Images and Voices from the World of Migration

The Children of NAFTA: Labor Wars on the U.S./Mexico Border

David’s Twitter Account

David’s Official Website

Transcript:

Chris: [00:00:00] Welcome to the End of Tourism podcast, David. It's an honor to have you on the pod. To begin, I'd like to ask you where you find yourself today and what the world looks like for you there.

David: Well, I live in Berkeley, here in California, and I am sitting in front of my computer screen having just what I've been up to today before talking with you.

Chris: Hmm. Well, thank you so much for joining us, and thank you for your work. Perhaps I could ask you what drew you to the issues of labor and migration.

David: Sure. Well, I come from a kind of left wing union family, so I knew about unions and workers and strikes and things like that from probably since before I can remember. And so I was kind of an activist when I was in high school, got involved in the [00:01:00] student movement in the 1960s at the University of California, got involved in the free speech movement, got tossed out by the university, actually, and wound up going to work after that, really, because I got married, had a daughter, and I got married, had a daughter, and, I needed to get a job and, you know, worked for quite a while as a a printer in the same trade that my father was, had been in went back to night school to learn more of the, of the trade, how to do different parts of it, how to run presses and so forth and then got involved, this is, you know, in the late 60s, early 70s got involved in the movement to support farm wo