Hanging on the hated wall between Mexico and the U.S., David Bacon’s photographs may help bring it down.
Eighteen big blowups of migration photographs by California photographer David Bacon now hang on the border wall next to the gate between Mexicali, in Mexico, and Calexico, in the United States.
They hang next to the traffic lanes where cars line up on the Mexican side, waiting to cross into the US. At times, hundreds of cars spend more than an hour in the lines — giving drivers ample opportunity to study the images and react to them.
Placed there by the Center for Cultural Studies at the Autonomous University of Baja California, the 6×4-foot blowups hang on the steel beams that make up the wall between the two cities.
Called “Beyond Borders,” the show documents the process of migration. Some images show the life of Mexican migrants in the U.S., while others were taken in migrants’ home communities in Mexico. Three show children working in the fields in northern Baja California, including one taken just a few miles from the Mexicali gate itself.
“As a photographer, I’ve tried to create images that aren’t neutral,” explained Bacon in an interview with Baja news media at the show’s opening.
“They are, first, a reality check, showing what life is actually like, trying to do it through the eyes of people themselves,” he said, standing in a park across from the cars lining up in lanes along the wall.
“But they are also a form of social criticism,” he said, “of poverty, of the discrimination and unequal status migrants face — especially in the U.S., but even in Mexico itself. Therefore, they’re also a call for social change.”
“So what better place to show them than on the wall itself?” he asked. “The Center is using an object that is hated on both sides of the border — the wall — and reclaiming it as a site for developing popular culture.”
Even more, he said, the wall can be reclaimed “as a space where people can be urged to make changes so that some day we will live in a world where the wall itself will not exist.”
At the press conference, the director of the Center and its museum, Luis Ongay, said that because of its location where cars and pedestrians are crossing to the United States, many people will see the show. “it’s bringing the museum into a public space.”
Center assistant director, Christian Fernandez, noted that the exhibit uses images that are part of a project of popular art and culture, and then shows them in a way that is accessible to ordinary people. “We have a show about migration, and the people looking at the images are those who themselves are crossing the border — migrating.”
He pointed to two images, one depicting an old labor camp in California, which housed bracero workers in the 1950s, and the other a portrait of a former bracero, taken in Oaxaca.
“Some former braceros, who are very old now, come on Sundays to this park to meet and talk with each other,” Fernandez said. “What will they think of the images that show parts of their own experience?”
The high-quality prints were made on plastic-coated fabric, stretched across metal frames, and coated with an anti-UV protective film. Fernandez said he hoped that the prints would survive the next three months of the show and that, if they did, the center might then take them to other sections of the border wall in Baja California.
