These images are a requiem.

For a people and a time.

The people: migrantes, from Mexico.

The time: the 1990s.

We followed them from their homeland in Michoacán, across the border, and then across America.

The journey began with death. Three brothers — Benjamín, Jaime and Salvador Chávez — were killed when the truck they were being smuggled in lost control in a chase with the Border Patrol in the hills above Temecula, CA.

Practically since it was drawn, the US-Mexico border has been a site of trafficking and violence, as are such lines all over the world. But beginning in the 1990s, migrants began to face considerably graver risks. The construction of what today we routinely call the “wall” began in 1994 under the Clinton administration. (It is important to remember that the project of closing off America from the world has been a bipartisan affair.)

And yet people continue to cross because they must. For most, it is a journey not towards death but life. What they are leaving behind causes intolerable pain, and there is a hope, sometimes just a sliver of it, that there will be a new life, a better one, here, on this side.

We retraced the Chávez brothers’ path back to its point of origin, to the Indigenous (P’urhepecha) village of Cherán in the western Mexican state of Michoacán. We met the surviving members of the family. Rosa Chávez, sister of the dead, soon embarked on her own journey north, with her two year-old daughter in her arms.

Rosa and her family found life on this side, in what today we call a “red state.” She is a grandmother now.

With Migrantes, we sought to reveal what’s routinely hidden: the lives of laborers. Their bodies, their daily routines, their bewilderment and exhilaration, and the nostalgia for what’s been lost on the road from homeland to adopted home.

But it’s not out of nostalgia that we present these images from the 90s. We show then to reveal now. Yes, much has changed. Visit Tijuana today and those forlornly waiting for an appointment to present a case for asylum are from Haiti, Sudan, Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela. The world is at our doorstep, an idea that is deeply disturbing to many Americans.

You can see now in the then of the faces of these migrantes, reflecting an undying hope, in spite of all.

There is a second original sin in American history, after slavery: the violent disdain of the immigrant. This prejudice is as old as the republic.

We disdain ourselves.

Who is it in the fields of the San Joaquin Valley in California, picking the produce that feeds the country and a good part of the world?

Who was it filling potholes in the wee hours on the Francis Scott Key Bridge on that cold night? The laborers were from

El Salvador, Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras.

Sometimes they work so close to us — nannying babies, cradling the dying in hospices.

They have headphones on next to you on the F train to Queens.

They are not they. They are us.

The crisis is not at the border. It is in the heart, in the heartland of America: in its conscience.

Joseph Rodriguez took these photographs with his heart, to remember his own family’s journeys.

These images are a requiem for all those who’ve died trying to cross the line, for those that are still trying, for all those migrantes rarely seen in the fullness of their pain and hope.

Migrantes

Featuring: Joseph Rodriguez

Locations

ON VIEW AT: Truss Banner 38

• #Agriculture
• #Documentary Photography
• #Employment
• #Immigrant Stories
• #Mexico-US
• #Migration