1	Books The Migrant Project looks at what it takes to put food on America’s tables; a conversation with the author of Mexican Enough. read more...
2	Film & TV Getting psyched with actor James Roday; the surprisingly varied career of Rey Valentin. read more...
3	Music Indie rocker Julieta Venegas unplugs; the boys of Plastilina Mosh mellow out. read more...
4	Ask Julie Tapping retirement accounts for funding. read more...
5	Calendar Outstanding events around the country. read more...
6	Picture This Wilfredo Lam in North America. read more...

Latin Forum

Books

The Migrant Project

By Victor Cruz-Lugo
Photos By rick Nahmias

A new book takes readers inside the lives of the thousands whose backbreaking efforts put food on tables every day.

Even as Americans are nourished by the fruits and vegetables they consume daily, the lives of the migrant workers that deliver this bounty to us remain mostly invisible. Too often, in the vacuum of this ignorance, rather than gratitude for the sufferings of these essential but marginalized laborers, the nation offers them a harvest of fear and hostility. The recent crafting of anti-immigrant legislation is but one example of this tendency. It would seem that without an adequate understanding of who these laborers are, we have failed as a nation to rightly measure their worth.
Photojournalist, documentary filmmaker and writer Rick Nahmias attempts to remedy this condition. Through his photo book and national art exhibition of the same name, The Migrant Project: Contemporary California Farm Workers, (University of New Mexico Press) Nahmias examines laborer’s lives in that important agricultural state. It is through the sweat of California’s more than 1 million farm workers, half of whom are undocumented, that half of the nation’s produce is brought to market.
To bring us this rare glimpse into the faces, lives and hearts of migrant workers, Nahmias traveled 4,000 miles throughout California, visiting nearly 50 rural communities before arriving at the selected 40 images that grace his book and exhibition. The eloquence of Nahmias’s black and white photographs are further enhanced by accompanying texts. Together, they begin to paint a picture of this sector of the American experience whose story has been relegated to the shadows.
While we may have become familiar with the image of the migrant worker toiling in the fields, Nahmias’s lens seeks to tell a new story. While the relation between workers and what they are picking remains a focus, Nahmias extends his view beyond that subject, and indeed moves inward. We see children bathing, an elderly man demonstrating. We enter sleeping quarters, peak into a migrant bus, and seem to join work crews as they load flatbeds. We find ourselves drawn into the world of these photographs, even as we are humbled by the challenges their subjects face.
Often Nahmias’s images infuse apparently exterior farm scenes with the almost mythic quality of charged interiors. Outside becomes inside. We begin to see the subtle, even intimate connections between the laborer and the land. These are not merely people undertaking backbreaking work: they are fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, friends and activists, and they are people dreaming and yearning. Finally, within the frame of Nahamias’s photos we begin to sense the enormous physical and emotional cost of what we may have come to take for granted.
The book and art exhibit feature several essays that deepen our encounter with the lives of the men and women crucial to bringing food to our tables. Dolores Huerta, the now legendary co-founder of the United Farm Workers union provides the foreword. In the preface, Nahmias—who was working as a researcher and writer for political columnist Arianna Huffington before embarking on this artistic project—tells how and why he took on this photographic subject. The conclusion features writings by key farm worker activists as well as a pair of striking oral histories of migrant workers.
What emerges is a portrait of hardworking people who make an enormous contribution to the quality of life in the U.S., even as their dreams are so often thwarted.
Those who purchase this stunning and informative book can take heart in the fact that half the earnings generated from its sales will go to non-profit and charitable farm worker organizations.

Since opening in 2003, The Migrant Project exhibition has toured throughout the U.S., stopping at museums, universities and cultural centers. Through the summer the exhibition will be shown at the Ann Arbor District Library in Michigan and in the fall can be seen at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute in Alabama.

7 Questions for Stephanie Elizondo Griest

The journalist, traveler and author of Mexican Enough opens up about traveling to Mexico with little more than a laptop, her curiosity and a quest for a new understanding of herself.

Growing up biracial in the U.S. wasn’t always easy for Stephanie Elizondo Griest. Although the journalist and author benefited from her Anglo roots (her father’s family hails from Kansas) as a child, she wondered if she had the qualities that would make her Latina enough, and if she didn’t, she wondered just what those would be. Her name and background were enough to land her race-based scholarships as a college bound teenager, but the concern was persistent. After spending time in Russia and China and chronicling her travels and experiences, she decided to do the same in Mexico, where she encounters strikes, poverty, violence and communities fighting for the basic rights Americans enjoy without a second thought. In the process, her voyage dispelled long-held myths and opened her eyes to Mexicans’ reality and parts of herself.

Hispanic Magazine: What motivated you to seek your Mexican side?
Stephanie Elizondo Griest: I spent much of my 20s traveling around the Communist Bloc, mingling with the Russian Mafiya, polishing Chinese propaganda and belly dancing with Cuban rumba queens. (These adventures inspired my first memoir: Around the Bloc: My Life in Moscow, Beijing, and Havana.) During that time, I was struck by how fervently Stalin, Mao and Castro tried to vanquish centuries of religion, tradition and ritual by forcing social culture upon their citizens. Yet hundreds of thousands of people boldly defied these rulings.
This made me reflect on how, in the United States, those of us who haven’t needed to fight for our culture have often deserted it. Though I called myself a Chicana, I hadn’t invested much energy into learning about my Mexican heritage. I couldn’t even speak Spanish, despite growing up 150 miles from the border! When I returned from the bloc, I vowed to get reacquainted with my own neighborhood block. So on New Year’s Eve of 2005, I moved to Mexico.

HM: What was the distinction for you between feeling like a foreigner in Russia or China as compared to Mexico?
SEG: In Moscow, I once asked for carrots instead of envelopes at the post office, and the clerk laughed so hard, she nearly fell off her chair. But I didn’t mind. I’m a Chicana from South Texas: How should I know the difference? In Mexico, however, linguistic mistakes like that mortified me, like I was betraying my ancestry or something. I also took personal interactions much more seriously. The slightest rebuff felt like total rejection—not just by a person, but a people. My people. Fortunately, Mexicans are incredibly kind.
HM: Regardless of your intent, do you think you represented “El Norte” to the Mexicans you encountered? If so, what did that feel like?
SEG: The year I traveled across Mexico, I was 30, single, childless, jobless and essentially homeless. Nothing screams “El Norte” louder than that. Mexican women just live an entirely different reality. In an effort to better connect with people, I tried introducing myself as a Chicana. But that just made them laugh. We’re as foreign as any other gringo. Still, people seemed to appreciate that I didn’t come to Mexico to sip tequila on a beach. They are extremely proud of their culture and eager to share it. At the same time, being perceived as a “wealthy foreigner” granted me passage into places completely inaccessible to most Mexicans. I harbored a lot of guilt about this, especially considering how badly Mexicans can be treated when they visit the United States. I often found myself trying to fight a system that benefited me.

HM: Many believe that merely documenting a situation changes it. Do you believe your presence made an impact on the political situations, strikes, murder investigations, presidential election backlash, etc. you witnessed? How so?
SEG: I deeply believe in the power of stories—not only as a healing force but as an agent of social change. That is why I conducted so many interview sessions with Mexico’s marginalized populations: strikers, migrant workers, indigenous resistance fighters, prisoners, gays and lesbians, etc. Certainly, nothing concrete may come from the inclusion of their stories in my book. But hopefully, the act of being interviewed helped legitimize their experiences, and made them feel a little less alone in the world.

HM: What was your biggest misconception about Mexico?
SEG: I was secretly hoping that my time there would somehow Mexify me. I’ve always been insecure about my cultural identity, worrying that I am not Mexican enough to accept race-based scholarships and the like. But after eight months in Mexico, I finally accepted that I will never be truly Mexican, not even if I moved there for the rest of my life and acquired the requisite customs and traditions. Because what binds a people are their bedtime stories. The songs they sing on road trips. Political and historical events. Fads and crazes. Shared memories. Not skills that can be acquired, like language. Which isn’t to suggest that my pursuit was a worthless endeavor. I am deeply proud that I can finally speak the language of my ancestors, and that I intimately know the lay of their land. Yet there is no point striving for an unobtainable state of being.
Identity crisis is actually endemic to the U. S. Latino community. I am constantly meeting caramel-skinned women who speak Spanish fluently, cook arroz con pollo, and salsa dance on weekends, yet still don’t feel “Latina enough.” This is especially ironic considering that white society created what it means to be Latino in the first place. Colonists diluted indigenous blood through conquest and rape; the U. S. government drew up categories like “Hispanic,” “White,” “Black,” and “Other” and made us choose. Hollywood created the cholo while MTV gave us JLo. For generations, we’ve felt pressured to emulate these role models because they were our only ones.
But poco a poco, we are coming into our own as a people. We’re making strides in film, literature, non-profits, politics, science, music. Creating our own definitions of who we are and who we can aspire to be. Fulfilling the dreams of ancestors who struggled to root (or keep) us here.

HM: What, if anything, surprised you to learn about yourself during your travels?
SEG: Mother Road changes each of us in profound ways. I found that as I traveled, all of the identities I had spent a lifetime cultivating began to peel off one by one. My vegetarianism drowned in a bowl of yak penis soup in China; in Russia, I compromised my feminism by being with men who treated me badly. I never felt less Chicana than I did in Mexico. Yet, traveling has built within me a foundation that allows me to stroll the world’s passageways with confidence. It has taught me the difference between being alone and being lonely, and made me ever selective of my company. I have become such a self-sustained, self-contained unit, I’m expecting to self-pollinate any day now.

HM: Do you feel you will rediscover your Kansas roots now that you have had such an awakening in Mexico?
SEG: I have always felt strongly connected to Kansas, perhaps because my family used to pack up the van every summer and drive up for a visit. Countless things lured me back: the crisp, sweet smell of the hay, the enormity of the sky, the tartness of my aunt’s cherry pie, and especially my grandmother’s stories. She spun tales of retreating into dugouts after spying tornadoes on the horizon; of battling dust storms and brush fires; of sleigh rides at Christmas. Kansas is the landscape of my childhood, and it is always a pleasure to revisit.
Everyone should travel to their motherland at some point in life, to learn from the roots that grow within. You can make rubbings of tombstones engraved with your family name at the local cemetery; talk with the old-timers; fill a jar with earth. It is deeply satisfying to know you have witnessed the same sunset as your ancestors. That your boots have collected the same dust.

Top Shelf
Consider stocking your bookcase with some of these
new titles, sure to inspire, inform or entertain.

Lady Q: The Rise and Fall of a Latin Queen
By Reymundo Sanchez and Sonia Rodriguez
Chicago Review Press, $24.95
It is telling that both authors, former insiders to the world of violent street gangs, use pseudonyms, ostensibly for their own protection. This book takes a harsh look at the heartbreaking transformation of Sonia into the powerful Latin Queen leader known as Lady Q, as well as what it took for her to save herself and her children.

One Night in America: Robert Kennedy,
César Chávez and the Dream of Dignity
By Steven W. Bender
Paradigm Publishers, $22.95
Robert Kennedy and César Chávez came from different worlds but united in the 1960s to fight for the rights of farmworkers—in the process developing a warm friendship. Bender examines their multifaceted relationship and legacy, as well as the work that remains today, 40 years after that fateful day when Kennedy was killed.

En Español

Un Sueño Americano: Mi Historia
By Oscar De la Hoya with Steve Springer
Rayo, $19.95
Oscar “Golden Boy” De la Hoya, one of the most important figures in contemporary boxing reveals the public and private struggles he endured to bring him to the top of his sport and of celebrity in this revealing autobiography.

Next Stop: Growing Up Wild-Style
in the Bronx
By Ivan Sanchez
Touchstone, $14
Using the backdrop of the drug epidemic of the 1980s and 90s, Sanchez provides the Puerto Rican perspective on growing up in the Bronx amidst slumlords, drug dealers and gang members. As the only survivor among his group of friends, he uses his stories as a warning to other living on the edge.

En Español

La Llorona
By Marcella
Serrano
Rayo, $13.95
Serrano interprets the tall tale of the weeping woman who wanders the night calling out for her children that she killed. But perhaps for the first time, an author attempts to see from the woman’s perspective and ask what really happened to turn the woman into legend.

The Seamstress:
A Novel
By Frances De Pontes Peebles
HarperCollins,
$29.95
The Brazilian-born author makes her fiction debut with this story of two sisters set in 1930s Brazil. It is a saga of family loyalty, love and courage as the sisters who begin life as seamstresses take widely divergent paths, one as a member of society, the other as an outsider.

The Ring
By Jorge Molist
Harper
Atria, $14
A native of Barcelona whose work has been translated into 20 languages, author Jorge Molist spins the spellbinding tale of a New York lawyer who receives a mystical ring that draws her into adventure and a search for a lost treasure in Spain.