The Migrant Project
It is one experience to listen to the debate around immigration this presidential election year. It is quite another to take in the faces and lives of the people the policies impact intimately.
The Migrant Project: Contemporary California Farm Workers by Rick Nahmias is a book profiling a traveling exhibit of the same name. in it, the author collects oral histories of migrant workers, photographs of their lives and conditions, and narratives of border organizers. Author and documentary photographer Nahmias is child of the San Fernando Valley and admits his thoughts of the vast California farmlands were few and far between. With this book, he dives into what is, for him and most assuredly many readers, an unknown world. From the masks they wear to coins they use, many aspects of life for migrant farmworkers are open and vulnerable before the pen and the lens.
One cannot examine The Migrant Project without talking about the photographs. Nahmias’ tour de force takes us from the dusty fields to the streets of small towns. Children, elderly former braceros and others find space before the author’s camera. The images and the stories behind them are piercing. You will not be able to view them unaffected.
But the emotional pull of this book has a good amount of study for ballast. In terms of writings, the end of this book is going to dazzle you. Kurt Organista’s contribution to the book an overview of issues facing farmworkers and the legal fights they’ve engaged in to defend their rights, is a priceless part of this book. It is followed by a fabulous essay by Bruce Goldstein on how farmworkers are being enmeshed, oftentimes for the worse, in the national debate over correct and just immigration policy. In all, The Migrant Project delivers a valuable work on both the personal and political.
