“Family is complicated,” the photographer Joseph Rodriguez said. “That’s all.”
Mr. Rodriguez was talking about “Migrantes,” his long-term project following several immigrant families as they journeyed from rural Mexico, past the border in Arizona and on to various parts of the American South. They encounter hardship – even death – as they go on to accept menial, backbreaking jobs on farms. But they face all these challenges together, as family.
Other photographers may be content to settle for a single dramatic image of people crossing the border. But for Mr. Rodriguez, it’s about teasing out the subtle relationships that sustain people on both sides of the line.
“Family has always been important for me in every project that I do,” Mr. Rodriguez said. “Growing up in New York, my family was very much not there. The other reason I look at family is that most photographers don’t. They tend to go in, grab and leave I always felt it was important for me to hang out in the living room. It slows me down and makes me listen.”
Joseph Rodriguez Reyna Guzman, who has lived in the United States for more than 20 years, in her kitchen in Watsonville, Calif.His immersion in the lives of his subjects is not new. From his early work on the streets of East Harlem, to his series on the lives of gang members in East Los Angeles, Mr. Rodriguez’s approach has been marked by getting as close as possible for as long as possible. Small surprise, then, that as he followed the Chavez and Tapia families, he took the time to watch for meaningful moments – at religious ceremonies to bless the journey, while working the fields or when sitting down for a family dinner.
An early selection of these images has already been published in “Crossing Over,” a book he collaborated on with the author Ruben Martinez. Their hope now is to turn a decade’s worth of photographs into a more expanded, definitive document.
“What we tried to do as photographer and writer was to make our own ‘Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,’ from a Latino perspective,” Mr. Rodriguez said. “We would always see Western photographers and others go down and work the border, but we felt there was a lot more to this story than just that. We wanted to go deeper into the mindset and culture of crossing over.”
Joseph Rodriguez Economic opportunities in the United States have provided incentive for people to leave depressed towns in Mexico. Nogales, Sonora, Mexico.As chronicled in their earlier work, the story started in the mid-1990s with the Chavez family, which lost three brothers when their truck crashed into a ravine as they were headed into California. Despite the tragedy, other siblings were determined to make the journey. Mr. Rodriguez and Mr. Martinez worked together for a while, then followed the stories separately before teaming up again.
When the group they were following was apprehended in California, others shifted to making the crossing in Nogales, Ariz. While Mr. Rodriguez was in Nogales, he started photographing homeless children who lived along the border and would sneak into the U.S. through storm drains. As he followed them deeper into the U.S., he spent long days in the fields.
“We worked those fields, and it was nasty,” he said. “The big farms use a lot of chemical sprays. I was in the field a lot. It’s no joke. From five in the morning until the sun went down. Then we’d go back to their room, everybody’s tired. They sleep, get up and start it all over again.”
This attention to detail was not unnoticed by his collaborator, Mr. Martinez.
“He gets amazingly close to his subjects,” Mr. Martinez said. “He wants to know what cereal they eat. He wants to spend the night. It was just a whole other level of intimacy that I was not used to, frankly. I was shy. He can walk right through doors that are closed to other people.”
Looking back on the project, Mr. Rodriguez admits the crossing has become more dangerous because of the drug trade that shares some of the same migrant routes. And it has been harder to go back and forth in a post-9/11 world, too. Yet people continue to come, which speaks to another theme in his work.
Joseph Rodriguez The Chavez family waited for members of the family to return home from the U.S. Cherán, Michoacán, Mexico.“Personally, it’s about the browning of America,” Mr. Rodriguez said. “Look at Los Angeles. All around America I started to see this. Even now, in those discussions about Mexicans moving into the South. These were depressed communities, like in that picture I took of men standing in front of a video store. But those stores helped rebuild the community. The browning of America was helping that town grow.”
Like family, it’s complicated.
“I think it’s important for me to show life is complex,” he said. “It’s not always about the most dramatic or violent image. I talk to a lot of editors about working in Mexico, and they always gravitate to the narco story. But there’s a lot more. If I show the negative, I need to find the hope in the story as well.”
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Life on Both Sides of the Border
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