Postcards from Both Edges

The Border Film Project collects images from the front lines of the immigration battle.

By Elana Berkowitz, Campus Progress

Last week, the McCain-Kennedy immigration bill, which represented perhaps the best, most reasonable approach to reform on the Hill these days, collapsed under partisan strain. Meanwhile, over a million protesters across the country have marched against a House measure that would criminalize illegal immigrants amongst other draconian reforms. Despite the relative good cheer at each of the protests (To wit: a group of young men outside of our offices chanting “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” while wearing American flag bandanas around their heads and Salvadoran flags draped across their shoulders) real, comprehensive reform still seems a bit too far out on the horizon.

Immigration has become a political football in Washington, D.C., which is around 2,300 miles from the Sonoran desert that spreads out between Arizona and Mexico. Since 1998, more than 2,500 people have died crossing illegally through the unforgiving, sun-bleached terrain. Many are quietly buried in unmarked graves.

A new photo project produced by Brett Huneycutt, Rudy Adler, both Arizona natives who vividly remember the rash of local migrant deaths in the desert during the 90s, and Victoria Criado, explores immigration through the eyes of those most affected by it – on both sides of the border. Tired of the partisan hot tempers, speechifying and pundit overload that surround this thorny issue, they launched the Border Film Project last summer by distributing cameras to just a fraction of the hundreds of thousands of migrants illegally crossing the border each year, as well as to the Minutemen, self-styled vigilante “border guards” working in Texas and Arizona.

The three accomplished, recent college grads (Brett is currently a Rhodes scholar, Rudy works in advertising, and Victoria left investment banking to work as a loan consultant for non-profits) initially set out to make a documentary film themselves and say that their move toward the self-documentation model was “haphazard.”

The trio had spent significant time near the border and were down in a town called Altar, 60 miles south of the Arizona border in Mexico, working on their documentary, figuring out how to take on the knotty issue. Altar is a new kind of Mexican town, one that popped up in the last few years to serve the transient migrant community by offering amenities like call centers, cheap temporary lodging , and roadside shops that offer border crossing necessities like jeans and water bottles.

“We met this really endearing family in the height of the summer who were waiting to cross,” Brett explains, “It was around 115 degrees. And we all wondered ‘how the hell is this family going to make it across the desert?’ Vicki really took a liking to their 8 year-old daughter and wanted to give her something. We looked for a cheap bouncy ball or something but we couldn’t find one so we jokingly suggested we give her our video camera. And, we realized, that wasn’t a bad idea.”

But, in lieu of handing off a $2,000 Sony, they instead purchased hundreds of cheap disposable cameras and passed them out along with simple instructions and an invitation to document whatever seemed most important to the photographer. In Mexico, they found their amateur photographers by wandering through parks and centrally located town squares as well as visiting migrant shelters, churches and social service agencies. They then spent the next few months criss-crossing the U.S./Mexico border, passing out single-use cameras to both migrants and Minutemen, who, Brett, pointed out, were a bit easier to work with because “they are kind of PR hungry.”

They knew that this new approach was a numbers game. To add a bit of incentive, they handed out a Wal-Mart gift card with each camera and promised that it would be activated with a $50 deposit once the used cameras were returned to them. So far, they have only gotten around 15% of the cameras back. Though they know that a few of their photographers were picked up by the border patrol, the vast majority are simply unaccounted for.

Though the end results are mostly amateurish, the photos are worthwhile, veering between shocking, funny, elegiac, dull and bittersweet. The images from both sides of the border may be spare, dusty, and harshly uncompromising, but they are rarely ever totally bleak. Some of the images are surprisingly lighthearted, like the shot of a Honduran man, Juan Carlos, who traveled through the Arizona desert on his way to Las Vegas, waving, grinning and joking for the camera just like the casual tourist might. Others, like the bloody and blistered feet of a migrant or the images of grimly cramped transient housing, make palpable the sacrifices made by those trying to access a corner of the American Dream. Perhaps the only constant between both sets of photographs is the landscape along the Southwest border, the perfect blue sky that looks as if it could have just been Photoshopped from one image to the next.

Brett hopes that the impact of the Border Film Project images will be a nuanced one. He wants to avoid painting those waiting at the Mexican border as saints or the Minutemen as bad guys with legal gun permits. “I’m frustrated that everyone already has such strongly formed opinions. We want people, on both sides, to know a more human side of the story and give themselves the chance to be affected by the pictures.”

Because the trio is resolutely devoted to using this project to foster a bi-partisan dialogue on the issue, Brett was a bit skittish about pinning down any of the project creators’ specific viewpoints on the immigration debate. However, he did offer, “all three of us have pretty different views on immigration. Ironically, through the project, our points of view have converged somewhat. We had two very different groups of photographers but both sides really agree on the fundamental issue that what is currently happening at the border is a broken system that needs to be changed.”

And for someone growing up in the Southwest, Brett has seen the cracks in the system for quite some time. In Arizona , immigration is an issue that doesn’t just appear and reappear when it becomes politically expedient – it’s a pressing policy issue hidden in plain sight. Brett first visited the border when he was 18, traveling to Ciudad Juarez only a few years after the borders in California were tightened in the mid-90s, shifting migration routes to the more dangerous Arizona border. “By the border, relative disparities are so striking. I spent two weeks in a shanty town on the Mexican side that was made from a variety of leftover materials – cardboard, concrete, pirated wires. They had almost no electricity in the town but standing there in Mexico, you could see the lights of El Paso, Texas shining right across the border.”

Migrant cameras:

Minutemen cameras:

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