The Future is Another Country
Lange’s photographs can be considered “care work,” the devalued labor, integral to maintaining human life. By identifying the distress of migrant laborers’ lives, Lange indicated where care had lapsed.
These scientific servants of elite interests created a vision of the migrant body that perfectly matched the ideal working body of slavery that must be kept at labor to avoid illness.
In our current moment, as the Trump administration daily wields federal power to attack immigrant communities and workers’ rights, these kinds of community-driven struggles and organizations serve as a bulwark protecting families and empowering workers to make change where they live and work.
The Trump administration’s immigration policies have invited numerous comparisons to nineteenth-century regulations of enslaved persons. These comparisons will continue so long as the state retains the power to circumscribe a person’s mobility and employment opportunities through the policing of their legal status.
To the present and past Mexican farmworker families of Tulare County: I write for you and walk alongside you. Mis vecinos, you are right. You belong here, just as your history of endurance and resilience belongs in our archives.
Usually it is the Left that is stereotyped as tyrannical with its political correctness and assertions of rights, according to the standard Republican line. But really, it’s Trump coming for people’s land, stampeding over rights, and ignoring public opinion.
“I see my duty as an activist-historian to also uplift the voices of other activist-historians who may not be traditional historians, but are doing essential historical work, by highlighting their historical-activism on any platform available and joining them in direct action whenever possible.”
Then, as now, policing and incarceration target people of color to the benefit of white officers and officials. The continued operation of this system deprives Black people of equal justice under the law and is, in short, simply unacceptable.
Maybe, through protest, we can create a government that acts on its own for justice. Maybe, through protest, we can make protest obsolete. Maybe.
It is sad that it took such a tragedy to get our community to realize that our city has such a problem with racism—a problem our community has struggled with for generations. Fortunately, the solution is blossoming before our eyes.
The Activist History Review