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h2oetry's review
4.0
Bob Dylan: I’m not gonna read TIME magazine, I’m not gonna read Newsweek, I’m not gonna read any of these magazines, I mean cause they just got too much to lose by printing the truth. You know that.
TIME: What kind of truths are they leaving out?
Dylan: Well anything, even on a worldwide basis, they’d just go off the stands in a day if they printed really the truth.
TIME: What is really the truth?
Dylan: Really the truth is just a plain picture.
(Excerpt from TIME Magazine’s interview with Bob Dylan as seen in the documentary “Don’t Look Back”)
“We do not wish to look at Juarez, we do not vacation there, we do not speak of the place. When it briefly comes to our attention, we dismiss it as a grotesque exception to what matters, what is, and what will be.” (pg. 48)
This book is filled with images of a city whose violence is upfront, often, brutal, highly-selective although jettisoned with hands-off disregard. The snapshots of former lives caught in the crossfire; answers and motives are usually buried deeper than the bodies themselves. The photographs, from local photojournalists[Javier Aguilar, Jaime Bailleres, Gabriel Cardona, Julian Cardona, Alfredo Carrillo, Raul Lodoza, Jaime Murrieta, Miguel Perea, Margarita Reyes, Ernesto Rodriguez, Manuel Saenz, Lucio Soria Espino, Aurelio Suarez Nunez] are chilling. If we don’t look, did the inhumanity ever occur?
Charles Bowden has been writing about Juarez since the mid-nineties. This book grew from his Harper’s piece, “While You Were Sleeping’ in which Juarez photographers expose the violent realities of free trade.
“We must stop pretending and start living. We already have lives of double exposure. Just as the photographers cannot really stay on one side of the camera, we cannot really stay on one side of the line. We will cross it, we have crossed it, we are in play. We have many options and none of them are easy. But the one option we do not have is to continue our past habits into the future, We cannot pretend such places do not exist. We cannot pretend such places can be contained. We cannot pretend such places will magically remedy themselves. We are exposed and we should be. And we are exposed to the future and this future will be hard, but it can also be good or bad depending upon what we do We are free to act. If we act in time.” (pg. 114)
Keep in mind: this book came out almost a decade before the war on drugs was officially declared by newly-elected President Calderon in 2006. He calls Juarez the laboratory of the future, and it is happening 30 feet across the river from El Paso, Texas. The area serves as an ecotone(borderland between two biological assemblages -- think of the forest edging the meadow) of the US & Mexico.
“Where an ecotone occurs there is more life and life is louder and more grasping because two or more groups of plants and animals overlap, boosting life’s pitch and intensity [...] That is what is happening now on the border of Mexico and the US, where a huge ecotone of flesh and capital and guns is rubbing up against itself as two cultures and two economies and two languages meet and mingle and erupt into something we cannot yet name.” (ps. 48)
Bowden’s writing is incredible; he masterfully describes the city and situations with eyes wide open. Squeamish realities deserve squeamish words and visuals. His words show the possibility of caring with vigor when answers seem nowhere to be found.
Noam Chomsky wrote the introduction, and he rightfully attacks NAFTA, showing how it maintains the status quo for the richest and most powerful while also waging war on the rights of workers and consumers. Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano offers and cogently answers a question in the afterword: Should the Third World really aspire to be like the First World? (spoiler alert: no)
“It is time for everyone to talk. It is time for everyone to talk despite the thickets of racism, of foreign-policy considerations, of the growing and ominous military presence on the border, of the barbarism festering in our agencies that expresses itself in the mistreatment of illegal immigrants from Mexico. It is time to talk because silence only makes matters worse, bodies cold, murder sanctioned, and poverty invisible.” (pg. 112)
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