Mexico
The reason why a lot of the photographs I take in Mexico kind of mix up the politics and the communities and families all together is because this is the way that I was encountering them. And this is also the way that I was getting my education about Mexico. I think that, in some ways, what I was able to do in the photographs and in the words is to present back here to the United States a picture of what was going on in Mexico that I think was truer and more accurate than what we were seeing in the media here.
Mexico has faced multiple economic challenges, and remains a country of striking economic disparity. During the revolutionary era, from approximately 1911 through 1928, agrarian reforms were intended to uplift and modernize a vast rural and illiterate country. Over the subsequent decades, peso devaluations and international agreements like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) of 1994 made it easier for capital to cross international borders and harder for small businesses and family farms to prosper.
The outgrowth of globalization has been a wide-ranging and long process. The Zócalo or main square in Mexico City—the cosmopolitan center of the country, home to multiple industries and a fast-paced urban landscape—has long provided a location for civic and political organizing. During the 1990s and 2000s Mexico witnessed multiple presidential campaigns that were highly contested. The privatization of the municipal bus system resulted in hundreds of drivers rallying in the Zócalo in a bid to save their union benefits and jobs. Since the 1990s, David Bacon has been photographing the impact of globalization in Mexico, including the mass migration from Mexico to the United States, largely comprising indigenous people from Mexico’s poorest regions, as well as tumultuous presidential campaigns, privatization of government businesses and services, and labor disputes between small farmers and corporate agribusiness.
