TCSE: Ted Corpus Search Engine

Recorded at	July 20, 2019
Event	TEDSummit 2019
Duration (min:sec)	13:37
Video Type	TED Stage Talk
Words per minute	162.07 slow
Readability (FK)	48.82 difficult
Speaker	Jon Lowenstein


1	00:12	[This talk contains graphic images]
2	00:16	So I'm sitting across from Pedro,
3	00:19	the coyote, the human smuggler,
4	00:21	in his cement block apartment,
5	00:24	in a dusty Reynosa neighborhood
6	00:26	somewhere on the US-Mexico border.
7	00:29	It's 3am.
8	00:31	The day before, he had asked me to come back to his apartment.
9	00:35	We would talk man to man.
10	00:37	He wanted me to be there at night and alone.
11	00:41	I didn't know if he was setting me up,
12	00:43	but I knew I wanted to tell his story.
13	00:46	He asked me, "What will you do
14	00:48	if one of these pollitos, or migrants, slips into the water and can't swim?
15	00:53	Will you simply take your pictures and watch him drown?
16	00:56	Or will you jump in and help me?"
17	01:00	At that moment, Pedro wasn't a cartoonish TV version of a human smuggler.
18	01:07	He was just a young man, about my age,
19	01:09	asking me some really tough questions.
20	01:12	This was life and death.
21	01:14	The next night, I photographed Pedro as he swam the Rio Grande,
22	01:18	crossing with a group of young migrants into the United States.
23	01:23	Real lives hung in the balance every time he crossed people.
24	01:28	For the last 20 years,
25	01:29	I've documented one of the largest transnational migrations
26	01:33	in world history,
27	01:34	which has resulted in millions of undocumented people
28	01:37	living in the United States.
29	01:39	The vast majority of these people leave Central America and Mexico
30	01:43	to escape grinding poverty and extreme levels of social violence.
31	01:48	I photograph intimate moments of everyday people's lives,
32	01:52	of people living in the shadows.
33	01:55	Time and again, I've witnessed resilient individuals
34	01:59	in extremely challenging situations
35	02:02	constructing practical ways to improve their lives.
36	02:07	With these photographs,
37	02:08	I place you squarely in the middle of these moments
38	02:11	and ask you to think about them as if you knew them.
39	02:14	This body of work is a historical document,
40	02:17	a time capsule that can teach us not only about migration,
41	02:21	but about society and ourselves.
42	02:25	I started the project in the year 2000.
43	02:31	The migrant trail has taught me
44	02:34	how we treat our most vulnerable residents in the United States.
45	02:37	It has taught me about violence and pain and hope and resilience
46	02:43	and struggle and sacrifice.
47	02:45	It has taught me firsthand
48	02:47	that rhetoric and political policy directly impact real people.
49	02:52	And most of all,
50	02:55	the migrant trail has taught me
51	02:57	that everyone who embarks on it is changed forever.
52	03:01	I began this project in the year 2000
53	03:04	by documenting a group of day laborers on Chicago’s Northwest side.
54	03:09	Each day, the men would wake up at 5am,
55	03:12	go to a McDonald's, where they would stand outside
56	03:14	and wait to jump into strangers' work vans,
57	03:17	in the hopes of finding a job for the day.
58	03:19	They earned five dollars an hour,
59	03:22	had no job security, no health insurance
60	03:24	and were almost all undocumented.
61	03:27	The men were all pretty tough.
62	03:31	They had to be.
63	03:32	The police constantly harassed them for loitering,
64	03:35	as they made their way each day.
65	03:38	Slowly, they welcomed me into their community.
66	03:40	And this was one of the first times
67	03:42	that I consciously used my camera as a weapon.
68	03:45	One day, as the men were organizing to make a day-labor worker center,
69	03:50	a young man named Tomás came up to me and asked me
70	03:53	will I stay afterwards and photograph him.
71	03:55	So I agreed.
72	03:56	As he walked into the middle of the empty dirt lot,
73	03:59	a light summer rain started to fall.
74	04:03	Much to my surprise, he started to take off his clothes. (Laughs)
75	04:07	I didn't exactly know what to do.
76	04:10	He pointed to the sky and said,
77	04:12	"Our bodies are all we have."
78	04:15	He was proud, defiant and vulnerable, all at once.
79	04:19	And this remains one of my favorite photographs of the past 20 years.
80	04:23	His words have stuck with me ever since.
81	04:26	I met Lupe Guzmán around the same time,
82	04:29	while she was organizing and fighting the day-labor agencies
83	04:33	which were exploiting her and her coworkers.
84	04:36	She organized small-scale protests, sit-ins and much more.
85	04:41	She paid a high price for her activism,
86	04:44	because the day-labor agencies like Ron's
87	04:47	blackballed her and refused to give her work.
88	04:51	So in order to survive,
89	04:52	she started selling elotes, or corn on the cob, on the street,
90	04:56	as a street vendor.
91	04:58	And today, you can still find her
92	05:00	selling all types of corn and different candies and stuff.
93	05:04	Lupe brought me into the inner world of her family
94	05:07	and showed me the true impact of migration.
95	05:11	She introduced me to everyone in her extended family,
96	05:14	Gabi, Juan, Conchi, Chava, everyone.
97	05:19	Her sister Remedios had married Anselmo,
98	05:21	whose eight of nine siblings
99	05:23	had migrated from Mexico to Chicago in the nineties.
100	05:27	So many people in her family opened their world to me
101	05:31	and shared their stories.
102	05:33	Families are the heart and lifeblood of the migrant trail.
103	05:38	When these families migrate,
104	05:40	they change and transform societies.
105	05:44	It's rare to be able to access so intimately
106	05:47	the intimate and day-to-day lives
107	05:49	of people who, by necessity, are closed to outsiders.
108	05:53	At the time,
109	05:54	Lupe's family lived in the insular world of the Back of the Yards,
110	05:58	a tight-knit Chicago neighborhood,
111	06:01	which for more than 100 years had been a portal of entry
112	06:04	for recent immigrants --
113	06:07	first, from Europe, like my family,
114	06:09	and more recently, from Latin America.
115	06:11	Their world was largely hidden from view.
116	06:14	And they call the larger, white world outside the neighborhood
117	06:18	"Gringolandia."
118	06:21	You know, like lots of generations moving to the Back of the Yards,
119	06:24	the family did the thankless hidden jobs that most people didn't want to do:
120	06:29	cleaning office buildings, preparing airline meals in cold factories,
121	06:34	meat packing, demolitions.
122	06:38	It was hard manual labor for low exploitation wages.
123	06:41	But on weekends, they celebrated together,
124	06:44	with backyard barbecues
125	06:47	and birthday celebrations,
126	06:49	like most working families the world over.
127	06:52	I became an honorary family member.
128	06:55	My nickname was "Johnny Canales," after the Tejano TV star.
129	07:00	I had access to the dominant culture,
130	07:02	so I was part family photographer, part social worker
131	07:06	and part strange outsider payaso clown, who was there to amuse them.
132	07:11	One of the most memorable moments of this time
133	07:15	was photographing the birth of Lupe's granddaughter, Elizabeth.
134	07:20	Her two older siblings had crossed across the Sonoran Desert,
135	07:25	being carried and pushed in strollers into the United States.
136	07:28	So at that time,
137	07:30	her family allowed me to photograph her birth.
138	07:33	And it was one of the really coolest things
139	07:36	as the nurses placed baby Elizabeth on Gabi's chest.
140	07:41	She was the family's first American citizen.
141	07:44	That girl is 17 today.
142	07:48	And I still remain in close contact with Lupe
143	07:51	and much of her family.
144	07:54	My work is firmly rooted in my own family's history
145	07:58	of exile and subsequent rebirth in the United States.
146	08:03	My father was born in Nazi Germany in 1934.
147	08:07	Like most assimilated German Jews,
148	08:10	my grandparents simply hoped
149	08:12	that the troubles of the Third Reich would blow over.
150	08:16	But in spring of 1939,
151	08:18	a small but important event happened to my family.
152	08:23	My dad needed an appendectomy.
153	08:25	And because he was Jewish,
154	08:27	not one hospital would operate on him.
155	08:31	The operation was carried out on his kitchen table,
156	08:34	on the family's kitchen table.
157	08:37	Only after understanding the discrimination they faced
158	08:40	did my grandparents make the gut-wrenching decision
159	08:43	to send their two children on the Kindertransport bound for England.
160	08:49	My family's survival has informed my deep commitment
161	08:54	to telling this migration story
162	08:56	in a deep and nuanced way.
163	08:58	The past and the present are always interconnected.
164	09:03	The long-standing legacy
165	09:05	of the US government's involvement in Latin America
166	09:08	is controversial and well-documented.
167	09:11	The 1954 CIA-backed coup of Árbenz in Guatemala,
168	09:15	the Iran-Contra scandal, the School of the Americas,
169	09:18	the murder of Archbishop Romero on the steps of a San Salvador church
170	09:22	are all examples of this complex history,
171	09:25	a history which has led to instability
172	09:29	and impunity in Central America.
173	09:34	Luckily, the history is not unremittingly dark.
174	09:39	The United States and Mexico took in thousands and millions, actually,
175	09:43	of refugees escaping the civil wars of the 70s and 80s.
176	09:48	But by the time I was documenting the migrant trail in Guatemala
177	09:52	in the late 2000s,
178	09:53	most Americans had no connection to the increasing levels of violence,
179	09:59	impunity and migration in Central America.
180	10:02	To most US citizens, it might as well have been the Moon.
181	10:07	Over the years, I slowly pieced together
182	10:10	the complicated puzzle that stretched from Central America through Mexico
183	10:15	to my backyard in Chicago.
184	10:18	I hit almost all the border towns -- Brownsville, Reynosa, McAllen,
185	10:22	Yuma, Calexico --
186	10:23	recording the increasing militarization of the border.
187	10:27	Each time I returned,
188	10:29	there was more infrastructure, more sensors, more fences,
189	10:32	more Border Patrol agents and more high-tech facilities
190	10:36	with which to incarcerate the men, women and children
191	10:41	who our government detained.
192	10:44	Post-9/11, it became a huge industry.
193	10:47	I photographed the massive and historic immigration marches in Chicago,
194	10:52	children at detention facilities
195	10:54	and the slow percolating rise of anti-immigrant hate groups,
196	10:59	including sheriff Joe Arpaio in Arizona.
197	11:03	I documented the children in detention facilities,
198	11:08	deportation flights
199	11:10	and a lot of different things.
200	11:13	I witnessed the rise of the Mexican drug war
201	11:16	and the deepening levels of social violence in Central America.
202	11:20	I came to understand how interconnected all these disparate elements were
203	11:25	and how interconnected we all are.
204	11:27	As photographers,
205	11:29	we never really know which particular moment will stay with us
206	11:34	or which particular person will be with us.
207	11:38	The people we photograph become a part of our collective history.
208	11:42	Jerica Estrada was a young eight-year-old girl
209	11:45	whose memory has stayed with me.
210	11:47	Her father had gone to LA in order to work to support his family.
211	11:53	And like any dutiful father,
212	11:54	he returned home to Guatemala, bearing gifts.
213	11:58	That weekend, he had presented his eldest son with a motorcycle --
214	12:02	a true luxury.
215	12:04	As the son was driving the father back home
216	12:07	from a family party,
217	12:11	a gang member rode up and shot the dad through the back.
218	12:15	It was a case of mistaken identity,
219	12:17	an all too common occurrence in this country.
220	12:20	But the damage was done.
221	12:22	The bullet passed through the father and into the son.
222	12:27	This was not a random act of violence,
223	12:29	but one instance of social violence
224	12:32	in a region of the world where this has become the norm.
225	12:36	Impunity thrives when all the state and governmental institutions
226	12:40	fail to protect the individual.
227	12:42	Too often, the result forces people to leave their homes and flee
228	12:47	and take great risks in search of safety.
229	12:50	Jerica's father died en route to the hospital.
230	12:53	His body had saved his son's life.
231	12:56	As we arrived to the public hospital,
232	12:59	to the gates of the public hospital,
233	13:01	I noticed a young girl in a pink striped shirt, screaming.
234	13:05	Nobody comforted the little girl as she clasped her tiny hands.
235	13:10	She was the man's youngest daughter,
236	13:11	her name was Jerica Estrada.
237	13:13	She cried and raged,
238	13:15	and nobody could do anything, for her father was gone.
239	13:18	These days, when people ask me
240	13:21	why young mothers with four-month-old babies
241	13:24	will travel thousands of miles,
242	13:25	knowing they will likely be imprisoned in the United States,
243	13:29	I remember Jerica, and I think of her and of her pain
244	13:33	and of her father who saved his son's life with his own body,
245	13:38	and I understand the truly human need
246	13:40	to migrate in search of a better life.
247	13:43	Thank you.
248	13:44	(Applause)

Jon Lowenstein: Family, hope and resilience on the migrant trail