Communities Without Borders: Images and Voices from the World of Migration.

COMMUNITIES WITHOUT BORDERS: IMAGES AND VOICES FROM THE WORLD OF MIGRATION

By David Bacon

Cornell University Press, 2006

So much of migration goes unseen by most Americans, and so many of the stories are never heard. But in his new book Communities Without Borders, activist and acclaimed photographer David Bacon brings the images and the political stories of migrants to the forefront. He photographs everything from migrants striking in Nebraska to the Mixtecs of Oaxaca, Mexico playing basketball. The black-and-white images are unflinching.

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Bacon has also documented the voices of the migrants and so their stories are interweaved with the images, creating a book that is at once memorable and critical to understand immigration today. In other words, this is the photography book that you want on your coffee table, in your office and at your brother's.

Here are a few images that caught our eye.

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Unfortunately, Beah's memoir gives no political context to think about the war and the future of Sierra Leone. The rise of boy soldiers seems to be a depoliticized reality.

Dr. Chi Huang brings more of a political lens to the situation of Bolivia street children in his book When Invisible Children Sing. The child of Taiwanese parents in the United States, Huang starts his memoir off as a young Christian man who wants to change the lives of poor children. With his Asian features, Huang hits Bolivia feeling like an older brother to the boys and girls of the streets in La Paz. But that's where the similarities end. The kids live on paint thinner, walking around with open wounds. Huang walks into a world where to be an indigenous child is to be despised, refused services at hospitals and left to do sex work in the streets.

As with Beah's book, we are here asked to hold competing truths: the tenderness of these children's hearts and the reality of their lives, which can and does include murdering other children to keep themselves alive.

The memoir moves back and forth between Bolivia and Texas where Huang grew up. He offers an unflinching account of his childhood struggles to do better than whites, and he brings that to describing Bolivia's children--writing simply about the brown teenage girls who cut themselves and the boys who fear washing their feet and end up with infections.

Both books show the difficulties in changing the lives of children who have been attacked by an intersection of horrors like war, abuse and racism and in a subtle way point to some of the solutions that are needed. In Bolivia, Alejandro, a boy from the orphanage, tells Huang that he must be patient because the kids don't want charity. "They want you to be part of their lives," Alejandro says. "They won't listen to you until they know you care for them. They won't assume that you're there out of the goodness of your heart ... you have to prove it's free, always free, that you will always be there for them, even if for no reason."