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Photography by Henrik Berquist
David Fitzgerald and his daughter. Gabriela, in Jalisco,
Mexico. |
Ex-Photojournalist focuses on nation of emigrants
A new look at Mexico
BY Jacqueline Tasch
UCLA Today
As a photojournalist with the Los Angeles Times, David Fitzgerald
covered the Proposition 187 campaign, hoping to provide a balance
to “the shrill public discourse about immigrants,” he
said. “I tried to give Times readers a sense of the daily
lives of their immigrant neighbors, but grew frustrated by photography’s
limited capacity to explain the political context.”
Seeking to learn more about that context, Fitzgerald looked to graduate
education and UCLA, where he is preparing his dissertation in sociology:
“A Nation of Emigrants? Everyday Nation-State Building in
Mexico.”
Fitzgerald was recently honored with the Fletcher Jones Dissertation
Year Fellowship, supported by gifts from the Fletcher Jones Foundation
of Los Angeles and awarded through the UC Office of the President.
Worth $20,000 a year, it is one of the most prestigious and generous
awards for graduate students in the UC system.
While Fitzgerald’s newspaper work focused on Mexican immigrants
in California, his dissertation looks at the impact of their departure
on their home communities. He spent the last year in Jalisco, Mexico,
seeking to understand how government, church and economic elites
try to control migration or manage its results.
On a couple of occasions in the 1950s, Mexico “actually
put troops on the border to keep people from entering the United
States,” Fitzgerald said. At the time, Mexico was negotiating
labor contracts with U.S. employers for bracero workers and wanted
to stop illegal emigration. Today, however, leaders in Mexico are
“more or less giving up on trying to manage emigration and
turning to managing its effects,” Fitzgerald said.
This may mean filling labor shortages by bringing workers in from
other areas of Mexico or refocusing economic activity on less labor-intensive
enterprises; for example, cattle-ranching rather than crop-growing.
Women and children have become more involved in agriculture back
home while husbands work in the United States, and families are
often separated for years at a time.
“This weighs heavily on the minds of Catholic priests in
Mexico, who are concerned about the effects of family disintegration,”
Fitzgerald said. “All manner of social evils are blamed on
emigration.” For example, returning workers may be linked
to the advent of drug abuse and gangs.
Fitzgerald was an undergraduate in photojournalism at the University
of Texas when he first became interested in the perspective of countries
with high emigration rates. He and a colleague wrote an award-winning
report tracing the Central-American roots of a small refugee community
in Austin.
His understanding of the immigrant and refugee experience is informed
by his childhood in the Middle East, where his father was a surgeon
with missionary hospitals in Gaza. Going back and forth across the
border to the American International School in Israel, Fitzgerald
learned that “daily movement and physical security depended
on holding the magic blue booklet with the eagle on the cover,”
his U.S. passport.
“If there was an easy lesson here,” he said, “it
was that politics and coercion matter in deciding where and how
one lives.”
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