Marisol and the American Dream I’m a photojournalist based in Mexico, and I focus on social issues, like the topic of migration. As a child growing up in the South of the United States, I witnessed many contradictions and social divisions, and this really upset me. I began exploring my city with a camera, to try to understand
Janet Jarman
these divisions. I began to see photojournalism as an instrument, a powerful one, in order to participate in society’s complex social issues, through the creation of images. Cross-border migration, from a journalistic standpoint, became a topic of deep concern. Working in Florida at the beginning of the nineties, I met hundreds of migrants. I was concerned. I worried that the media portrayed them as statistics or categories, not as individuals making an effort to improve their lifestyles while building vibrant communities. I wanted to learn more about their lives, and about how their lives changed over time once they arrived in the United States. And thanks to a meeting with a young Mexican girl, twenty years ago, I was able to document a part of the puzzle of migration. Marisol and I met in the municipal garbage dump in the city of Tamaulipas in 1996. She was eight years old. It was a scorching hot day in August. Surrounded by thousands of flies, standing in the middle of burning garbage, I met Marisol and her mother Eloisa. They had found dead animals in that garbage dump. One day, they found a human cadaver and a fetus in a jar. They invited me to stay with them. Eloisa told me, desperately, that she wanted a different life for her family.
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