Dying To Live: A Story of U.S. Immigration in an Age of Global Apartheid

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City Lights Publishers, 2008 - History - 255 pages

A compelling account of U.S. immigration and border enforcement told through the journey of one man who perished in California's Imperial Valley while trying to reunite with his wife and child in Los Angeles. At a time when Republicans and Democrats alike embrace increasingly militaristic border enforcement policies under the guise of security, and local governments around the country are taking matters into their own hands, Dying to Live offers a timely confrontation to such prescriptions and puts a human face on the rapidly growing crisis. Moreover, it provides a valuable perspective on the historical geography of U.S.-Mexico relations, and immigration and boundary enforcement, illustrating its profound impact on people's lives, and deaths. In the end, the author offers a provocative, human-rights-based vision of what must be done to stop the fatalities and injustices endured by migrants and their loved ones.

Dozens of stunning photos by Mizue Aizeki complement the text.

For a sneak preview of some of Aizeki's photos:

Chapter 1: Introduction: The Bodies

Chapter 2: The Desert

Chapter 3: The Border


Praise for Dying To Live:

"In Dying to Live, Joseph Nevins and Mizue Aizeki have produced an important and visually moving book that adds to our knowledge of the border and its place in history. Nevins' painstaking research documents the development of the Imperial Valley—its industrial agriculture, its divided cities, and the chasms between rich and poor, Mexican and anglo, that have marred its growth. Through the valley runs the border, and Nevins' accounts of the growth of border enforcement on the U.S. side, and the racism of its legal justifications, will be a strong weapon for human rights activists. Mizue Aizeki takes her camera and tells the story of Julio Cesar Gallegos, who died in the desert trying to make it across. Her images of the stacked bodies of border crossers held in refrigerator trucks, and the barrenness of the ocotillo cactus on the flat hardpan are eloquent testimony to the terrible risks and human costs imposed on migrants. Her beautifully composed portraits of Gallegos' family make a direct appeal to the heart in a way that words cannot. And her documentation of border protests and immigrant rights demonstrations, including the rows of jugs of water put out in the desert to save lives, are all compelling evidence that there is a struggle going on to halt the human rights crisis she and Nevins document."
—David Bacon, author of Communities Without Borders: Images and Voices from the World of Migration

"Joseph Nevins blows the cover off the scapegoating of "illegal" immigrants by meticulously and grippingly compiling the history of why so many try to come to the U.S. and, tragically, why so many die. This book strikes at our very moral core."
—Deepa Fernandes, author of Targeted, Homeland Security and the Business of Immigration

"...a fierce and courageous denunciation of the foul politics of immigration and the two-thousand mile tragedy of the Mexican border, snaking its way between two worlds, two nations, separated at birth but forever joined at the hip. Starting from one man's blackened corpse, the tale wends its way across the desert of racial amnesia to reveal the sources of America's reactionary (and futile) attempt at closure of a porous frontier. Deftly stitching together disparate times and places – from the Imperial Valley to Zacatecas to Mexicali and back to East L.A. - Nevins and Aizeki weave a memorial quilt to the hundreds of innocents in unmarked graves."
—Richard Walker, professor of geography, UC Berkeley, and author of The Conquest of Bread and The Country in the City.

"Dying to Live is a compelling, perceptive and invaluable book for our times. Our new apartheid, as explored here, is as bleak and hostile as the landscapes in which people lose their lives trying merely to survive. Those lives delineated here are unforgettable."
—Susan Straight, author of A Million Nightingales and Highwire Moon

"Invisible in life, like most exploited immigrants, Julio Cesar Gallegos now judges us from the hour of his terrible death. He reminds us – thanks to the passionate investigations of Nevins and Aizeki – that the eyeless corpses in the Imperial Valley are murder victims: abandoned to heat, thirst, and anonymous graves by a border politics compounded of historical ignorance and contempt for human rights."
—Mike Davis is the author, most recently, of Planet of Slums and In Praise of Barbarians

From inside the book

Contents

Acknowledgments
9
Juchipila MexUSA
123
Beyond the Boundary
165
Copyright

3 other sections not shown

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About the author (2008)

Joseph Nevins is the author of Operation Gatekeeper: The Rise of the Illegal Alien and the Making of the U.S.-Mexico Boundary (Routledge, 2002) and, more recently, A Not-so-distant Horror: Mass Violence in East Timor (Cornell University Press, 2005). His writings have appeared in numerous journalistic publications, including The Christian Science Monitor, the International Herald Tribune, The Nation, Los Angeles Times, The Progressive, and The Washington Post. He is an associate professor of geography at Vassar College. Born and raised in Boston to a working class family, he attended the city's public schools. He graduated with a Bachelor’s degree from Middlebury College in Vermont in 1987. It was as a student there that he became politically active, engaging in solidarity work with Central America, and efforts to end CIA recruitment on campus. He received a Ph.D. in geography in 1999 from UCLA. A long-time solidarity activist with East Timor, Joe is a founding member of the East Timor Action Network. He visited East Timor many times during the years of the Indonesian occupation and was the first American to meet with the East Timorese guerrilla movement. In 1999, he helped to organize and coordinate the largest non-governmental observer mission for the UN-run plebiscite in East Timor which resulted in the country’s eventual independence. A father of two young girls, Joe is a board member of the Tucson-based BorderLinks, a bi-national organization that offers experiential educational seminars along the border focusing on the issues of global economics, militarization, immigration, and popular resistance to oppression and violence. He is also a founder and board member of La’o Hamutuk, the East Timor Institute for Reconstruction Monitoring and Analysis. Mizue Aizeki is a documentary photographer. Her work has appeared in a variety of publications including Colorlines, The Progressive, L.A. Weekly, The Wall Street Journal, Z Magazine, and The Nation. She has also exhibited her work in several venues, such as the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts in San Francisco. Mizue was born in Japan. At the age of two, she and the rest of her family migrated to New York, where she was raised. In her early-20s, Mizue moved to Los Angeles, where she enrolled at the University of Calfornia, Los Angeles (UCLA), from which she received a BA in geography and a MA in urban and regional planning (with a focus on community organizing). It was during this time that Mizue became a political activist. Following graduation, Mizue worked for a many years as a researcher and strategist for a labor union with a very heavy immigrant membership. In addition to being the mother of two young girls, she continues to be a social justice activist, working on matters related to migrant and worker rights, and anti-racism. She is also a board member of Families For Freedom, a New York-based multi-ethnic defense network by and for immigrants facing and fighting deportation. Her documentary photography work has included projects on Palestinian refugees in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza, immigrant deportees and their families, taxi worker organizing in New York City, and Mexican migrants in Poughkeepsie, NY.

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