Product Description

Juarez: The Laboratory of Our Time challenges the propaganda and the realities of the current relationship between the United States and Mexico, focusing on the more intimate connection between the border towns of El Paso and Juarez. Charles Bowden, who first brought attention to the story of the Juarez photographers in Harper's (December 1996), has written an uncompromising, piercing work that combines insightful and informed reporting with a poetic and wry style. His powerful text, integrated with brutal and revealing images by a group of unknown Mexican street photographers, takes on issues of NAFTA, immigration, gangs, corruption, drug trafficking, and poverty, uncovering a very different Mexico than generally depicted in the press and by the United States and Mexican governments.

Conditions in the impoverished colonias (urban settlements), work on maquiladora (foreign-owned factory) assembly lines, arrests and victims resulting from drug and gang violence, the hardships for women and children-- in short, everyday life in Juarez-- are all depicted here with an urgency and passion that could only grow from pure desperation. This group of guerrilla photographers, most of whom work for one of the daily newspapers in Juarez, earning the equivalent of only $50 to $100 per week (although the cost of living in Juarez is nearly that of El Paso), risk their lives daily with the photographs they take, alienating themselves from the local governments in both Juarez and El Paso, the police, the drug traffickers, and the gangs.

It is all too easy for the American media (and, consequently, the American public) to ignore the plight of the almost two million residents of a city seemingly so distant and foreign, yet the brutal irony is that many of these people-- our not-so-distant neighbors-- suffer directly from the effects of our "progress." Many Mexicans continue to work in subhuman conditions, with little hope of lifting themselves out of grinding poverty.

While Charles Bowden presents a riveting investigation of Juarez, its inhabitants, and its visual chroniclers, the renowned activist and writer Noam Chomsky offers in his introduction a bitingly critical account of NAFTA, suggesting its nullifying effect on democracy and the rights of both workers and consumers, and its underlying strategy for protecting the rich and powerful, and keeping everyone else in his or her place. In his afterword, the Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano poses the question: Should the Third World really aspire to be more like the First World? His insider's look at contemporary North/South American relations reveals how the relationship between Juarez and El Paso can serve as a metaphor for U.S.-Latin American relations, and demonstrates the devastating toll United States policy and attitude knowingly take on human rights and the environment south of our border.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #172943 in Books
• Published on: 1998-04-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 136 pages

Review
Filled with dozens of dramatic and disturbing images of everyday violence against the people of Juarez and against the land itself, Bowden's book acts, in Kafka's words, as an ax to break up the frozen sea within us. -- The Los Angeles Times Sunday Book Review, Saul Landau

Review

About the Author
Charles Bowden is the author of fourteen books including Blood Orchid: An Unnatural History of America; Desierto: Memories of the Future; Red Line; Blue Desert; and (with Michael Binstein) Trust Me: Charles Keating and the Missing Billions. He is contributing editor of Esquire, and also writes for other magazines such as Harper's and The New York Times Book Review, as well as for newspapers. Recently he won the Lannan Award and the Sidney Hillman Award. He lives in Tucson, Arizona, and is currently at work on a new book entitled, A Borderline Case.

Noam Chomsky has written and lectured widely on linguistics, philosophy, intellectual history, contemporary issues, international affairs, and U.S. foreign policy. His works include: Language and Mind; The Political Economy of Human Rights, Vols. I and II (with E.S. Herman); Rules and Representations; On Power and Ideology; Language and Problems of Knowledge; The Culture of Terrorism; Manufacturing Consent (with E.S. Herman); Necessary Illusions; and Reflection on Propaganda. He has been a professor in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT for more than forty years.

Eduardo Galeano is the author of the trilogy Memory of Fire-- Genesis; Faces and Masks; and Century of the Wind-- as well as Open Veins of Latin America; The Book of Embraces; and, most recently, Soccer in Sun and Shadow (Verso). His books have been translated into eighteen languages. He lives in Montevideo, Uruguay, where he was born.

Customer Reviews

Ground Zero
Driving south to El Paso you come over a rise and the first thing you see is a vast sprawling city choking the Rio Grande valley. If you were on vacation and had never been there before, you would think El Paso is a much larger city than what your map indicates.

But as you descend further and draw nearer you notice the rat maze of shacks covering the hillside along the valley and realize it looks like no other American city you have ever seen before. Then you grasp the reality.

The hillside is Mexico. The rat maze of shacks is a cardboard colonia. The city, of course, is Juárez. Charles Bowden calls it "the laboratory of our future," where free-marketers are loose to test the human and environmental limitations of money.

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) just marked five years of no-holds-barred commerce between the US, Canada, and Mexico. According Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch "do-no-harm" test, the pact has failed in every respect.

"NAFTA at 5: A Citizen's Report Card" (12/98) shows failing marks in nine categories ranging from US job creation to economic impact on Mexico. In just five years, "Free Trade" has become synonymous with pollution, poverty, crime, and corruption. Now free trade simply means unfettered foreign investment anywhere that guarantees substandard wages and absolutely no environmental regulations; a place where capital moves freely and labor is held hostage.

All these places, writes Charles Bowden, "...are growing quietly like mold on the skin of the planet."

Nowhere is the impact of free trade more evident than in border cities like Juárez, and nobody understands better NAFTA's impact on Juárez than Charles Bowden. In Juárez: The Laboratory of Our Future, with its 100 disturbing photographs of death and despair, Bowden transforms our first-world dream of the future into a third-world nightmare of reality.

"Politicians and economists speculate about a global economy fueled by free trade. Their speculations are not necessary. In Juárez the future is over thirty years old, and there are no questions about its nature that cannot be answered in this city."

In Juarez, with essays by Noam Chomsky and Eduardo Galeano, Bowden reports on the disparate relationship between El Paso and Juárez at ground zero, and its compounding effect on the larger alliance between Mexico and the US. It is a sad story that first surfaced in an acclaimed article written for Harper's magazine a couple of years ago. Here Bowden wends his words around the poignant and often brutal images of thirteen Juárez "street shooters," a group of unknown guerrilla photojournalists who work for little more than film and the satisfaction of exposing the city's deep malaise.

Charles Bowden's powerful narrative and wry first-person style, combined with these photographs of human and environmental devastation, create a tormenting text. The free-traders in Juárez (US-owned multinational corporations) make no qualms about exploiting human labor for a profit, and their NAFTA boosters are quick to point to America's surging economy to justify its sordid history. To paraphrase Bowden, They reluctantly admit to the object, but steadfastly deny any subject or verb.

Today there are more than 300 foreign-owned factories (maquiladoras) employing over 200,000 Mexican workers, mostly women, who work 6 days/48 hours for about $9 per day. (Ironically, under NAFTA, the new jobs created in Juárez are almost equal to the high-paying manufacturing jobs lost in America.)

Americans routinely justify these substandard wages with a belief that the cost of living is less in Mexico. In reality, prices in Juarez are 85-90% of those in El Paso, only 50 yards away, where your average Texan earns ten times more.

But jobs and wages at ground zero are just the tip of the iceberg in the maquiladora economy. NAFTA's other promised benefits of prosperity and environmental cleanup have failed miserably. The treaty instead has exacerbated social decay and public-health problems on both sides of the border.

In Juárez the petri dish bubbles over with a toxic brew of evil elements that has poisoned an entire city. People seethe with fear of violent gangs, narcotraffickers, smugglers, corrupt cops, and now even US soldiers along the border to help keep NAFTA's mess contained.

"In Juárez," Bowden writes, "you cannot sustain hope."

The veracity of Bowden's thesis is born out by Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch report. Juárez stands as a scathing indictment of American free-trade policy.

Painfully real pictures
I've twice been to the Colonia's of Cd. Juarez. I have not, thank God, witnessed the violence.

I have seen the poverty.

The photographs in "Juarez, the laboratory of our future" are painful to view. The work of skilled local photographers, the pictures jump from the pages and into your heart. Life in a Colonia is a nightmare.

As the text makes clear, the causes of the poverty and violence are complex. But it is certain that we, the consumers of cheap goods, are adding to the pain when we buy the product output of Juarez, but bar the producers from escaping their Hell. The people in the Colonias are living lives very the close to those suffered by WWII slave laborers in Europe and elsewhere.

Where are the liberation forces?

All of Bowden's books are wake up calls. One of his best.
We, as a society, ignore too much, and are far to isolated as to what the rest of the world is like. We surround ourself with junk, the media feels that Bill Clinton's sex life is what we need to know about, and people fight over bean bag toys. Yet just to the south of our decaying scciety is a place where people, at times, will do anything to either A) live in the US B) Kill each other for a handful of dollars. The images presented in this book are stark and real. The photos are not "titillating", but are harsh, and they are pushed in your face. Bowden's text is superb, and presents mind images that equal or surpass the work of the photographers. Books like this should be required reading for the fools that think NAFTA et al, are good for the world.