Family, hope and resilience on the migrant trail | Jon Lowenstein

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4.1 • 11.9K Ratings

🗓️ 21 August 2019

⏱️ 14 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

For the past 20 years, photographer and TED Fellow Jon Lowenstein has documented the migrant journey from Latin America to the United States, one of the largest transnational migrations in world history. Sharing photos from his decade-long project "Shadow Lives USA," Lowenstein takes us into the inner worlds of the families escaping poverty and violence in Central America -- and pieces together the complex reasons people leave their homes in search of a better life.**

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This TED Talk features documentary photographer, filmmaker, and visual artist John Lowenstein, recorded live at TED Summit 2019.
0:12.0	So I'm sitting across from Pedro, the coyote, the human smuggler, in his cement block apartment in a dusty reynosa neighborhood somewhere on the U.S.-Mexico border.
0:25.0	It's 3 a.m. The day before, he had asked me to come back to his apartment, we would talk man-to-man.
0:33.3	He wanted me to be there at night and alone. I didn't know if he was setting me up, but I knew I
0:39.4	wanted to tell his story. He asked me, what will you do if one of these poyitos or migrants
0:46.0	slips into the water and can't swim? Will you simply take your pictures and watch him drown?
0:52.1	Or will you jump in and help me? At that moment, Pedro
0:57.9	wasn't a cartoonish TV version of a human smuggler. He was just a young man about my age
1:05.1	asking me some really tough questions. This was life and death. The next night, I photographed Pedro as he swam the Rio Grande crossing
1:14.1	with a group of young migrants into the United States. Real lives hung in the balance every time
1:20.8	he crossed people. For the last 20 years, I have documented one of the largest transnational
1:27.4	migrations in world history,
1:29.9	which has resulted in millions of undocumented people living in the United States.
1:34.8	The vast majority of these people leave Central America and Mexico to escape grinding poverty and extreme levels of social violence.
1:43.8	I photograph intimate moments of everyday people's lives of people living in the shadows.
1:50.0	Time and again, I've witnessed resilient individuals in extremely challenging situations
1:57.0	constructing practical ways to improve their lives. With these photographs, I place you
2:04.2	squarely in the middle of these moments and ask you to think about them as if you knew them.
2:09.8	This body of work is a historical document, a time capsule that can teach us not only about
2:15.4	migration, but about society and ourselves.
2:20.1	I started the project in the year 2000.
2:26.3	The migrant trail has taught me how we treat our most vulnerable residents in the United States.
	...

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