Portside

Starting around 1999, public policies that spurred development in Los Angeles' Skid Row started. Buildings that were dubbed underused were transformed in the 50-block area. Well-heeled residents have moved in. In 2014, Skid Row's streets have a vibrancy of sorts - one in which families, the homeless, the hip, the elderly and even well-treated dogs coexist in an ever-changing place.

The new film, Cesar Chavez: History is Made One Step at a Time, doesn't capture the diversity of the farmworkers' movement. "When I was a farmworker, before the strike, we lived in different worlds - the Latino world, the Filipino world, the African-American world and the Caucasian world," Eliseo Medina as interviewed by David Bacon for In These Times.

By law, a company can’t hire H-2A guest workers if it is in a labor dispute with its US workforce. But that is exactly what this Washington State berry grower is trying to do.

Malta's prime minister, Joseph Muscat, exclaimed to journalist Gwynne Dyer that "we are building a cemetery within our Mediterranean Sea.” An NGO, Fortress Europe, says 6,450 died in the channel between Sicily and North Africa between 1994 and 2012. This figure is similar to the 5,570 people found dead in the desert between Mexico and the United States from 1998 to 2012, and has earned the Mediterranean the nickname “sea of death.”

One of the most important parts of the Senate's bill, and of all the "comprehensive immigration reform" proposals, is a big increase in guestworker programs. Employers demand them as a price for supporting legalization of the undocumented. But our history tells us that this is a very high price. Especially for farmworkers, guestworker programs have been a terrible idea.

In the picking of the strawberry crops - many workers are needed and in the name of immigration reform the growers are seeing their dream - a huge cheap source of labor. Congress is debating bills that would expand the number of recruited workers many times over, possibly even reaching the 500,000 worker peak of the bracero program in the mid-1950s.

Violently evicted by their government and unwelcome in the U.S., Mexican mining unionists have nowhere to go.

In July, Washington berry pickers went on strike. A week after their return, farm owners brought in H2A guest workers.

Can photographers be participants in the social events they document? Eighty years ago the question would have seemed irrelevant in the political upsurges of the 1930s, in both Mexico and the United States. Many photographers were political activists, and saw their work intimately connected to workers strikes, political revolution or the movements for indigenous rights. Now a book and a recent exhibition should reopen this debate.

"Both have two central elements in common. They criticize public education in their countries, and they're financed and backed by important people in the business world."