http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/hea ... 42797.html

Nov. 17, 2006, 3:36PM
Exhibit offers snapshots from the border crisis


By WENDY GROSSMAN
Copyright 2006, Houston Chronicle

Rudy Adler, 25, took a few minutes to discuss the photos.

Q: How did you guys think of this project?

A: Two of us, me and Brett Huneycutt, we're both from Arizona, so immigration has always been an extremely important topic. The third group member, Victoria Criado, had done service trips in college.

We got together wanting to do some sort of project that involved storytelling. We decided on the U.S.-Mexico border as an area that has a lot of stories.

We interviewed Minutemen, migrants, activists and politicians. We were in a small town in Mexico called Altar, and we were interviewing a young, migrant woman who was crossing alone with her three very small children. We interviewed them. We said our goodbyes. We tried to convince them not to go — but it fell on deaf ears.

Q: Why did you want to stop them?

A: Crossing the border is extremely dangerous from there. It was this young mother - she must have been, like, my age, and she had three children. One of her little boys had diabetes, and they had some medication.

To us it just seemed extremely dangerous. This was also in the summer, remember — well, you're in Houston, you know the heat.

The idea itself came when Victoria went searching through her purse, looking for a piece of candy or a toy to give the children and came up with nothing. And I made a joke, "Oh, why don't we give them our video camera?"

It was definitely a joke because we had spent a lot of money on that video camera. But the moment I said that, we all looked up at the same moment and said it would be pretty interesting if we could give people some sort of recording device.

Long story short, we decided on disposable cameras as cost-effective. And we worked out a scheme of using prepaid, self-addressed envelopes and Wal-Mart gift cards to get the cameras back.

Q: How did you find people who were planning to enter the country illegally?

A: It's actually pretty easy. We started first just going to the middle of these border towns. There's usually some sort of park or town square-type area, and it's littered with men with backpacks. So it's pretty obvious who's crossing. The main distribution for us was going to migrant shelters — humanitarian organizations, usually run by the church. They provide migrants with a meal.

Q: Have you had any response from immigration officials wanting to know who these people are and where they are?

A: As far as wanting to know the locations of these people? We actually don't even know.

We were in Texas when we had the idea, and we distributed about 100 cameras to start. We didn't get any back. (In the end we did get one back, but it was much later.)

We were wondering why we weren't getting any back. It was because we were asking the migrants to either give their family address in Mexico or their destination address in the states.

That was a big mistake. There is some suspicion, especially when we're asking for personal information.

Q: Mostly you want to be on the down low if you are undocumented.

A: The beauty of the Wal-Mart gift card is it allowed us to do this anonymously. We have kept in contact with, like, one or two migrants because those are people who wanted to keep in contact. For the most part, we don't know where any of these migrants are.

It's funny: The camera we eventually got back from Texas came from Juarez, south of El Paso. Months later we got a stack of prints back. This is the only migrant who actually developed the photo back and sent us prints. For the most part, they sent a camera back.

He wrote little comments on the back of the prints. It's pretty amazing, because he started south of Texas. There are photos from the New Mexico desert, there are photos from the Arizona desert.

And it looks like they crossed successfully in the Arizona desert. Then we had photos from L.A., and then we had photos from Oregon. The envelope was post-marked Atlanta. They could be pretty much anywhere in the country.

Q: The press release says you tell stories that no news piece, policy debate or academic study could convey. How so?

A: In the immigration debate, you hear a lot from politicians and a lot of loud people, but you don't actually hear from the people on the ground.

We want to show people the quiet battle that's happening every day on the ground. It's not really about anyone talking about what the solution should be or what they think is right or wrong. It's migrants documenting their reality, and it's Minutemen documenting their reality.

Q: Anything else you think is important?

A: I should probably talk about the Minutemen's involvement. What's interesting about the Minutemen photos is this: Our project is very nonpartisan. We don't take sides. We're showing both sides equally.

When we approached the Minutemen, we really didn't know what to make of them at first. They really broke the stereotypes.

We found them to be pretty independent thinkers. They didn't like George Bush, and they didn't agree with the Iraq war - things we never expected. And they were actually super nice.

It turns out the reports of them shooting migrants were completely false. When we started asking a lot of questions, we realized that there's truth on both sides here, and neither group is completely right.

A lot of the Minutemen are ranchers who live on the border, and they live in fear because there are people constantly crossing in their backyards. And I can imagine they're pretty terrifying. These are things you can't completely brush off.

I think the Minutemen photos really go a long way into humanizing them. Q: What did you think of them before? A: Gun-toting vigilantes - who were possibly inflicting harm on migrants as they crossed.