ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a visual analysis of the photograph taken of a Honduran woman running from tear gas, holding fast to her two small children at the U.S. border entry point at San Ysidro, California. The photograph has been titled the Migrant Mother, in a reference to the famous photograph taken by Dorothea Lange in 1936 in Nipomo California, while working for the U.S. Farm Security Administration (FSA) during the Great Depression (MOMA Learning, “Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California,” https://www.moma.org/learn/moma_learning/dorothea-lange-migrant-mother-nipomo-california-1936/">www.moma.org/learn/moma_learning/dorothea-lange-migrant-mother-nipomo-california-1936/). By deconstructing this powerful visual documentation, I argue that the picture created an opening for news reporting critical of U.S. border patrol policies. Media coverage up to that point was framed by security discourses, which followed the rhetoric and agenda of the 45th President’s assertion that the migrant caravan represented an invasion of illegal aliens not deserving of dignity and protection. The picture led to news stories critical of the use of tear gas, and other cruel policies of CBP. Stories from the migrants point of view also increased, and the public was made aware that migrants were fleeing from violence and poverty in their home countries, especially Honduras. Obscured in media coverage were the causes of violence and poverty that have led to out-migration from Honduras, forces set in place by the U.S.-backed, illegal military coup of 2009. The chapter goes on to assesses the role played by Hillary Clinton and the U.S. military in helping the perpetrators of the coup d’état that ousted the legitimately elected president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya. The 2009 coup set in motion the dismantling of democratic institution, and led to government corruption, and police and military brutality toward the people of Honduras. The United States continues to fund Honduran security forces, even in the face of ample evidence of the web of interconnections between police and military to the international drug cartels. Security forces and para-military death squads also target environmental defenders who struggle against multinational extractive industries who push them off their lands, pollute the environment, and destroy their livelihoods. Berta Cáceres, a prominent international environmental leader was murdered for her work on a campaign against the Agua Zarca hydroelectric dam. Connections to this background are rarely tied to news reports that present poverty and violence as natural disasters that emerge from nowhere, without explanation of their origins. In conclusion, I assert that humanitarian frames for media coverage are blocked by this lack of historical evidence as the causes of humanitarian disasters. Only by including historical context of U.S. involvement in the causes of out migrations will security discourses give way to a meaningful set of humanitarian principles.
