Panic In Waukegan

This image appeared in Friday's NYT  about a deportation panic in Waukegan.

After local police were trained to begin deportation hearings on immigrants with a criminal record, rumors spread that any undocumented person pulled over by the police was also at risk.  Several recent raids have only added to the anxiety level.  The offshoot is that undocumented Hispanics and their legal relatives or loved ones are living in fear and have begun dropping out of public life.

The backstory on the image is as follows:

Miriam M. and her husband, married in 2004, own a tidy house on a peaceful street and are raising four children from previous marriages, all United States citizens. He runs his own landscaping company, paying business and property taxes.

Even though Miriam M. is a citizen, it is difficult for her husband to obtain legal papers, since he entered illegally from Mexico 12 years ago. She did not focus on her husband’s illegal status when she first met him.

...

Now he stays close to home and avoids downtown Waukegan, driving around the city limits when he can.

The physical symbolism is actually quite broad, making similar, but distinct references to: "pulling in," "clinging" and trying to "hold on." 

With the immigration issue having devolved into little more than a paranoid fanning of the ideological fires, this image speaks to the rising emotional fallout.

Facing Deportation but Clinging to Life in U.S. (NYT)
Slide show feature (NYT)

(image: Sally Ryan for the NYT.  2007.  Waukegan, Ill.  nytimes.com)

Comments

[John Lucaites]

Notice too, how the image calls attention to the fundamental humanity of the individuals. There is only the barest hint of ethnicity here, with the emphasis on not just holding on, but being connected in an integrative sense -- notice how the fingers interlock. Hands, as Hariman and I have been arguing for awhile, are key markers of character and expressions of humanity. And here they are used in the most basic way of creating connections, both inwards towards one another, but outwards as well to the viewer.

[martin]

Notice how also the language around this dis-loccution. the fall side of the way that the world has financially worked for sum for some while is suddenly being brought - bought - into repute. If u hale from the UK and have exercised a write to try and conduct your abilities via the liveable $10 an hour quagmire: the failure would have been intense and disheartening.

If you hold a passport, the delay might be marginal.

The language continues apace: that of the circumspect; the swamp; the flood. back-barrier holding.

The tap. An engineered belief in the ability to hold back the flow. Just as easily as it was turned on.

I annotate my own origins. I am not sure that I remember a post from indigenous folk in Australia. My limited experience of how some of how those people down there work with images might call me to ascribe this to 'the dreaming'.

Sung&dance.

Terrible portent