Category: Immigration

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Known for its sweet potato pies, the long-established 27th Street Bakery at 2700 S. Central Avenue, also is distinguished by its red and white exterior and painted signage, done in all caps san serif black letters shadowed in gray.

The Unique Art of Sign Painting in Los Angeles

Known for its sweet potato pies, the long-established 27th Street Bakery at 2700 S. Central Avenue, also is distinguished by its red and white exterior and painted signage, done in all caps san serif black letters shadowed in gray.

Crops are grown and harvested year round in the valley with migrant farm workers arriving at various parts of the year for peak harvest season of crops like grapes, broccoli and cauliflower.

Coachella Valley Farm Workers

I had been working on making photos about farm workers very slowly over the years and in 2015 l received a Fellowship from The Alicia Patterson Foundation which allowed me to dedicate the time, focus and thought to the work that it deserved.

The Coachella Valley is located 130 miles east of Los Angeles in California. It is about 45 miles long and 15 miles wide extending southeast from Palm Springs to the northern shore the Salton Sea. The north side of the valley is comprised of a series of connected desert cities, south of that strip of cities is a vast expanse of land containing a huge variety of fruit and vegetable fields and a few small towns.

Immigration: The Pain and Reward

Imagine for a minute that you have to leave your home. Imagine there is a war going on around you and you fear for your life and that of your children. Maybe the potato crop, which your country is dependent on, has been ravaged by disease and hundreds of thousands of people have died of starvation.

Shadow Lives USA

Jon Lowenstein (APF – 2008) has compiled his recent work on deportation and immigration into “Shadow Lives.” Jon won a 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship and a TED Global Fellowship. He is a member of the NOOR international photo agency, based in Amsterdam. His work can be

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Refugee Foster Care in Mississippi — When Cultures and People Clash

Refugee Foster Care in Mississippi — When Cultures and People Clash (Note: The names of the Sudanese youth in foster care were changed because of foster care privacy rules.) It was a simple misunderstanding. The article in the small Catholic Diocesan newsletter in Jackson, MS.,

U.S. Border Wars Show No Signs of Keeping Migrants Out

El Paso, Texas—Wire fencing encases the sides of the Rio Grande where the river slices through El Paso on the U.S. side and Ciudad Juarez on the Mexican side of the border. Its purpose: to keep out illegal migrants who each year routinely swim across

Southern Schools Strain Under Immigrant Arrivals

Luis sits at a computer working with a program designed to teach him English. He is warm and accepting, still trusting despite what he has seen. But when the 11-year-old recalls his journey from Guanajuato, Mexico to Morganton, North Carolina, his round face darkens and

Tom Higgins, president of the S.L. Waber de Mexico plant in Nogales, Sonora, Mexico, talks with Industrial Engineer Francisco Javier Lopez on the plant floor.

Maquiladora Workers Get Homes of Their Own

Photographs by Jeffery Scott From his office window, Tom Higgins looks across the city of Nogales, Sonora, Mexico, and sees rows of new tin roofs shining on a hilltop. “I’m so pleased,” he says, “that in all the crap and corruption of this world, the

Homeless children in Nogales, Sonora, learn to read and write in a classroom at Mi Nueva Casa. Their teacher is Gloria Judith Rodriguez. Photo by Jeffry D. Scott

Nogales Plans to Rescue Children from Border Underworld

Veronica was ten years old when she first went into the tunnels. She insists she wasn’t thrown out of her house or abandoned like many of the other kids who lived with her in the miles of concrete storm channels that run beneath the border

Sonia, a young Los Angeles girt, wears a memorial T-shirt from her brother Ulises’ gang funeral. A local Mara Salvatrucha gang member raises the lid of the coffin he was sanding to strike a pose of respect to the memory of his dead homeboy. Photo by APF Fellow Donna Decesare

Avenging Angels: Homegirl Survival Stories

Text and photos by Donna DeCesare “The weak one is the one society thinks is good, but that’s the one that is going to end up dead.” –Angel, Latina gang member “Trippy” from Mara Salvatrucha getting a new tattoo. Photo by APF Fellow Donna Decesare

A portable sign warns motorists that they are approaching a Border Patrol checkpoint on Interstate 19 in southern Arizona.

Border Patrol Catches Flak at Arizona Checkpoint

Photos by Jeffry Scott A spring shower has just ended, and as the sun sets over southern Arizona, five United States Border Patrol agents work quickly to reopen a traffic checkpoint on the main highway north from Nogales. The checkpoint, which is taken down during

Haitians still arrive in South Florida the hard way: smuggled in from the Bahamas on leaky boats. Occasionally crafts are swamped before they reach shore. There have been 70 confirmed drownings of Haitian immigrants in Florida waters since 1980. Rescue workers try CPR on one Haitian whose boat capsized. Photo by Greg Lovett, The Palm Beach Post

Delray Beach, Florida: Little Haiti’s Little Sister

Note: Many of the Pictures used in the original APF Reporter issue are copyrighted and could not be used in the web eddition Daniella Henry remembers her first visit to Delray Beach. Driving up from Miami one night in 1990, she exited brightly-lit Interstate 95

The grand mosque of Touba is located 200 kilometers from Dakar and is the biggest in black Africa. Touba also is a thriving market town and center for contraband. From Touba, Mouride businessmen have gained control of most of Senegal's commercial activity, and are now turning their attention to the United States.

Profiting from One’s Prayers

When prayers end, commerce begins. It’s an inevitable consequence when you are part of a sea of worshippers flowing from West Africa’s holiest shrine. This is the only known photo of Cheikh Ahmadou Bamba, the founder of Senegal’s Mouride Brotherhood. It was taken in the

The soul of the new ghetto lies in service workers like Mourtala Sall and his wife. He drives taxis six nights a week, and she cares for their two-year-old daughter while earning up to $50 an hour braiding hair for African-American women in their kitchens. They are saving to open a Senegalese restaurant, the first one, Mourtala hopes, to cross out of Harlem and into middle-class Manhattan. "Americans like our food," Mourtala says. "But white people won't go to Harlem."

Caste Party: Africa Arrives in America

The United Gnegnos of America held their annual ball recently at the Bronx’s Parkside Plaza. Gnegnos (pronounced “NYE nyose”) are a caste, actually the lowest caste, among the city’s 20,000-odd Senegalese immigrants. To attend a Gnegnos function, to have even heard of it (I received

The Jamaica Progressive League attracted more than 300 people in a new voter/citizens drive held a Guayanan retaurant in Brooklyn's Flatbush section this March. Would-be citizens paid $120 each for photographs, fingerprints and notarized registration forms. The first citizens will be sworn in this summer. Photo by Rachel L. Cobb

Brooklyn’s Anti-Poverty Workers: Caribbean Immigrants

Family values, religion and community renewal are among the pillars of conservative ideology, and rallying-points of Republican legislators who tend to represent districts that are rural, white and affluent. In Democratic Brooklyn, particularly the mainly black, mainly poor neighborhood called Fort Greene, the Republican Personal

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Traveling for a family: The Remittance Economy

According to the inscription on the Statue of Liberty, immigrants are the “tired… poor… the huddled masses yearning to be free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore… the homeless, tempest-tossed.” Unfortunately, those words did not fit when Emma Lazarus wrote them in 1883, and

More than a year after the Los Angeles riots, street vendors ply their wares in the shadow of the city's downtown. Photo by APF Fellow Roberto Suro

Immigration to the Burn Zone: The Changing Face of the American City

Photos and article by APF Fellow Roberto Suro   LOS ANGELES — During Los Angeles’ days of fury in spring,1992, the sounds of gun fire and helicopters reminded Elsa Flores why she had left El Salvador more than a decade earlier and made her wonder

Shoua Vong, organizer of the Hiawatha project.

Charting A Course To The American Dream

MERCED, Calif.–One hand rises slowly into the air from the back of a room overflowing with Southeast Asian refugees. Another hand pops up in the front. A third hand timidly reaches upwards. The other 200 refugees in the bare room do not raise their hands,

Hmong leader Captain Kue Chaw

The Hmong’s Blue Ridge Refuge

MARION, North Carolina–Eloise Witte first heard about the Laotian refugees coming into the county when she read it in the McDowell News. Then she started seeing them peering into shops on Main Street and buying pants and shirts at Belk’s. Most of the women were