Crystal Herrera, a 17-year-old Carson High School student, stands in front of her AP history class holding up a photograph she traveled 150 miles to take.
It shows a stack of grape boxes in a dry, desert-like landscape.
“It doesn’t look like much when you first see it,” she says. “But when you know the story, you’ll start to realize its meaning.”
Herrera’s 37-year-old uncle, Jorge Herrera, was a farmworker at Vignolo Vineyards in Delano. On July 31, he died of heat exhaustion, leaving behind two children, ages 4 and 7.
“He was paid by how many grape boxes he could stack,” Herrera explains, as her voice starts to crack. She holds the photograph over her face to hide tears from her classmates.
“It was hot that day,” she says after a moment. “His body temperature reached the same as outside, which was over 100 degrees.”
Herrera’s black-and-white photograph paying tribute to her uncle’s legacy is part of the student project “The Way We See It: L.A. Teens on Immigration.” Led by the nonprofit organization Facing History and Ourselves, the photography initiative aims to encourage understanding and tolerance with regard to the controversial issue of immigration.
For eight weeks, 35 juniors at Carson High School worked with photographer Rick Nahmias to develop storytelling photographs that tackled a mixture of topics – from Japanese culture and Mexican traditions to mixed-race relationships and post-immigration blues.
Thirty photographs from the Carson students will be exhibited along with projects from New Technology High School in South Los Angeles at the Skirball Cultural Center beginning Tuesday.
The other photographers in the group stayed closer to home than Herrera did.
Carson student Aaron Johnson spent a day at the beach to get his image – a photograph that shows a group of people, some in sunglasses, walking toward the camera along the Redondo Beach pier.
For Johnson, the picture represents the contradictory nature of American identity.
“We are all so individualistic, to the point that we’re all kind of the same,” said Johnson. “America pushes everybody to be unique and stand out, but it’s like, are we really that different from each other?”
Kathleen Del Rosario and Angelia Bornachea used the project as an opportunity to immerse themselves in a part of immigrant culture they knew little about. They visited the Mitsuwa Marketplace in Torrance and photographed a third-generation Japanese-American man leaning over his lunch with chopsticks in hand.
“We learned so much about Japanese culture,” said Del Rosario. “It’s like a whole different world, right here in Los Angeles.”
In an effort to fuse exploration, creativity and education, Facing History and Ourselves provides resources to schools and teachers nationally and internationally.
“In what I think is a really desperate time in education, Facing History and Ourselves works within a curriculum to introduce kids to their own stories,” said Nahmias, after his final workshop with the Carson High School history class. “All these students really rose up and dug deep into their personal stories, which is what we had hoped would happen.”
For many students, the experience has been eye-opening. But Herrera’s project has also left her with a lot of unanswered questions. She and her group partner, Atly Sale, visited the farm in Delano where Herrera’s uncle died.
“For me, I didn’t really understand what my uncle had to do every day,” said Herrera. “It was kind of heartbreaking to know that he had to go through all that and work there just to support his family.”
After doing research on the United Farm Workers’ union Web site, Herrera discovered that six farmworkers died in California from heat-related illness this past summer – one of them a girl her own age.
“It just makes me think, `What is the governor doing?’ ” said Herrera. “Is he not helping the farmworkers? Because they have been going through this for a long time. So, why are they getting paid so little to be working so hard?”
Like her classmates, Herrera says she hopes the exhibition of their photographs will help impart some of the lessons they learned creating them.
“I thought of this project as an opportunity to tell my uncle’s story,” said Herrera. “But I just hope people realize the hard work that goes into the things we take for granted each day.”
Emily Henry (310) 540-5511, Ext. 380 email@example.com
THE WAY WE SEE IT:
L.A. TEENS ON IMMIGRATION
>When: Tuesday through Jan. 25. Hours are noon to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Friday (until 9 p.m. Thursday), 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday.
>Where: Skirball Cultural Center, 2701 N. Sepulveda Blvd., Los Angeles.
>Information: (310) 440-4500, www.skirball.org, www.facinghistory.org.