Barnard College Forum on Migration Presents El Otro Lado - (The Other Side), A Photo Essay on Mexican Migration by Pulitzer Nominee Writer and Photographer Mike Kamber Oct. 22

New York, NY, October 11, 2002—Pulitzer Prize nominee Mike Kamber will exhibit and discuss his photo essay on Mexican migration titled El Otro Lado - (The Other Side) on Tuesday, October 22, at 7:00 p.m. in the James Room, 4th floor Barnard Hall (117th St. and Broadway). This Barnard Forum on Migration event will also include remarks from Gerry Dominguez, Director of Casa Mexico, Hugo Hiriart, Director of the Mexican Cultural Institute, and Robert Smith, Professor of Sociology at Barnard. The exhibit will also be open for viewing on Wednesday the 23rd and Thursday the 24th of October.

Photo essayist Mike Kamber has worked as a New York City-based freelance writer and photographer since the late 1980s documenting New York’s Mexican immigrant population. He has made frequent trips to Mexico to produce articles about the massive migration of laborers to the U.S. and the effects of this phenomenon on Mexican society.

Kamber has also worked extensively outside of the United States, covering social issues and politics in the Carribean in the early 1990s and examining religious fundamentalism in Pakistan and Afghanistan since September, 2001. He spent several months writing and photographing a series of articles surrounding the plight of long-term Afghan refugees and the future of a post-Taliban Afghanistan.

Currently a writer for The Village Voice, Kamber has also worked as a photographer for The New York Times, The Associated Press, Newsday, The Baltimore Sun and New York magazine. His writing has appeared in various local publications as well as in two recently published books, Brooklyn: A State of Mind and The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2002 (Houghton Mifflin).

In the spring of 2002, Kamber studied journalism and languages as a Revson Fellow at Columbia University. He was nominated for a World Press Photo Award for his photography from Mexico, New York, Pakistan and Afghanistan, and for a Pulitzer Prize for national reporting for his series on Mexican immigration. Kamber is also a recipient of the Columbia University School of Journalism’s 2002 Mike Berger Award, for outstanding reporting on the lives of everyday New Yorkers.

Robert Smith is an assistant professor in the Sociology Department at Barnard College, a faculty fellow at the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy at Columbia University, and the co-founder of the Mexican Educational Foundation of New York. He has worked on Mexican migration for fifteen years as a scholar and activist.

Gerry Dominguez, founder and director of Casa Mexico, a non-profit community in New York City, migrated from the Mexican state of Zacatecas. He is also a former organizer of the Green Grocers Campaign, which fought for better wages and conditions for the undocumented immigrants working in bodegas, or green grocers, in the city. He currently works for the Mexican-American Students Organization, whose work directly contributed to the "Dream Law," recently signed by Governor Pataki, which offers in-state tuition to many undocumented immigrant students.

Hugo Hiriart is the director of the Mexican Cultural Institute and has had a long and distinguished career as a journalist, editor, and writer in Mexico.

The Barnard Forum on Migration is a series of seminars, lectures, and readings that explore issues connected to the movement of people from one part of the world to another, voluntary or otherwise. Each year the Barnard Forum on Migration will host distinguished writers and academics who will address a broad range of issues which relate to these important questions of migration and social order. Lectures offered through the Barnard Forum on Migration are supported by a bequest establishing the Weiss International Fellowship Fund to bring distinguished scholars in literature and the arts to Barnard. The Forum is organized by Caryl Phillips, the Henry R. Luce Professor of Migration and Social Order, who joined the Barnard in 1998 as a member of the English department.

For more information, please contact the Barnard Forum on Migration at 212-854-3577.
Contact: Petra Tuomi, Office of Public Affairs, 212-854-7097