Blog Post: Carla Maria Guerrero

I’m a graduating M.A. journalism student taking Jim Hubbard’s Visual Communication and Social Change class at USC Annenberg. I registered for the class not knowing quite what to expect but I have enjoyed the experience. Our projects are unique in that we are able to experience “photographic empowerment” ourselves-even though we are privileged students at an elite university in the United States.My project focuses on a Southern California swap-meet in the Inland Empire-in the 909. I decided to work on a topic that I am intimately familiar with. I wanted to explore a sub-culture within my own Latino, working-class, immigrant community from the vantage point of photographer/student/critical analyzer. It is, to a certain degree, an appendage of my M.A. thesis, which introduces unfamiliar readers to this world.

I have been working at my parents’ stand at a local swap-meet since 1994, when I was just nine. Since then, I have woken up on my weekends in the wee hours of dawn to help my parents set up merchandise and deal with customers. We are only one immigrant Latino family of hundreds across the state whose livelihoods depend on the income generated by the open-air markets known as flea-markets and swap-meets. (They are commonly known as pulgas and tianguis in Mexico).

I am glad I am doing this project for my class. I am not an outsider looking in on this swap-meet life. I belong to it and therefore I don’t feel intrusive or even creepy. The camera makes me uncomfortable-when I hold it or when I see others holding it. However, I’d rather be the one with the camera than have someone parachute in, take a couple of pictures, snap some stories and leave with no context or cultural significance of what it is they are capturing on film.

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