| Donna DeCesare | ||
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UNCA -
Oct. 30- |
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Shadow Dreams and New Youth
Visions
USA - 1999 award recipient Since 1993 I have been documenting the spread of Los Angeles gang culture to El Salvador. My photographs explore the shadow dreams, gang affiliations and dislocated lives of youth who are forming a new stateless class of migrant outlaw. I seek to strip away the macho veneer that masks their hopes and fears. Last year, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) began enforcing provisions of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act and Anti-Terrorism Act passed in 1996. Now a single brush with the law can result in deportation for one time juvenile offenders. Often young criminal deportees have plea-bargain convictions for non-violent street drug offences. Some are legal immigrants whose previous misdemeanors like shoplifting or smoking marijuana have been retroactively reclassified as more serious offenses. Nearly all have paid for their crimes with prison time in the United States before the INS scoops them up and sends them "home." Even legal immigrants who have spent most of their lives in the United States are being sent to countries such as El Salvador and Haiti whether or not they have relatives there or speak the language. Many of these deportees are members of gangs such as the Mara Saluatrucha and Eighteenth Street, which is the largest Latino gang in Los Angeles. Since its inception in 1993, the Violent Gang Task Force of the INS has deported hundreds of members of Mara Salvatrucha and Eighteenth Street to El Salvador. These members often carry their affiliations and vendettas with them, and attempt to recreate the gang lifestyle in places like San Salvador. The peacetime homicide rate in El Salvador is now even greater than that of Colombia and far exceeds the average yearly death toll during the 12 years of civil war. There is a real danger that an unintended effect of the U.S. laws will be to undermine local efforts to protect human rights of street children and marginalized adolescents in Central American and Caribbean societies. Nations as distinct as El Salvador and Haiti are already burdened by a legacy of violence and injustice. Since 1996, the annual rate of criminal deportations to Central America and Caribbean countries has increased by 40 percent. By greatly accelerating the deportation of youths with U.S. gang affiliations and criminal histories, current U.S. immigration policy is helping to create a violent global underclass throughout the region. The media in these Central American and Caribbean societies tend to blame violent crime almost exclusively on unwanted youth from the United States. El Salvador has responded to the burgeoning number of criminal deportees by suspending rights of habeas corpus and reinstating the death penalty. The Haitian government has recently begun imprisoning U.S. criminal deportees upon arrival, even though they have not committed any crime there. With this project I hope to show that compassion is not foolish, and that there is no justice without respect for all human rights.
Publications: Aperture, The New York Times Magazine, Newsweek, The Atlantic, Der Spiegel (Germany), Forbes, The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Los Angeles Times, Double Take, Grand Street, The Village Voice and others. Education: M.Phil., Literature, 1979 Essex University, Colchester, England. B.A., Literature, 1976, SUNY College at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY.
Exhibitions: (Partial listing of solo exhibits)
Group Exhibits: (partial listing)
Awards
Panelist: " Youth Violence and the Media" Corcoran Museum of Art 1997Keynote address: Conference of The Pan American Health Organization 1997Keynote address: The Violence Prevention Coalition of Greater Los Angeles, 1997Consultant: Save the Children, UNICEF and the Interamerican Development BankHas taught photographic journalism workshops in Brazil, El Salvador, New York. Photographs in numerous private collections. Additional sources of information on Donna de Cesare:
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