Alum's work at Arte Américas

By Shannon Milliken
The Collegian

In 2005, photographer Hector Amezcua was working alongside Pulitzer Prize winner Tom Knudson, a reporter for The Sacramento Bee, when they got a tip that Latinos working in United States forests were being mistreated.

The tip took Amezcua, a Fresno State graduate with degrees in mass communication and Chicano studies, out into the field to hunt down the story.

The photographs Amezcua shot for The Sacramento Bee are now on display in Fresno’s Arte Américas museum.

At first the two journalists had no idea which companies to investigate, Knudson said, and it took nearly three months to find a worker willing to speak to them.

But, they knew there was a story there that needed to be told.

“We went out for months and months and ran into just about every dead end you can imagine,” Knudson said. “Workers were often inclined not to say too much because they were afraid of losing their jobs.”

They learned that many of the workers were from Mexico and Guatemala, so Knudson and Amezcua took two trips there and began to find people who had worked in the U.S. forests and were now willing to talk because their contract for the job was over.

“The stories we heard were gripping and powerful,” Knudson said.

Amezcua, who is from Mexico City, learned that many of the Latino workers who were coming to work in U.S. forests were dying in van accidents just on the commute to work.

Fourteen workers were killed in one such accident in Maine where the driver was not trained to handle a van.

Amezcua said there have been a number of similar accidents, including one in Washington in which the driver was unlicensed and had no experience driving through the snow.

In addition to transportation hazards, Amezcua and Knudson found that many of the workers were forced to pay for their own tools and living expenses.

“They fall into indentured servitude,” Amezcua said. “They get scammed by people who say they have visas for them when they don’t. Then they are charged for transportation, tools and living arrangements. One man ended up with a check for $1.98.”

Documentation of the investigation through stories and photographs appeared as a three-part series in The Sacramento Bee in November 2005.

Though The Sacramento Bee had done a similar investigation about the men of the pines, or “Los Pineros,” in 1992, the work conditions had not improved in the 13 years between the two reports.

After Amezcua and Knudson’s “Los Pineros” project appeared in 2005, Knudson said that new legislation was generated about the workers conditions and it is now pending in congress.

Amezcua and Knudson were also awarded by several organizations for their work on the “Los Pineros” project, including the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, the Inter American Press Association’s Online News Coverage Award and the Overseas Press Club of America.

“But the most important thing is that we’ve actually been able to bring it to the light,” Amezcua said.

“There’s just this passion that I have for telling these people’s stories. That’s the reason I wanted to do this, because I want people to see this and be willing to help people in need.”

The reporting and investigation for the project was a team effort.

“Hector is the first photographer in The Sacramento Bee’s history to get on the byline of something like this,” Knudson said. “He got the byline because he was an integral part of the investigation and I couldn’t have done it without him. It was more than just an assignment for him, asit was for me also.”

The photographs from the “Los Pineros” project, which show some of the tragedy of the Pineros’ work conditions, will be on display at Arte Américas until Nov. 12.

The project is also packaged online and can be viewed at http://dwb.sacbee.com/content/news/projects/pineros/.

Comment on this story in the Features forum >>