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Moe FonerMoe Foner
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Session:         Page of 592

from Mexico, from all over. They're here doing jobs, work, and we are setting up workshops with these groups. We have fifty already set up to start, in which they will attend -- the participants will first be in a class learning how to use a camera. One of the big camera companies, through Ann Newman, has given us several hundred cameras, and these students in the class will be taught how to use it and to photograph their co-workers and interview them.

We have also received the support of Time-Warner and Life, which have agreed to develop the photographs, keep them on file, and make them available for an exhibition. Life wants to do huge blow-ups of photographs for public display, subways, you know, really major things, and we already have about fifty groups set up for it.

Q:

What are some of these groups, and how are the groups composed?

Foner:

They may be hospital workers, home-care workers in UNITE. They are nail polishers who work on people's nails. They may be people like out on the Island, workers who came here from Mexico and are trying to --

Q:

Street corner shape up, construction guys.

Foner:

Right. It was in the press that the population's response, the white population, beat up two of them so badly that they were hospitalized and almost died. As a result, there's a case against the people who did it, and that group is involved with us at Stonybrook. There are four colleges involved in the project through their students. NYU --

Q:

The Center for Worker Education of City College.

Foner:

Queens College and CUNY [City University of New York], and they keep adding all the time, more coming. The American Place Theater has actors who are studying acting, who are going to be in the project. We expect that this will become not only national, not only New York, but upstate, and we're discussing with SEIU how to do it in other cities. They would send somebody here to find out how to work it and go back and do it.

Q:

So it goes well beyond immigrants. It's low-paid workers in any kind of job where they're not recognized.

Foner:

The Unseen America.





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