As some of you know, this past June, Jim Harney’s oncologist told him that his throat cancer had returned and was spreading. Given “six months to a year” to live, Jim made some decisions which his friends would call characteristic. He decided to take a walk. On July 30th, he will leave Bangor for Boston where he will embark on a six-week walk to New Haven, stopping on his way to educate and tell the stories of millions of undocumented immigrants. During Jim’s latest trip to Mexico and Guatemala, he ate, slept, and accompanied these undocumented, disenfranchised people as he photographed. Now he is using the last of his strength to tell their stories and bring attention to their plight.

BACKGROUND: Jim Harney, 68, is Artist in Residence for Posibilidad, a Bangor-based nonprofit organization committed to revealing the plight of indigenous people whose lives have been disrupted by “Globilization”. For the past 20 years, Jim has traveled throughout North and South America, documenting the conditions of poverty and misery in which millions of poor peasants and migrant workers live, sharing in story and photographs the dreams and hopes of a dignified life. He has most recently returned from the US-Mexico and Mexico-Guatemalan borders walking with undocumented people headed to the US to find work.

“Undocumented people have come out from under the shadows and declared that they ‘exist,’” Harney says. “They’re here in the middle of our society. However we hardly interact with them. We don’t know their stories, hardships, anxieties and joys. We don’t see how U.S. economic policies are producing the migrant flow. Nonetheless the undocumented do the backbreaking work of providing our food, keeping our infrastructure intact, cleaning our homes, grooming our lawns. Still they are invisible.”