Photojournalism nominee

In Mexico’s San Quintin valley, thousands of indigenous farmworkers are hired on a daily basis as a source of cheap and flexible labor. They endure long hours hand-picking produce in extremely hot temperatures for as little as 9 dollars a day and live in areas of difficult access where large families are crammed into small rooms in makeshift houses made of little more than cardboard and plastic, without electricity or running water.
San Quintin is a photography project that documents the situation of migrant farmworkers in Mexico and addresses pressing social issues such as poverty, health and human rights violations. My intention is to denounce the inhumane living conditions that the farmworkers endure as a result of the miserable pay that they receive meanwhile the corporations they work for make millions by the sweat of these laborers’ brow.

Griselda San Martin is a documentary photographer and visual journalist based in New York City and Tijuana, Mexico. She studied Business Administration at Esade Business School in Barcelona and has an M.A. in Journalism from the University of Colorado Boulder. In June 2015, she graduated from the the Photojournalism and Documentary photography program at the International Center of Photography in New York.
She has been photographing and documenting the U.S.-Mexico border for the past four years. Her documentary work explores transborder and transnational issues and focuses on concepts of identity and belonging in diasporic communities and ethnic minorities. She is interested in in-depth stories that transcend borders and cultures and challenge popular assumptions and dominant media discourses. The stories of those whose struggles are disregarded, the minorities, the displaced, the underrepresented communities and those who live on the margins of society.
She has received several scholarships to develop her projects, such as the Beverly Sears scholarship in Boulder, Colorado and the George and Joyce Moss Scholarship in New York. Her short video Soldiers Without an Nation was awarded second place at the Gender and Justice competition held by the Supreme Court of Mexico, United Nations Women, United Nations Human Rights