Carpoolers

The Car Poolers is a project that continues my visual research on how the suburbs impact the landscape, the city and its inhabitants. Since 2006 I started a documentation of Mexico´s process of becoming a country of homeowners. This issue, pushed and subsidized by the federal government since 2001, has produced over 400,000 new houses in the state of Nuevo León to which Monterrey is capital. The evidently unplanned urban and suburban development carried out by government and construction firms struck me as an issue that needed to be documented and addressed as something that would provide some kind of “prosperity” but also as some kind of consequence on the new homeowners daily lives. As such, my projects since then have concentrated in visualizing the invisible consequences of this 21st century Mexican progress. The rapid growth and construction of the houses outweigh that of the construction of infrastructure to inhabit these homes. Proper public transportation is lacking and so people have solutions to get to work even though they might be illegal and dangerous ones. These images of workers carpooling from the new housing developments in the northern low and middle class suburbs to the wealthy southern Monterrey suburbs seek to present peoples resilience, conviction and how it is more than often that the aspiration of a better life is paid at a higher cost by those with no money.