Suburbia Mexicana Project
Girl Coming Home To Suburb In Juarez From A Night Out In The City
2009, Juarez, MX. courtesy of Circuit Gallery, Toronto

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Suburbia Mexicana is a five part project by Mexican photographer ALEJANDRO CARTAGENA GONZÁLEZ that revolves around the representation of the current Mexican suburban sprawl with a focus on the metropolitan area of Monterrey.

This image has been taken from the fifth part of this photographic project entitled “people of suburbia”: at the beginning of 2009, I returned to the housing developments I pictured 2 and 3 years ago. It seemed to me that the ideal of private property in Mexico had created a blindfold and I wanted to understand the human part, the beneficiaries’ point of view, of this situation.

Even though that in my initial posture of the Suburbia Mexicana project I understood it was not only in the representation of lifestyles (as many photographers have done before) where I would find a proactive work that could actually advance the visual study of the unending capitalist endeavor of urban growth, I decided to risk myself and picture the people of the City of Juarez where the population has almost tripled since 2002. It is also the home town to my family which has lived there since the end of the 19th century.

ALEJANDRO CARTAGENA GONZÁLEZ‘s work is primarily documentary based, and employ landscape and portraiture as a means to examine social, urban and environmental issues in Latin America. Make sure to check out more about Suburbia Mexicana via his website: http://alejandrocartagena.com/