This project is a comparative case study of the dwellings of Mexican migrants: the residential homes where they work (“the model home”), the places where they are currently living (“the inhabited home”) and the houses they are in the process of building in order to move into them in the future (“the dream home”). The specific community with which I’ve worked on this project is from the state of Tlaxcala in Mexico and has been established for various generations in the city of Jackson Hole, Wyoming in the US. There, they work as construction workers, carpenters, cleaners and in the food service industry, among other occupations; as such, they clearly make up a large part of the city’s and the state’s workforce.

The peculiarity of this case study is that these people build their own homes in Mexico with the money they earn working abroad—this is architecture of migration and flux. Though their illegal status has prevented them from owning property in the US, they conserve an underlying feeling of rootedness to their country of origin: it is where they invest their hopes to build what would be their eventual home, longing to return one day and finally occupy the property they planned, with a better quality of life. Reproductions of Abandonment poetically describes three interconnected spaces, three loci in constant tension: the space that these Mexicans inhabit (trailers, motel rooms, basements), the space they want to inhabit (unoccupied houses under construction) and the space where they work (mansions occupied only three weeks out of the year).