Fronteras

Wired magazine has provided a timely review of two series of photographs by Minnesota photographer Anthony Marchetti.  

The series, entitled Occidente Nuevo and Little Boxes, reveal Southern California suburban sprawl moving south of the border into Tijuana. That’s part of a series of stories Fronteras Desk reporter Jill Replogle has been covering for the past few weeks.

Occidente Nuevo documents the strange phenomenon of ranch-style Southern California houses exported in full to Tijuana – discarded by their SoCal owners, cheap box homes planted on northern Mexican soil. From the photographer's website:

This 'new west' project documents results of the cross-border transmigration of building materials and even small suburban homes from San Diego to Tijuana. Although located only 20 miles apart, few cities could be more different from each other. San Diego calls itself “America’s finest city,” boasting some of the wealthiest subdivisions in the country, while Tijuana is viewed as decadent, transient and very poor. Yet in a demonstration that one city's trash is another's treasure, Tijuana receives and recycles San Diego’s abandoned structures, re-using and reconstructing materials into buildings that offer new opportunities for living and working.

Little Boxes documents the explosion of suburban gated communities on the outskirts of cities like Tijuana during the booming mid-2000s. Many of these communities have lost homeowners, with 50,000 homes abandoned in Tijuana alone and some 600,000 across Mexico. 

Per Doug Bierent in Wired:  

The photos in these series underscore the semi-permeable membrane between our neighboring nations, one that Marchetti says plays a significant conceptual role in the work ...The border is in some ways meaningless, but in other ways all too real,