Driven by inequality, the Mexican population represents the largest group of migrants in the United States to date. The continuous displacement over generations has formed geographic ties between “sending” and “receiving” localities. With remittance income representing 4% of Mexico’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP), migrants are financing and mobilizing physical transformations of Mexico’s built environment with money earned in the United States. The remittance landscape —elements constructed and altered with migrant dollars— can be found at multiple scales all across the country, influenced by U.S. experience and its aspirational lifestyle.

“Copies of abandonment: Only dreams remain” constitutes a spatial analysis of Mexico’s remittance houses production practices as the embodiment of migration geographical, social and economic displacement. The project analyzes the particular migratory case of Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where 80% of the latin community residing in the state are originally from the small town of Hueyotlipan, Tlaxcala. Illuminating the transformation of hometowns and the emergence of new architectural typologies, the exhibition unveils the intricate relationship between migration and the creation of new social and physical spaces, highlighting the significant role of the house as a remittance space that sums the construction practices and narratives of migrants as individuals, that are made visible by their communities. 

Seeking to understand contemporary migration not just geographically and historically, but in spatial and material terms, the exhibition presents the replication patterns that unfold from the construction industry in Wyoming that produces “model houses” —replicable mansions for the wealthy built and referenced by migrant workers— and conceives the migrant “dream house” in Tlaxcala —houses built and abandoned by the remittance money of migrants that may never return— as the amalgam of migrants’ life events and the macro forces that shape migration. Determined by representation, interpretations and material aspirations, the remittance houses operate as artifacts that produce temporal, social, political and economic collective patterns that establish the sending of remittances as a symbolic function, where its meaning is conceived, built and abandoned by individual dreams.