The Other Half
2012
12 framed Prints (8 x 10 in)
During industrial capitalism, walls were built within the city to keep the sites of the working class out of sight. Today, the walls are built around the nation to create a similar division between the exploited transnational labor pool and those who reap the benefits. There is a desire on the part of the elite to conceal sites from sight
The Other Half takes its name from the late nineteenth-century Victorian notion that attempted to restructure the working class as the inversion of the bourgeoisie’s own self-image. Today, cheap labor spills over the wall to fill the need for labor in this country, undermining the arrangements and order of “bourgeois” perception. Deportation comes to function as a regulatory mechanism, returning the working classes back across the wall: out of site, out of mind.
The Hotel del Migrante, located two blocks from the international border between Mexicali, BC and Calexico, CA, offers shelter, clean clothing, and food to deported migrants free of charge. The shelter feeds and provides sleeping accommodations for up to 200 deportees nightly. The Other Half documents the presence of transient bodies -- both deported migrants waiting to cross back into the United States and those returning home to the interior of Mexico -- alongside their responses when asked how they would define “deportation” and “reception”.