Abandonment Copies is a vital reflection on the architecture of migration between Mexico and the United States. A comment on the differences and the similarities between the ways of living and inhabiting in both countries: the individual aspirations, the crude realities, and the way architectural models can be translated through the particular lens of the society in which they are inserted.

The project compares three moments of permanent and temporary habitation between Hueyotlipan, Tlaxcala and Jackson Hole, Wyoming, (sister cities)

THE INHABITED HOUSE: The places that immigrants inhabit while working in Jackson Hole.

THE MODEL HOUSE: The houses immigrants build for the wealthy community of Jackson Hole.

THE DREAMED HOUSE: The houses, immigrants build in their place of origin, for which they save and send remittances to their families.

The migration to the north continues to be one of the results of the ongoing inequality and violence that exist in Mexico. Mexicans are still the largest community of immigrants living in the United States. The result of years of continuous displacement of people throughout several generations was the emergence of a geographical tie between the sending and the receiving communities in both countries. For example, 80% of the Latinos residing in the State of Wyoming are native to the Mexican State of Tlaxcala, in particular from the municipality of Hueyotlipan. Examples of this can be found throughout the Mexican - USA territory. Communities formed in foreign lands that hold a cultural association of origin, such is the case of Puebla - New York; Tulancingo - Salinas, CA. among many others.

The project focuses on the architectural parallelisms between the three types of housing. The places where the immigrants live, the houses where they work, and the houses they build back in Mexico. The work shows the constant struggle to build a house of one’s own, and the ties of longing that immigrants maintain with their families and their native communities even after years of living abroad. A lifetime of endurance, living overcrowded in extremely precarious conditions, working illegally in services and construction, to send money savings back to Mexico; where their family members construct self-built mansions inspired by the mansions the same immigrants helped to erect in Wyoming.

In a self-built dwelling, the essence of the house is not delegated to a specialist, which allows the families the particular freedom to (re)define and build the space as they wish. To have that liberty radically and profoundly affects the structure of these houses, however, the fact that there are no architects does not mean there is no architecture. The spaces are kept in a perpetual open modus, a state of ambiguity, where it is not possible to know if the house is being built or being abandoned. The practice of building is forged on the go, responding to the intuition and the aspirations of the owners. An ideal of a house that they may never inhabit, but whose construction motivates and pleases them. This is a response to the need of imagining a life different from one’s reality. A phenomenon that is reproduced throughout Mexico. An architecture that emerges from economic and global demands, where priority is given to the flow of economic capital at the expense of human movement. These are the utopian constructions that mirror the abandonment of a territory, a family. A stark and bare landscape.

The project covers ten case studies but herein the case of the Mexican immigrant Abraham Hernández Bautista was selected as a sample. The extensive project includes a documentary, and an archive (blueprints, diagrams, photographs, and texts).