Housing units emerged in Mexico in the mid-20th century as a model of social housing inspired by European projects, designed to offer the working class decent, functional, and collective spaces. These complexes were designed as self-sufficient urban microcosms, integrating schools, markets, recreational areas, and shops, with the aim of reducing dependence on cars and strengthening community life. The Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Housing Unit is part of this modernizing impulse, embodying the promise of progress, order, and social welfare. However, over the years, multiple factors such as economic crises, institutional neglect, job insecurity, and the fragmentation of the social fabric led to the gradual deterioration of these spaces, resulting in problems of marginalization, insecurity, and a profound loss of quality of life.

Del Sur is a photographic project that documents and reinterprets everyday life within the Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Housing Unit, the neighborhood where I grew up and which constitutes the emotional and symbolic core of this visual investigation. Through images, the project seeks to reconstruct the intimate memory of the place, exploring the tensions between the original architectural utopia and contemporary social reality. The photographs function as fragments of an affective cartography that reveals the traces of a community in transformation: the inhabited spaces, the everyday gestures, the silences, and the traces of time that shape the identity of the place.

This work stems from a personal need to return to my origins in order to understand how space shapes subjectivity and the way we construct belonging. Photographing the unit is also an exercise in introspection, where nostalgia, criticism, and tenderness coexist. Del Sur proposes a perspective that moves away from stigma to situate itself from a place of closeness, seeking to dignify the experience of inhabiting these territories and generate a dialogue about urban memory, the working class, and the social processes that permeate community life.