The Remittance Landscape: Spaces of Migration in Rural Mexico and Urban USA by Sarah Lynn Lopez (review)

Sarah Lynn Lopez’s The Remittance Landscape: Spaces of Migration in Rural Mexico and Urban USA makes a valuable contribution to the small but growing body of research into new patterns of architecture and urbanism financed long distance by migrant remittances. Much of the emerging scholarship on the topic in Latin America has been focused on the individual house, such as the research presented in the exhibition Arquitectura de remesas (Remittance architecture) organized in Guatemala City in 2010 by a team of anthropologists, architects, and photographers working across three countries in Central America;¹ the related exhibition held in Mexico City the following year;² and Christien Klaufus’s work on provincial cities in Ecuador, Guatemala, and Peru.³

Many of these writers are concerned with identifying the emerging forms and aesthetics of this architecture, which—with its imposing scale and assertive façades featuring an eclectic assemblage of decorative features, bold colors, and finishes—is seen as disruptive in multiple senses. According to its critics, its estética de la sobrecarga (overcharged or overloaded aesthetic) is needlessly disruptive of traditional vernacular building practices and is insensitive to its semirural environment.⁴ For others it is deliberately disruptive of regimes of taste established by elites and, by extension, disruptive of the cultural authority of those elites, just as it disrupts prevailing economic and social relations. In this reading, hypercharged housing commissioned by rural residents forced into international migration as a marginalized, legally invisible, and nomadic work force marks a “challenge to a history of exclusion” and “a legitimate ostentation” that resists conventional categories of aesthetic analysis.⁵ Finally, according to Klaufus, it can be disruptive of the architectural profession itself: while established architects remain disdainful of the nouveau riche overtones of remittance housing, Klaufus recounts the experience of a young architect accepting remittance commissions from her former domestic as well as from a construction worker she had met on a building site—clients who would never have been in a position to hire an architect before migrating. For this architect, herself from a modest background, these projects provided a means of developing an architectural practice that was less dependent on the “good social connections” required to win prestigious commissions or academic positions.⁶ (Indeed, as Lopez notes, architects and engineers are increasingly employed on these projects, as migrants experience the limitations of entrusting the construction of their “dream homes” to lay builders who cannot be adequately supervised from a distance [55].)

Lopez’s approach is to widen the focus in two directions. On the one hand, she moves from the individual house to the efforts of groups of migrants to organize public—or better said, semipublic—projects in their hometowns, focusing on the example of rural Jalisco, where she did her fieldwork. On the other hand, she examines projects undertaken by Mexican migrants in their current places of residence in the United States in order to suggest the contours of a transnational remittance landscape. While the book’s subtitle (Spaces of Migration in Rural Mexico and Urban USA) gives equal weight to these two realms— perhaps at the behest of the publisher’s marketing department rather than the author—in practice the three central chapters presenting case studies of communal projects in Mexico form the book’s most compelling contribution, while the lone, final chapter on the U.S. context feels far less convincing.

The book opens with two chapters that effectively set the scene for readers new to the topic. Chapter 1 introduces the remittance house in both its social and architectural dimensions, including a detailed history of construction practices, tracing a line from the traditional rural house to the rapidly evolving forms of contemporary remittance residences...