Alejandro Cartagena’s Suburbia Mexicana (2006-2009) is an expansive documentary series that confronts the frenetic suburban growth around Monterrey, Mexico, during the 2000s. Developed in multiple chapters, the project chronicles how government-subsidized housing booms and laissez-faire urban planning transformed the landscape and lives of northern Mexico. Cartagena, who made Monterrey his home, uses his personal connection to the region to expose the price of growth – the ecological and social upheaval behind neat rows of new tract houses. In 2008, a historic surge of housing loans spurred hundreds of thousands of Mexicans to pursue the sueño of suburban homeownership, only to encounter the harsh reality of bureaucratic hurdles, debt, and environmental strain. The Mexican suburbs, as Cartagena has noted, became “symbolic” of deeper ills – representing systemic corruption, lax urban oversight, and individual aspirations turned obsessions.

Visually, Suburbia Mexicana merges rigorous documentary observation with a poetically critical eye. Cartagena’s large-format color photographs are at once absorbing and unsettling. He frames endless rows of identical miniature houses stretching to the foothills of majestic mountains, “perpetual rows of tiny houses slicing directly into the foothills” of Monterrey’s peaks. These small, brightly painted homes line up “like pearls on a string” along scarred landscapes – images that initially read as orderly or even picturesque, yet quietly reveal the disruption of “previously intact” ecosystems and communities. In other images, dried riverbeds choked with trash and vacant inner-city lots speak to the mismanaged water resources and urban neglect that accompanied sprawl. Cartagena nods to the New Topographics tradition of depicting “man-altered” landscapes, but he diverges from their cool detachment. Instead of merely aestheticizing banality, his photographs leverage subtle beauty and rich detail to engage the viewer with urgent issues – greed, fragile ecologies, and the human cost of unchecked development. Each sub-series (from Fragmented Cities to Lost Rivers and People of Suburbia) examines a facet of this suburban phenomenon: the cookie-cutter housing tracts, the polluted or diverted waterways, and the everyday lives of residents adapting to these new environments. The series balances sweeping panoramas of urban sprawl with intimate portraits of suburban families customizing their homes and forging community, avoiding caricature or irony in favor of empathy and critique.

As a cornerstone of Cartagena’s practice, Suburbia Mexicana situates his concern for urbanization, labor, and identity firmly in Mexico’s contemporary context. The work was published as a photobook in 2011 (Daylight/Photolucida) with an introduction by Karen Irvine, underscoring its significance as a “plea for responsible, sustainable development in a rapidly changing world”. The series has been exhibited internationally, including as a featured show in Toronto’s CONTACT Photography Festival (2011) and in museums and galleries from North Carolina to Sonora, Mexico. By marrying local specificity with global resonance, Cartagena’s Suburbia Mexicana offers a visually striking indictment of speculative urban growth and a heartfelt call for more humane city planning. It established the thematic and ethical framework that continues to shape Cartagena’s art: an insistence that the patterns of development we see – the houses, the highways, the “nowhere” suburbs – are in fact reflections of collective values and policies, and thus subject to change.