Guillermo Ruiz de Teresa
Investing for Care

The built environment evidences a multiplicity of realities for diasporic communities. The ‘border thinking’ of multiple subjects contained within a single individual, the code-switching of bilingualism, the assertion of racial difference, the ability to participate in local and home-country politics, and ultimately the capacity to care for a community who is simultaneously here and there, is nurtured through unique urban spaces.

This thesis explores how finance has appropriated care within transnational communities in forming their multiple subjectivities. In particular, it looks at the way finance has shaped in specific ways the subject that emerged in the wake of capitalism’s financial turn, which Michel Feher refers to as the ‘invested self’.

The diasporic subject conceives of oneself as being on the border, or in that border space, resisting the drawing of borderlines, which in itself is a colonial act of power. The hegemony of finance has taken hold of this space. In this research, curatorial practices articulate through arrangement, narrative and spatialization, how the practice of a diasporic community to maintain, continue and repair collectively (to care) has been mobilised, through the built form, as a tool to enhance individuals own credit.

According to Joanne Tronto, the neoliberal subject is able to take risks, pursue private interests and failure to self-care is a mark of social inferiority. The invested migrant contributes to the growing literature that recognises the non-existence of the autonomous individual as a purely independent and self-sufficient economic agent. This self-determination unattainable fantasy, confronted with widespread threats and precarity, have in turn triggered a new type of ethics of care amongst migrant communities, whose actions are shaped as much by the notion of personal choice as by their awareness of mutual dependence within these social relations. If the neoliberal subject has privatised forms of being together and de-stabilised forms of attachment to places; the invested migrant has taken these alternative constructions of belonging in order to reimagine their political futures.

Mexicans in the United States are the world’s largest international migrant group, yet its architecture is absent from the dominant narratives of the American project. The hybridity of the Mexican diaspora, combining traditions and culture from the homeland and the stark alienation of late capitalism, imagines a new urban identity within its ‘borderlands’ while threatened by their transformation into abstract real estate value, fuelled by speculation of their condition as investors.

The study focuses on the close examination of the Mexican community in Chicago and its hinterlands through its architecture. This mode of ambivalent dwelling shaped by finance is not exclusive of the Mexican community in Chicago, yet its condition allows for a state of acceleration and saturation worthy of study.

How do we read the politics of care within these diasporic urbanisms? Through engaging relationally the “physical material objects, on and in which political histories” of this multi-sited community are inscribed, as well as the forms of mediation of these architectures through “representations, media, and documentary archives”.

In the context of this research, this footnote and its corresponding abstract looks at Fisher and Tronto's notion of 'taking care of—taking responsibility for activities that keep our world going’, through the work of architect Adrian Lozano and the role two of his buildings (BJHS and MFACM) have played in taking care of the community of Pilsen.