Vecinos

Two brothers, newly arrived at the brittle cusp of adulthood, lean against a cobalt blue car in a rundown parking lot, confronting the camera’s gaze. One wears a hairnet, a gold chain, a self-protective posture, and a leather t-shirt resembling a bulletproof vest; the other sports a big white shirt with room to grow into, long dark trousers with room to grow into, and cradles a baby, presumably his own, that underscores his own youth. At an abandoned horse ranch with a shattered window, two luminous brown-skinned youths in cowboy hats, denim, flannel and big belt buckles are framed against the wide blue sky, looking something like homesteaders, or keepers of the high desert, or defenders of some exploited land. In the boxing ring, a Mexican flag hangs against the wall, and a man wearing a grey sweatsuit stands with his shoulders squared, his hand closed into a fist, with a Junior Championship belt slung over his shoulder. Meanwhile, the men standing outside a dilapidated adobe apartment complex seem to be appraising us, sizing us up, wondering if we’ve lost our way to end up here.

Each of these photographs suggests a buried and overlooked story, prompting the question of who these people are, where they came from and who they’ve been, what histories of dispossession have driven them here and what they might mean to each other. When they turn up in later photographs, wearing new clothes, it’s as if you’re crossing paths with a neighbor, like Albuquerque is not a big city of 550,000 but in fact some tiny, insular community.

Taken together, these images accumulate into a stylized family photo album. It requires further inspection, getting closer to the image and to the person who commands it, to recognize that the big white shirt on the young father is Isabel Marant, that the flannel on the homesteader is Louis Vuitton, that the sweatsuit on the boxer is Gucci. There’s a visual irony here. These are not the kinds of people that fashion brands readily admit to have been inspired by when they send their collections down runways in Paris, or London, or New York. But those who know know that Hedi Slimane, who long designed for Saint Laurent from his home in Los Angeles, got those weathered flannels from somewhere, and that the “far away” landscapes Ralph Lauren has steadily pulled from have not been razed of the Mexican indigenous people who wear the serapes or ruffles or fringe he pedals as “exotic” and then prices way way up for the easy, breezy white upper class. High fashion tends to feed on the lifeblood of the streets. It’s the streets, we know, that set the agenda.

The outsiders who come here, to Albuquerque, don’t tend to stay long. They go north, to Taos, and take the hot springs, then return home and speak passively of the great beauty of New Mexico — the rolling hills pockmarked with pinyons and junipers, or the wide mesas where the gazelles bound and graze. But they don’t encounter the pockets where real life happens: the lowrider nights where drivers make tricked-out cars dance beneath the moonlight, the rodeos where riders make horses buck beneath the hot sun. For the stylist Marcus Correa and the photographer Carlos Jaramillo — who street-casted all of their subjects and who have worked together for the better part of a decade — this is less a fashion story than the story of a specific and stylish people: the story of how a new Mexican identity emerged in the wake of westward expansion, of blended families and mingling bloodlines, a study of the enduring, intimate bonds between vecinos.

See the rest of this story in Justsmile Issue 5, coming this December.

Photography Carlos Jaramillo

Styling Marcus Correa

Grooming Jacqueline Chavez

Photography assistance Bonny Melendez and Louie Perea

Styling assistance Evie Lozano

PUBLISHED: November 27, 2024