Call for a pilgrimage against gentrification
Under the supervision of Nitzan Shoshan, I conducted my first experience of ethnographic fieldwork and qualitative research for my bachelor’s thesis on the gentrification of the Juárez neighbourhood in central Mexico City. I spent around a year walking the streets, speaking with residents, interviewing architects and investors, and assisting grassroots initiatives opposing gentrification, or “whitening,” as activists called the process, highlighting the intertwinement of race, aesthetics, and renovation. This first experience sharpened my attention to questions of temporality, expectations, possibility, and deception, particularly in relation to the ways technology and the built environment can enforce segregation while commodifying land through imagined timescapes.
