White Fence

Graciela Iturbide, the Hasselblad Award-winning Mexican photographer, is renowned for her exceptional career in documentary and artistic photography. With a poetic and profound approach, she skilfully captures the essence of Mexico's life and culture. Through Alfonso Morales' compelling narrative, we delve into Graciela Iturbide's fascination with capturing the lives of the Latino street gang "White Fence" in Los Angeles' Eastside. It explores the complexities of this community, offering a powerful reflection on identity and migration. White Fence offers an unparalleled visual journey through Graciela Iturbide's travels, showcasing unseen images carefully recovered from her archive, accompanied by iconography and documents that will help to better understand its history and broaden our knowledge. On May 2, 1986, images were captured that gave rise to the book A Day in the Life of America. Graciela Iturbide formed part of the team of photographers who, over the course of twenty-four hours, registered everyday life in different locations across the United States. Her contribution to the time capsule was a portrait taken in an apartment in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of East Los Angeles, California. There, she was welcomed by a group of Mexican Americans who were mostly deaf women with ties to the White Fence gang. That initial encounter set the stage for a long-standing friendship as well as the composition of a photographic tale that could very well be described as the intermittent chronicle of a day prolonged for thirty-three years, from 1986 to 2019. The present edition, comprised of two volumes, offers a selection of the portraits Iturbide took of her Angelino hosts as well as their surroundings, movements, and connections. It features an essay by Alfonso Morales Carrillo describing both the development of this photographic series and the historic background it ultimately conveys: the formation and persistence of communities of Mexican descent north of the Rio Grande.