「Growing in the Shadow」 is a long-term photographic project developed in Tepito, one of Mexico City’s most historically layered and socially complex neighborhoods. Often reduced to narratives of crime or danger, Tepito functions in daily life as a self-organized social system, where family networks, informal economies, religious practices, and collective memory coexist within a dense and constantly repaired urban environment.

The project is photographed entirely in a 65:24 panoramic format, allowing people, spaces, and social structures to exist within the same horizontal field. This approach is not intended to dramatize scale, but to reflect how life in Tepito unfolds laterally—across streets, stalls, rooftops, and corridors—where survival, belief, intimacy, and tension are inseparable parts of everyday reality. Through repeated visits and long-term observation, the work documents architectural surfaces, bodily gestures, rituals, and transitional spaces that reveal how a community sustains itself under persistent pressure.

Rather than focusing on isolated events, Growing in the Shadow examines how environments shape individuals over time, and how lived experience leaves lasting marks on the urban fabric. The project seeks to understand growth not as a linear progression toward light, but as a process that takes place within constraint, uncertainty, and resilience—where life continues to form, quietly and persistently, in the shadow.