New Neighborhood, Tijuana - 2011 Transported Home, 2km - 2010 Transported Motel, 800m - 2010 House Awaiting Transport #1, U.S., 100m - 2011 New Development, Tijuana - 2011 New Development Street, Tecate - 2012 New Development Street, Tijuana - 2011 Transported Home, 1km - 2010 Transported Home, 400m - 2010 Transported Home, 5km - 2010 Transported Home, 8km - 2010 New Houses #2, Tijuana - 2011 Transported Home, 21km - 2010 Construction Site #1, Tijuana - 2011 New Houses #3, Tijuana - 2011 New Build, Rosarito - 2011 Construction Site #2, Tijuana - 2012 U.S.-Mexico Border East Terminus, 0km - 2011

The suburbs of Southern California go on and on and on some more, a sea of cookie-cutter houses so vast it's crossed the border into Mexico. This collision of cultures fascinates photographer Anthony Marchetti, whose series Occidente Nuevo and Little Boxes document the banality of suburban sprawl that's migrated south from San Diego into the regions around Tijuana.

Marchetti has long been intrigued by suburban landscapes, inspired by the work of Robert Adams and the bleak but striking photos of the famous New Topographics exhibition. Opting for a bulkier and more time-consuming large format camera to produce his stark shots, Marchetti says he aims for the spot between photojournalistic documentation and artful representation, a place he calls "the documentary aesthetic."

His approach provides the viewer a chance to sit with the reflection of San Diego in Tijuana. The cheap designs, building materials, and houses that form the subject matter of the two series were essentially discarded by their former owners in California. Marchetti's documentation of this transfer portrays a second-hand, dreary aesthetic that also feels somehow new.

“I think it’s really interesting how people are able to reuse that stuff, although I’m not sure all the building materials are necessarily good for people to be using," Marchetti says. “I was also interested in what travels what way. Discarded refuse travels from the United States down to Tijuana, and what comes the other way is less goods or objects, but more people.”

The phenomenon of Cali homes appearing south of the border was borne of convenience and economic sense. Before the economy tanked, construction was happening so fast that land had to be cleared quickly. To the U.S. owners of these rambler-style tract houses, built in the '50s and '60s to accommodate a booming population, they went from representing the American dream to simply taking up space. “The developers just wanted those older houses off the property and were willing sometimes to just give them away, or to sell them for a very nominal fee if they had to," says Marchetti. "You could probably buy a house and get it down to a spot in Mexico, if you had the plot of land, for under $10,000.”

Marchetti first heard about this material migration during an an exhibition in his home state of Minnesota. He caught a lecture by an architectural professor from San Diego who explained how the ubiquitous stuff of suburbia – windows, garage doors, the houses themselves – were being shipped south to the outskirts of Tijuana.

Prior to walking across the border, Marchetti landed in San Diego, where a chance meeting with family friends brought about an introduction to Hector Lizarraga. He became Marchetti's trusty guide through Tijuana during seven visits between 2010 and 2013. At first, Lizarraga wasn’t sure what the photographer was looking for, so Marchetti photographed the more apparent, newer housing developments, bleak rows of cloned concrete houses marching across the hills. These are the photos that comprise the Little Boxes series.

Happening upon a house that clearly had been transplanted from across the border, Marchetti pointed it out to Lizarraga, and it all clicked into place. “Once he saw that, he knew where literally hundreds of examples were,“ says Marchetti. The colorful, diverse houses stand in contrast to the homogenous subdivisions that could just as easily be any one of hundreds of California suburbs. These homes are the subjects of the Occidente Nuevo series.

The photos in these series underscore the semi-permeable membrane between our neighboring nations, one that Marchetti says plays a significant conceptual role in the work (Each photo in Occidente Nuevo comes with a note indicating the subject's distance from the U.S.-Mexican border). The border is in some ways meaningless, but in other ways all too real, visible even in aerial photographs that don't depict it as a physical barrier or a line on the map. “You can actually see the really sharp delineation where there’s all this stuff built right up to it on the Mexican side, and then this really expansive open area that’s mostly just traversed by border police on the American side.”

Despite the obvious and subtle notions of division that invariably arise in any examination of the U.S.-Mexican border, Marchetti says he doesn't want people reading too much into his photos beyond the specific subjects they capture. “I think of the photos as documents, evidence of this phenomenon.”

All photos: Anthony Marchetti