El Puche: life in the width of the border

Once the borderline has been crossed, the journey for an average immigrant arriving in the eurozone is far from over. The remaining distance to experience the feeling of a new home is what I call 'the width of the border'. Such concept certainly refers to a state of mind but also to a physical milieu generally located on the outskirts of urban areas. I have in the last five years regularly visiting El Puche, a deprived suburb of Almeria, the prosperous Andalusian city, where an unlikely coexistence of North-African immigrants, unskilled labor in the greenhouse industry, and local Roma, perennial dwellers at the margins of the Spanish society, struggle hand in hand to hold on over the europoverty line. Every new generations, often a result of intercultural marriage, shows the right potential to reach the goal of full integration, but young criminality is a too common shortcut in this community. The sense of this project is to melt my camera work in the local cultural life by focussing on positive representation. The ultimate aim is to depict the recurrent poverty as the object of an inspiring challenge rather than the corrosive stigma it seems to be.