Mexican Flophouse

For a few months I lived in the cheapest hotel in Mexico City’s centro district. It’s at the intersection of the two largest and busiest streets in the city – and one can always hear the roar of engines. Downstairs is a tie shop, a coffee shop, a sex shop, and a bar where you can pay twenty pesos to dance with a prostitute. Across the street is one of the oldest and most beautiful churches in Mexico City. An art-deco building that survived the 1985 earthquake, the hotel offers monthly residences to artists, closeted drug addicts, eccentrics and refugees. Tourists pass through and some of the residents have been here for as long as ten years. They speak English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, a variety of African languages and others. The photographs in this collection are my first-person account of my time with the people who call this place home.