About Building in America
Building in America is an ongoing multimedia documentary project exploring immigration, labor, home, and belonging in the United States.
The project began by documenting immigrant labor within the residential construction industry—the people whose hands quite literally build the places Americans call home. Since then, it has grown into a broader exploration of what it means to build a life in America and the many ways immigrants contribute to the communities, industries, families, and cultures that shape this country.
Through photography, film, writing, research, installation, and personal testimony, Building in America looks at both what immigrants build and what they carry with them: their labor, traditions, languages, memories, sacrifices, ambitions, and ideas of home.
At the center of the project is a question:
What does it mean to help build a country while still navigating what it means to belong to it?
As the project continues to grow, Building in America is also becoming a space for immigrants and their families to tell their own stories. These contributions form a growing archive of experiences—stories about leaving, arriving, working, raising families, creating community, starting over, and building a future.
There is no single immigrant experience, just as there is no single definition of what it means to be American. Building in America exists to document that complexity.
Where the Project Began
When you look at a house,
What do you see?
Founder’s Story
For me, Building in America began close to home.
I immigrated to the United States from Brazil with my family when I was young. We settled in Florida, and like many immigrant families, our experience in this country became intertwined with the work of building a life here—and, quite literally, with construction.
Years later, as a photographer and visual journalist, I began thinking more critically about the industry I had grown up around. I became interested in the people behind the houses, neighborhoods, and communities expanding across the country, particularly the immigrant workers whose labor is essential to residential construction but whose presence often remains invisible once the work is finished
That contradiction became the starting point for the project.
What does it mean to build someone else's home while trying to establish your own sense of home in America?
I began photographing construction workers and researching the relationship between immigration, labor, and the American housing crisis. What initially seemed like a story about construction quickly became a story about something much larger: visibility, contribution, security, and belonging.
As I spent more time with the project, I began to realize that construction was not its boundary. It was its entry point.
Immigrants build far more than houses.
We build businesses and families. We build communities and traditions. We create new languages between generations. We carry pieces of one home into another. We sacrifice, adapt, start over, and imagine futures for ourselves and for the people who come after us.
That realization began to reshape Building in America.
During the project's first installation, I invited other immigrants and people from immigrant families to contribute photographs, memories, and reflections about their own experiences. Seeing those stories enter the space shifted my understanding of what the project could become. I became less interested in trying to define the immigrant experience through my perspective alone and more interested in creating a place where many experiences could exist alongside one another.
Today, construction remains an important chapter of Building in America, but the project continues to expand beyond it.
It is becoming an evolving archive of what immigrants have built in this country, what we have carried with us, what we have had to leave behind, and what it means to make a home somewhere new.
Because ultimately, Building in America is not only about the structures we build.
It is about the lives we build within them.
