Stereotypes and Gender Roles in Unidad Independencia Through Nacho López’s Photographic Archive

With the arrival of Adolfo López Mateos to the government, a great construction plan was carried out for the Mexican Social Security Institute (IMSS) with the objective of having adequate buildings to cover the provision of social security services throughout the country, building in 1959 in the Federal District the Unidad Independencia Housing Complex, whose goal was “to give the country a new type of Mexican, with a clearer civic culture.” By including a Casa de la Asegurada in its program, it was expected to continue the search for gender equality begun in 1951 by Ruiz Cortines. For the understanding and dissemination of daily life developed in the Unidad Independencia, the IMSS hired the photographer Ignacio “Nacho” López Bocanegra whose work was used as propaganda. Currently, Mexico’s National Housing Program (2019–2024) proposes Unidad Independencia as a reference for affordable and quality housing. The purpose of this text is to analyze the functioning of gender roles in relation to the space of this housing complex through the lens of Nacho López in order to understand if it can be a model in this aspect. In order to obtain such results, two phases of research will be carried out: (1) The analysis of image parameters by restricting the visual codes with the stereotypes and gender roles focused on their spatial aspects; and (2) The evaluation of the archive images through a series of diagrams that translate the qualitative data and overlap them so that the analysis acquires representativeness in order to establish a comparison between the gender roles within the housing complex narrative.

Palabras clave: Conjuntos de vivienda, Metodología, Fotografía, Código visual, Fotoperiodismo.