Latino Auto Repair

In Williamsburg, Brooklyn, there once was a local family‐owned auto repair garage called Latino Auto Repair. Yielding to the unrelenting pressures of encroaching gentrification, it was sold in the 90’s and turned into a hipster‐hangout bar, which then turned into a gourmet grocery store. This ebbing of an era served as both inspiration and metaphor for Latino Auto Repair.

Photographed in the US and throughout Central and South America as well as Cuba, Latino Auto Repair is a salvage expedition imbued with an emotional and passionate view of a vanishing era before computers served as intermediaries between mechanic and car, and one in which man and his machine formed a personal bond of mutual assistance for survival. It exalts an ordinary trade whose torch has been largely passed on to Hispanics; a trade that by and large still thrives in their native countries. From rustic independent garages, classic cars, and beauty of the model-mechanics themselves, Latino Auto Repair is as much a fetishizing of Latino physical machismo as it is of American automotive muscle.