This isn’t quite breaking news — I remember reading about this earlier in the year — but Racialicious had a post on it this week, spurred by a current gallery exhibition in Washington, D.C.

Dulce Pinzón took photographs of Mexican workers in superhero costumes. A window-washer is Spider-man; a laudromat worker is Wonder Woman. Here is her artist’s statement:

After September 11, the notion of the “hero” began to rear its head in the public consciousness more and more frequently. The notion served a necessity in a time of national and global crisis to acknowledge those who showed extraordinary courage or determination in the face of danger, sometimes even sacrificing their lives in an attempt to save others. However, in the whirlwind of journalism surrounding these deservedly front-page disasters and emergencies, it is easy to take for granted the heroes who sacrifice immeasurable life and labor in their day to day lives for the good of others, but do so in a somewhat less spectacular setting.

The Mexican immigrant worker in New York is a perfect example of the hero who has gone unnoticed. It is common for a Mexican worker in New York to work extraordinary hours in extreme conditions for very low wages which are saved at great cost and sacrifice and sent to families and communities in Mexico who rely on them to survive.

The Mexican economy has quietly become dependent on the money sent from workers in the US. Conversely, the US economy has quietly become dependent on the labor of Mexican immigrants. Along with the depth of their sacrifice, it is the quietness of this dependence which makes Mexican immigrant workers a subject of interest.

The principal objective of this series is to pay homage to these brave and determined men and women that somehow manage, without the help of any supernatural power, to withstand extreme conditions of labor in order to help their families and communities survive and prosper.

This project consists of 20 color photographs of Mexican and Latino immigrants dressed in the costumes of popular American and Mexican superheroes. Each photo pictures the worker/superhero in their work environment, and is accompanied by a short text including the worker’s name, their hometown, the number of years they have been working in New York, and the amount of money they send to their families each week.

What struck me most was the sheer amounts of money these individuals sent home to their families. Noe Reyes, the Superman/Delivery Boy above, sends $500 a week. That’s $2000 a month — a staggering amount that doesn’t even include his own living expenses in a very costly city (or, at least, metropolitan area).

This kind of “quiet economic interdependence” is not unique to the relationship between New York City and Mexico. You have African traders in China bringing consumer goods back to the Continent (though given the size of China’s economy, it’s not quite the same kind of interdependence). And here in Canada, I think primarily of the Filipino community. Particularly in the western provinces (Alberta, B.C.) Filipina women come to work as nannies and housekeepers, sending large proportions of their earnings back home. I’m reminded of a conversation I had with a local business owner who comes from the Phillipines. She runs a  successful commercial baking operation that services Winnipeg’s large Filipino population (as well as people like me who have a taste for delicacies like ube roll cakes). She told me about how she had just sent half a dozen computer systems back to her sister in the Philipines so her sister could open an internet/computer café where users could pay per hour to use the computers (apparently, Filipino students are expected to hand in typed assignments, but few families own their own computers).

I encourage you to check out the entire series of photographs, in which Pinzón makes visible the “invisible” workers of NYC.