This project documents through an ethnographic comic how air pollution becomes entangled with everyday life. By following the stories of three people in one of Cuenca’s most polluted streets, I show how urban expansion and gentrification sit against precarious work and limited mobility. El Vado was a neighborhood marked by poverty, limited infrastructure and street-level drug dealing until the end of the 20th century, but even then, local craftsmen and neighbors came together to limit growing air pollution through local advocacy. Twenty years later and with more than five air-pollution-related deaths, neighbors have only seen a growing car industry and the purchase of historical buildings by rich conglomerates. As property prices rise in El Vado, older neighbors feel pressured to leave the neighborhood, or remain and face gentrification and air pollution escalation to highly toxic levels.In this comic, I aim to show what it is like to live or work in a place you know is slowly killing you. I portray the difficulties that low-income craftsmen in El Vado face when it comes to choosing between maintaining their business—and thus their entire income—and preserving their health. In doing so I use their testimonies as well as air pollution data and a short survey of the entire neighborhood to illustrate how air pollution becomes deeply entangled with other aspects of life.
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