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In 1988 photographer Paul D’Amato was driving around Chicago with his camera when he decided to follow Halsted Street into Pilsen, the city’s largest Mexican neighborhood. Intrigued by the barrio and neighboring Little Village, he began to take photographs and would continue to do so off and on for the next fourteen years. D’Amato started with the public life of the neighborhood: women and children in the streets, open fire hydrants, and graffiti. But later—after he got to know the area’s Mexican residents better—he was allowed to take more intimate photos of people at work, families at weddings and parties, and even gang members.

Barrio collects ninety of these striking color images along with D’Amato’s fascinating account of his time photographing Mexican Chicago and his acceptance—often grudging, after threatened violence—into the heart of the city’s Mexican community. Some of the photos here are beautifully composed and startling—visual narratives that are surreal and dreamlike, haunting and mythic. Others, like those D’Amato took while shadowing graffiti artists in the subway, are far more immediate and improvisational. With a foreword by author Stuart Dybek that places D’Amato’s work in the context of the Pilsen and Little Village that Dybek has elsewhere captured so memorably, this book offers a penetrating, evocative, and overall streetwise portrait of two iconic and enduring Hispanic neighborhoods.

Morgan Page and Dustin Rice love history, especially the history of ordinary people and places. What began as an early date––a road trip to Spanish Fort, a ghost town near Wichita Falls––grew into years of crisscrossing Texas in search of stories hidden in abandoned buildings, neglected cemeteries, and all-but-forgotten towns. Bones of Texas features nearly 100 color photographs and 28 compelling histories. The book opens at Medicine Mounds, a sacred site of the Comanche people, and moves through tales both notorious and obscure, with subjects ranging from Machine Gun Kelly’s Texas hideout, to the “orphan train” of Galveston, to a high school gym where students once played a basketball game astride donkeys, to the grave of James “Double Jimmy” James, a 100-year-old watermelon farmer-turned-local legend. Each story, and every photo, is an act of preservation, allowing readers to encounter Texas history as a landscape of lives once lived, even as the physical markers continue to decay. Ultimately, the “bones” that Page and Rice encountered––often mysterious, always evocative––transcend time and place, and now endure in the pages of this unique book.