With his pictures, he homes in on the historical amnesia that envelops not just the Mexican-American War but so much else of America’s past, effectively enabling our new era of intolerance. – Simon Romero, New York Times There is no photographic record of the period when Mexico ruled what is now the American West. To visualize the people and places from the remarkable yet unseen Mexican era, photographer Tomas van Houtryve photographed the region with glass plates and a nineteenth-century wooden camera. Van Houtryve pairs portraits of direct descendants of early inhabitants of the West—mestizo, Afro-Latin, indigenous, Crypto-Jewish—with photographs of landscapes along the original border and architecture from the Mexican period. This book challenges dominant Western mythologies and questions the role that photographs (both present and missing) have played in shaping the identity of the West. This book has four covers, each featuring a different portrait on the front and a landscape on the back. Trade copies are chosen at random; for signed copies, please choose either Bernadette , Dorothy , Gomeo , or Nathan below.