Authentic Texas

I love the West, and what’s still left of its most raw beauty is in Big Bend. Heat as endlessly wide as an ocean, with mythic snakes, thorns, and insects of unsentimental enormity. Night is another faraway time and exotic land, and you do get drunk on the astronomy of heaven. I never lived there, only drove around, slept here and there, always wondering what it’d be like day-to-day. Authentic Texas lets me meet the neighbors I never got to have. ~Dagoberto Gilb

In incredibly beautiful color and black-and-white photographs and in many in-depth interviews, Bill Wright and Marcia Hatfield Daudistel have documented the West Texas landscape and the self-reliant people who have chosen to live in isolated desert communities. In the huge horseshoe curve that extends to the international border—from the Davis Mountains to Presidio on the Rio Grande—the artists, retirees, storekeepers, pastors, teachers, and many more individualists are all here in this fascinating, must-read book. ~Elroy Bode

An awesome journey into the lives of families who live on the often brutal landscape of the Texas Big Bend. They live ‘authentic’ lives in one of the least populated regions of the United States, often existing outside of popular culture and the digital revolution, surviving and thriving in a landscape of heat and dust. We meet amazing people like Curry and Kate, owners of Eve’s Garden, an ecologically progressive bed-and-breakfast in an isolated town of five hundred people, and the Nietos, a Mexican-American family that owns the oldest department store in the border town of Presidio, a store where in days past all the Mexican cowboys used to come and buy their hats and boots. Daudistel writes with clarity and a poet’s sense of character and place, her words beautifully woven into descriptions as powerful as the photographs that accompany them. She brings to life these ‘ordinary’ extraordinary families, and she makes their stories resonate within. They are not just Texans, they are living proof of our past and a hopeful testimony of our future.

Wright’s photographs are amazing, deserving to become classics in both documentary and landscape photography. His images of people are as beautiful and vivid as those of Dorothea Lange. His desert landscapes are breathtaking, and as we gaze into the vast space he presents to us, we can’t help but to ask, ‘Where are the people? Who lives out there?’

Authentic Texas is the stunning answer to those questions.

~Daniel Chacón

If you have ever had any interest in the Big Bend region of Texas, this is the book for you. And if you think you do not want to know more about the Big Bend, this is also the book for you. ~Southwestern Historical Quarterly