Corazón: from the Heart of Latin America

Book excerpt: W.R. Stanton spent the early 1970s hitchiking, taking buses, and riding atop trains and trucks through Mexico, Central America, and the Andes, seeking to experience more of the native culture he had fallen in love with during an earlier trip to Mexico. Almost twenty years later, as a professional photographer and filmmaker, he returned to Latin America to photograph what made his original experiences there so life-transforming: the people. Now, after a long career as a successful photographer and filmmaker, he has focused his efforts on creating a book that features the photos he took and the experiences he enjoyed working and traveling in the region over four decades. As the story of his early travels in the 1970s unfolds, it becomes clear that young people from all around the world were on a similar journey. This was a time when young people felt safe hitchhiking or traveling however they wantedas long as they had a backpack and a little cash. Stantons story and photos offer a window into what it was like to live in that more innocent time.