In 1990, I set out on my Quixotic quest of capturing the essence of the Mexican festival as it existed during the last decade of the millennium.  I had regularly photographed indigenous people, beginning with discovering them during a series of plant collecting expeditions into the wilds of southern Mexico in the 1970’s, where the majority of the more than 60 Mexican cultures exist.
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I became thoroughly fascinated how each’s domains pervaded their respective regions, each with its own language, music and style.  Particularly interesting were their festivals, especially traditional propitiatory rituals dawning from the beginnings of agriculture, honoring respective agricultural deities for the same reasons as then and inspiring me to attempt to extract the essence of these cultural manifestations by photographing the important festivals of each culture during the magical timeframe that the last decade of the millennium provided - a magnificent opportunity to spend the next 11 years exploring and photographing Mexico, while assembling a historic collection of photography.  Armed with letters of introduction from the Ministry of Culture and demographic information identifying the greatest concentrations of native speakers of each culture, I targeted each's festivals, where I would show up completely unannounced, to make SURE that what I was able to find was exactly what was supposed to be there, without exaggeration. I honed skills that allowed me to enter the humble little  communities that I photographed and emerge with pure cultural treasure.  

My collection is now shared by the Benson Latin American Collection at the University of Texas, Austin and the Rockefeller Center for Latin American Art, at the San Antonio Museum of Art.