"You can't go home again."

I was off the grid this last week traveling with my parents from California to my dad's hometown of Raymondville, Texas. It’s a sleepy town on the southern tip of the country, an agricultural hub which was killed off by the unionization of the field workers by Cesar Chavez several decades ago. I’d actually spent a few days there about fifteen years ago on a quest to discover a bit of my dad’s past (and perhaps my own) while on a drive to Mexico in my mid-20s, but my dad hadn’t been back since he was a boy.

At the age of six he taught himself English, shined shoes for pennies, and dreamed of some unknown abstraction of a life larger than scrounging and fighting and losing on the working side of that grungy, gulf town. At the age of nine, armed only with a map and an ignorance of what was to come, he navigated his parents and siblings across the country, through Montana to Wyoming, in search of a wide variety of crops that needed harvesting. He incurred a lifetime’s worth of pain and education in those short years. Six years later he would be in California with a widowed mother and a few new siblings, excelling in school, working a full time job, the head of the household.

Though he was tight-lipped and supremely confident on the trip, I knew he was nervous of what would and wouldn’t be found on this trip. Just driving into the city limits brought silent tears to his face, and occasionally a whispered “wow” would breeze past his lips. We spent several days exploring what is left of the town, making fast friends with locals who have been there for decades and could relate to his memories. We made copies of old photos, sampled the best and worst examples of the local cuisine, and walked the streets that had hardly changed since the '50s.

It had been over sixty years since my dad had set foot in Raymondville. He had left that town a migrant child with many unfulfilled needs and very few wants. He returned a successful business owner, a respected community leader and teacher of men, a respected father and beloved grandfather. He arrived knowing who he was, but began searching for who he had been.

It was an emotional few days, priceless to watch and a joy to document and share. Here’s the very first photo I took on the plane as we left LAX, I intend to post more as I slowly edit through them over the next several months.

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