By Oronte. A friend had told Matt that if we really wanted to see disparity we should go see Dignowity, a downtown neighborhood still patchily gentrified. We ended up near the convergence of I-10, I-35, and US Route 87. There we found this woman, a figure of lonely desolation, under the rectilinear forms of the highways looming overhead. More...

By Oronte. Danny calls himself a Crusty. Crusties are (often) young people in a subculture that has a look and lifestyle. They move around out of restlessness and a desire for experience, and often have no permanent home. Danny has been on the street 12 years but doesn’t consider himself homeless. More...

By Oronte. Hispanic Elvis was born and raised in San Antonio. He frequents tourist sites around the city and performs with and without music. (His guitar is made of cardboard.) His talent, he says, is a gift from God. More...

By Oronte. The next day, early, we headed for Market Square, in downtown San Antonio. The Market is a first stop for many tourists, with its good restaurants, food carts, performers, and more than 100 shops and stalls selling pottery, jewelry, rugs, and all manner of geedunk. More...

By Oronte. I had shown Donato the iconic cover of Henry Miller’s Air Conditioned Nightmare, a shanty dwarfed by a skyscraper, to illustrate Matt’s idea of disparity. Donato thought there might be an equivalent shot with trailers in the foreground and mansions behind, with the stone wall separating them. More...

By Oronte. Early scholars of gated communities in America point out that the walls don’t just enclose and separate the well-to-do. They also inspire containment for the less powerful: closed streets and barriers, such as highways, in urban neighborhoods; fences around low-income housing projects; cul-de-sacs and meandering streets that discourage public transport in subdivisions; and dead-end roads in trailer parks. More...

By Oronte. Our friend Matt had told us about the explosive growth of San Antonio, how it was projected to double again in size within the decade, and how the wealthy were retreating to its north edge. He said there were areas where rich lived cheek-by-jowl with poor, which might make for a meaningful visual contrast in our new gilded age. We took a ride. More...