orn and raised in Chicago, 22-year-old photographer Sebastián Hidalgo has a front row seat to the changes sweeping through his city. In the Mexican-American community of Pilsen, where he grew up, he’s watched small mom-and-pop stores shut down, rents skyrocket, and families displaced by waves of gentrification that has shown no sign of slowing down in the last two decades. Roads & Kingdoms recently spoke to Hidalgo in New York about his work, and what he hopes people take away from his photographs.
Sebastian Hidalgo documents Pilsen, the old Chicago neighborhood where he grew up, hoping to capture the community before it is altered by rapid gentrification.
Sebastian Hidalgo grew up in Pilsen, an old Chicago neighborhood, when it was still Chicano through and through: Day of the Dead, Virgen de Guadalupe, Mexican Independence Day and other traditional festivals filled the community calendar. Murals from the late 1960s turned buildings into canvases, alleys into museums. And the food — “authentic Mexican” a restaurant critic called it — came straight from wherever the chef’s roots lay, be it Michoacan or Mexico City.
