Travel with Rolando Chang Barrero

Guadalupe Mountains National Park. Photography by Rolando Chang Barrero Three Days of Solitude, Stone, and Sky My Time at Guadalupe Mountains National Park By Rolando Chang Barrero More from National Parks Service Welcome to Travel with Rolando! Subscribe to YouTube     Support me at Patreon Travel With Rolando Guadalupe Mountains National Park. Photography by Rolando Chang Barrero There are places you visit, and then there are places that quiet you down. Guadalupe Mountains National Park did exactly that for me. Tucked into far West Texas, where the desert stretches wide and the sky feels impossibly tall, this park offered me three days of pure serenity, physical challenge, and deep connection to the land. No crowds. No noise. Just wind, stone, and time slowing to a crawl. Guadalupe Mountains National Park. Photography by Rolando Chang Barrero   From the moment I arrived, I knew this wasn’t going to be a “check-the-box” national park visit. Guadalupe demands presence. I...

Walking the Landscape My Visit to the Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas by Rolando Chang Barrero Welcome to Travel with Rolando! Subscribe to YouTube     Support me at Patreon Website    Video Short on YouTube Spending time at the Chinati Foundation is not a casual museum visit—it is an act of immersion. I spent several hours walking the grounds, slowing my pace, letting the West Texas light shift, and photographing Donald Judd ’s 15 Untitled Works in Concrete . The experience was physical, meditative, and deeply intentional. Installed between 1980 and 1984 , these monumental concrete forms are arranged across the open landscape of the former Fort D.A. Russell. Each work is distinct—variations in geometry, negative space, openings, and proportion—yet collectively they function as a single composition unfolding over distance and time. This is not sculpture meant to be glanced at. It is sculpture meant to be walked . As I moved from one structure to the next, the de...

Stories of Segregation: An American History Lesson A Visit to the Blackwell School National Historic Site, Marfa, Texas  by Rolando Chang Barrero More from National Parks Service Welcome to Travel with Rolando! Subscribe to YouTube     Support me at Patreon During my time in Marfa, Texas, I visited one of the newest and most powerful sites in the National Park Service system: Blackwell School National Historic Site . What I encountered there was not just a preserved building, but a deeply human story—one written by prejudice rather than law, and one that still echoes loudly today. Built in 1909 , the Blackwell School served Mexican and Mexican American children during an era of de facto segregation. Although segregation in Texas was not always codified in the same way it was in the Jim Crow South, the practice of “separate but equal” was firmly enforced through social norms, local policies, and institutional bias. From 1889 to 1965 , Mexican American students in Marfa w...