By Julia Felsenthal

The self-taught photographer Gusmano Cesaretti grew up in Lucca, Italy, but as a child he fell in love with America through movies, jazz and the work of Beat writers like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. He arrived in the United States at age 19 on the day Kennedy was assassinated, and eventually made his way to California, where he found work in the photo department of the Huntington Library in Pasadena. It was during this time, in the early 1970s, that Cesaretti began to explore the Latino neighborhood of East L.A., photographing the people he met and the graffiti that decorated the buildings.

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Source: http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/