For the first fifteen years of my life, travel meant one route. LAX to Guadalajara, then two hours through endless patches of blue agave into Jalostotitlán, the small town my family calls Xalos. We never switched it up, never veered off the path. Sometimes we went more than once a year. Xalos was a second home.

I hardly remember the specifics. What stayed with me is a sense of freedom. Running the streets outside my grandmother's house, where the road turns from cobblestone to asphalt to dirt. A Volkswagen Beetle circling the block, blaring an ad for soap that was always on sale. Then the drive out to my other grandparents' ranch, which was like crossing into a different world. The Angelino in me was never ready for it. I still remember watching a goat go through the full cycle of farm to table, and not eating that night. I didn't realize it at the time, but those trips made me aware of a reality beyond the one I knew.

At sixteen, it stopped. Maybe it was rebellion. I started saying no to the familiar scripts. I quit piano, not because I hated music, but because it was inherited rather than mine. Around the same time I got fixated on photography and filmmaking, and became aware of what I wore and how it changed the way people read me. Fashion and cameras became my armor, my form of creative expression, and my way of carving out a place for myself.

The first time I ventured beyond Xalos was to China in 2012, at the end of college. I brought a camera, the way I have on every trip since. It was the first time I documented life thousands of miles from home, and the first time I understood I wasn't only making pictures to show my family. I was watching how a place shapes its people, and how the people shape their place. I wanted to keep doing that, and to share it with whoever was interested.

My parents left everything behind to come here. Their curiosity was inherited. The idea of travel came easy once I realized what was possible.

My career started in marketing, first at Ties.com, then as creative director at El Super, the largest Hispanic grocer in the country. I went freelance, then founded mÆdio, a creative studio built around photo and video production for travel, lifestyle, hospitality, and fashion brands. Along the way I've worked with global names like Tripadvisor, Intrepid Travel, and Four Seasons, and with boutique and emerging brands that are still figuring out what they sound like.

JacobsMedium is my practice. Documentary and editorial projects about people, place, and identity, from Cuba, Lebanon, Norway, and Mexico City to Manila and a lap around Australia. I'm interested in how history shows up in daily life, who gets to tell that story, and what people are building now.

It's also where I think out loud. About immigration, and what it means to be first-generation Mexican-American. About the political climate and the days I don't know how to feel about it. About questions with no practical use, like whether we're the only species that experiences awe.

Travel is what opens those questions. Being somewhere unfamiliar makes you notice what you assumed was fixed, including about home. I don't treat the two as separate.