Joel Salcido grew up with one foot in Mexico and the other in the United States, straddling two languages and two cultures. As a staff photographer for the El Paso Times, he documented the Tarahumara Indians of Mexico and covered the 1985 earthquake in Mexico. He has also traveled extensively in Latin America for USA Today. He has received numerous awards, including several for his coverage of life in Cuba and inhalant abuse on the U.S.-Mexico border. His images appear in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the El Paso Museum of Art, the University of Texas Harry Ransom Humanities Center, and the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University. Additional acquisitions have been by the Federal Reserve Bank, the University of Texas at San Antonio, and the University of International Business and Economics in Beijing. Most recently, the photograph Atotonilco el Alto from this book was added to Mexico's National Art Heritage Series. Salcido lives in Austin.

Paul Salopek is an American journalist. A two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, he was raised in central Mexico. In 2013 he embarked on the "Out of Eden Walk," a seven-year, 20,000-mile transcontinental foot journey along one of the migration routes taken by early humans out of Africa. Funded by the National Geographic Society, the Knight Foundation, and the Abundance Foundation, the project aims to immerse readers in the lives of nomads, villagers, traders, farmers, and fishers Salopek meets along the way. He previously worked as a reporter for the Chicago Tribune and taught journalism at the Princeton University.

Chantal Martineau writes about wine, spirits, food, travel, and culture. Her work has been published in Vogue, Food & Wine, Departures, Saveur, the Atlantic, Forbes, Financial Times, and more. She is the author of How the Gringos Stole Tequila: The Modern Age of Mexico's Most Traditional Spirit, which chronicles tequila's coming of age in America, and is at work on a book about mezcal. Martineau, a Montreal native, is based in New York.