"El libro de De Cesare le hace plena justicia a las imágenes y en un salto tremendo para un libro de fotografía, contiene un texto enteramente bilingue...Unsettled / Desasosiego es un logro impresionante y muestra la profundidad de comprensión y documentación hecho posible mediante muchos años de trabajo y compromiso de parte de una fotografa brillante."

David Bacon en CuartoOscuro

"Unsettled/Desasosiego is a tremendous achievement, and shows the depth of understanding and documentation made possible through many years of work and commitment by a brilliant photographer."

David Bacon, in AfterImage

"DeCesare’s new book, “Unsettled / Desasosiego: Children in a World of Gangs,” part nonfiction history and part memoir, traces how she came to see gangs as both a symptom and a mechanism of emotional trauma. An honest and sobering depiction of gang life, her photographs transcend straightforward documentation, becoming family albums, memorials, and vehicles for social change."

Genevieve Fussell, The New Yorker

“This rich and emotionally powerful book is the result of the three decades Donna De Cesare has been documenting the effects of gang and political violence on youths both in Central America and in refugee communities in the US. … of the 105 photographs she’s chosen to include, there is no frame that isn’t fully realized and affecting. As layered and striking as her images are, the photos make up only half the story…. A clear and thoughtful writer, De Cesare shares the sometimes-complex stories of the children she has gotten to know over the years… Unsettled is a work of excellent journalism as well as photojournalism; it makes us care about a story with no simple answers.”

--Holly Stuart Hughes, Photo District News

Unsettled/Desasosiego is a book that hurts. It's photographs are testimonies of children whose childhood was mutilated, whose images are always made with enormous respect, without affectation or sentimentality. The text written by De Cesare in a personal and committed voice, offers us a political and historic context that we need to understand the significance of the images.... She shows poetic photos of enormous beauty and sophistication, and she also has simple photos, which could be in a family album. ...We should approach the lives of others on tiptoe, with enormous delicacy and respect, just as Donna De Cesare has done....

Pablo Corral Vega, ReVista

“She has a heart that guides her toward the right places, the sensibility of an artist for beautiful, nuanced compositions, the talent to achieve technical excellence and the courage to love her subjects and become a perpetual part of their lives,”

--Alejandro Martinez-Cabrera in The Daily Texan

"Taking a point of view is part of a documentarian’s role. A photographer can’t fully reflect her subject’s point of view if she is professionally and emotionally detached. To tell the story, she has to live it to some degree... For De Cesare, that meant gaining the confidence of people who yielded their trust to strangers only reluctantly, trust being one casualty in a war where the enemy may be a shopkeeper or your neighbor."

--Steve Wolgast, News Photographer magazine

Donna De Cesare has documented the lives of young people in Los Angeles and Central America, where poverty, US immigration policy and gang culture intersect. ….Her photographs capture the struggles of family life in dangerous times, brotherhood in the streets, and just how early children can be pressed into service as soldiers. …The images offer a sense of the tremendous scope of DeCesare’s work and the scale of the troubles she documents.

--Patrick Michels, The Texas Observer