I'm an efficient, good, professional reporter. But I also write. And so what I try to do is write about places that I know that I care about intensely and write about them in a way that conveys the fact that I care.

I think the great Mexican cuisine is dying because there are fast foods now competing, because there are supermarkets, and supermarkets can't afford to keep in stock a lot of these very perishable products that are used for fine Mexican cooking. Women are working and real Mexican cooking requires enormous amounts of time.

Talking in one language and talking in another, I think inevitably, produce two different personalities, as far as I've seen in other people. I assume it does the same for me.

And, of course, millions of us cross the border to work in US homes and gardens and factories and carpentry shops and restaurants, and if you go to a restaurant pretty much anywhere in the United States, the chances are that the dishes will be washed by a Mexican.

There is no point to samba if it doesn't make you smile.

Peron had a wise saying. In politics, you can recover from anything except looking like a fool.

What I wonder is what would happen in California, say, if all the Mexicans left from one day to the next?