I had all this anxiety about what it meant to be a minority. My professors - the same men who taught me the intricacies of language - just shied away from the issue. They didn't want to talk about it, other than to suggest I could be a "role model" to other Hispanics - when I went back to my barrio, I suppose.

We're looking at complexity. We're looking at blond kids in Beverley Hills who can speak Spanish because they have been raised by Guatemalan nannies. We're looking at Evangelicals coming up from Latin America to convert the U.S. at the same time that L.A. movie stars are taking up Indian pantheism.

I've once gotten in trouble with certain gay activists because I'm not gay enough! I am a morose homosexual. I'm melancholy. Gay is the last adjective I would use to describe myself. The idea of being gay, like a little sparkler, never occurs to me. So if you ask me if I'm gay, I say no.

The drama of the essay is the way the public life intersects with my personal and private life. It's in that intersection that I find the energy of the essay.

What has happened in the last generation is that Tijuana has become a new Third World capital - much to the chagrin of Mexico City, which is more and more aware of how little it controls Tijuana politically and culturally. In addition to whorehouses and discos, Tijuana now has Korean factories and Japanese industrialists and Central American refugees, and a new Mexican bourgeoisie that takes its lessons from cable television.

Human unhappiness is evidence of our immortality.

Maybe the American Dream is too rich for us now in the U.S. Maybe we're losing it because we are not like our Swedish grandmother who came across the plains, hacked down the trees, and took the Spanish words she encountered and made them hers. Now her great-great-grandchildren sit terrified, wondering what to do with all these Mexicans. The American Dream is an impossible affirmation of possibility. And maybe native-born Americans don't have it anymore. Maybe it has run through their fingers.