Well, one of the things I discovered in the course of looking back and writing about what I saw in my memory is that I was a closely observant person long before I became a reporter.
The best translators slip into the glove of a text and then turn it inside out into another language, and the whole thing comes out looking like a brand-new glove again. I’m completely in awe of this skill, since I happen to be both bilingual and a writer, but nevertheless a lousy translator.
I love food and I love everything involved with food. I love the fun of it. I love restaurants. I love cooking, although I don’t cook very much. I love kitchens.
You know, one, two, three, four, five years go by and then Marcos gets a little boring.
If you’re going to be a myth or want to be a myth, you’d better die young.
The most that somebody in Mexico City will get paid for a job in construction is 100 pesos a day.
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.
The left is being funded primarily by the drug traffickers who provide this tax money and that’s why the guerrillas in Colombia, unlike the guerrillas anywhere else in Latin America, have been able to survive for 40 years because they have a hard, solid source of income.
So, you know, I always say that I’m a Mexican, but if I had to be a citizen of anywhere else, I’d be a citizen of Manhattan. I feel very much a New Yorker.
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.
I realized that I had traveled to Havana during what now seems like the childhood of the Cuban Revolution, if you think that Fidel has now been in power for 44 extremely long years. I started looking at the revolution as history, and not as part of the daily news.
Investigative reporting is the bone structure without which the journalistic body collapses. The Center for Public Integrity’s constant and consistently enterprising investigative work is an invaluable contribution not only to journalism, but to society and to a healthy democracy.
Peron had a wise saying. In politics, you can recover from anything except looking like a fool.
An essential part of the magic involves turning everyone into an enemy, to ward off surprises.
For the kids, who in their lives have never known the slightest power, delinquency is a way of looking for power.
One does, after all, take on many of the givens of a society when one takes on its language.
I may not have a practical mind, but it’s very fixated on concrete things. I like detail.
What I wonder is what would happen in California, say, if all the Mexicans left from one day to the next?
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.
Yet this is not a novel. It is a faithful transcription of my memories, some of them hazy, others riddled with holes left by the passage of the years, others patched up by time and the filters of experience and distance, and still others, no doubt, completely invented by the stubborn narrator we all have within us, who wants things to be the way they sound best to us now, and not the way they were.