When Dean Haas considers his career so far, he describes its most emotionally difficult period as a two-week "hostage situation" involving a group of Americans "who'd gone to look for Noah's ark." There was, of …

"This gym, NeoSpa, opened in 1988. It was started by a Russian group that came to Tijuana. They came up with the name and made the original investment. They also opened a disco and a …

My first day in school was really my second day — Jangchup Phelygal The Radiators That Ticked Heat into the Room — Laura Rhoton McNeal Rear Rank Rudy — Jim Morris Forget-me-nots — Rosa Colwin …

It looks as if you're cradling a baby goat in your arms while something explodes from its backside. Right wrist rests atop left elbow. Right elbow rests atop left wrist. Right pinky and index finger …

"At the time it was cross tops and black beauties. Not yet the methamphetamine." "I was caught up in the first DUI sweep in San Diego. I had my picture on the front page of …

I didn't recognize where I was. "Things have changed a lot," said Jorge Rodríguez, leading me out of the rain, into his two-story cinder-block house. "I came to Los Arenales looking for new horizons," he …

"Careful, Ma; don't spill your soup," I warned. "First time you spill, that's it — you're going to the home.” Mom's reply was immediate. "I know. I've picked out what I want to take with me."

"I visited your father's grave," my mother said when she last called. "And I gave his headstone a good kick." This is the sort of joke we share, my mother and I. Survivors of an …

I see Asian gang cars some nights, in a long caravan down the Mira Mesa Boulevard. They meet at In-N-Out Burger before heading off for illegal street races on Kearny Villa Road or in Sorrento Valley.

Before the newlyweds across the street went on their honeymoon, they asked me to keep an eye on their house. Yesterday, a neighbor two doors down, an elderly Mexican woman, brought me a big bowl …

“Of all the things we did for Normal Heights, the most important was down-zoning. When the community plan was finalized in 1985, no one could build any more of those big ugly apartment buildings.”

Not long after my brother died and was buried in Oregon, I found myself in the depósito de cadáveres, or morgue, at Tijuana’s Autonomous University of Baja California. My hand rested on the handle of …

“On the morning of January 20, 1974, the police came. The neighborhood’s name was Tierra y Libertad, ‘Land and Liberty.’ The police marched right into the neighborhood. Perhaps they were state police. I’m not sure. …

"Just like Florence, just like Rome, Tijuana, too, has its monuments." Professor Julio Rodríguez steers his blue Ford through Zona Rio, gesturing at one statue after another. "And what are monuments? What do they represent? …

Esmo’s phone manner was so hugger-mugger that I could be sitting four feet away and could not make out a single word. For all I could tell, he might have been laying fifty on a pony.

In late January 1954, Dick Tracy found an infant abandoned in a tree. For more than a week the comic-strip detective searched for the mother. Suddenly, “as if dropped out of nowhere,” a Mrs. Catchem …

In Mexico City in June of 1994, Pat Nelson took a friend, a Mexican financial consultant, to lunch. "My friend said to me, 'Pat, in '92 and '93 the Mexican government issued short-term bonds that …

'I'm totally lyric," says Erika Lara, a woman in her early 30s who sits on a metal folding chair on the marble landing before Tijuana's municipal government building. "A lyric poet. Uneducated. I barely finished …

'We currently have 20 kids here who've committed homicides. We get about one a month. In every case except one, it was an armed assault, usually a robbery, involving money, drugs, or both. The one …

'Let me explain it to you slowly, because my life is very complicated. When I was 15 years old, I went from my small town in Puebla to Tecate, where I crossed into the United …

“I even speak Yiddish with a Mexican accent. I can’t help it.” If you call the Institute for Jewish Research in Manhattan and ask to be referred to a Yiddish speaker in San Diego, you’ll …

'Go to the border between 5:00 and 7:00 in the morning, and you can understand something about my patients' lives. At that time in the morning, the border is crazy. People honking, yelling, fighting for …

"I knew Somalis who drove taxis and said I should try it.. For three months, I've been driving a cab. I live with a friend in a small house in Lemon Grove. I pay $300 a month"

"There weren't so many big strong guys in Iraq, and so Saddam Hussein's security service was looking for strong guys to work as his bodyguards. You looked big. You looked frightening, like you might kill some people"

“You’re eating bug excrement.” Stephen Facciola and I are standing in the parking lot of a Middle Eastern grocery in disheartening Anaheim. The streets are eight lanes wide. The blocks, a mile long. The air …

"As an African you think that you're going to have a lot in common with black Americans. You don't. They really don't like us. So, in 1998, I went back to my village"

'In late 1985, we fled Kabul and crossed from Afghanistan into Pakistan in the dead of winter. We walked ten days and nine nights. There were about 60 people in all. Friends, neighbors. Eight members …

Denomination: Fraternal Spiritualist Address: 4720 Kensington Drive, Kensington; 619-281-4557 Year founded locally: 1932 Senior pastors: Millie Landis, Chris Christensen Congregation size: 83 members Staff: all volunteer Church school enrollment: no Sunday School Annual budget: $99,000 …

"People jump out of the cab to keep from paying. I had one Mexican guy jump out of my cab while it was still moving. Some day one of these people is going to get hurt.”

"Back in the late 1960s, there was only one Thai market I was aware of, Bangkok Market on Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles. It opened in 1968 and it carried mostly canned goods, no vegetables, no spices."

A wicked Hungarian count tries to seduce a pubescent American blonde. A resort manager falls hard for a German baroness. Hitler masterminds the slaughter of millions. There are love ballads and some tap dancing. When …

To commemorate Father's Day, this issue contains a collection of reflections from Reader writers about their fathers: The Last Tag Sale — Jeanne Schinto An Air of Exoticism — Duncan Shepherd Kinder Than I Would …

Until he lost consciousness eight hours before his death, my father was lucid. He did have night terrors, usually around 4:00 a.m., when, animated by morphine dreams, he’d rise cackling from his bed, hairy arms …

Last December Todd Galli made a list he entitled "Things I Want to Accomplish in My Life." Dissatisfied with how that sounded, he started again with "Things I Will Accomplish in My Life." At the …

"The Japanese were literally dying in the streets from hunger. MacArthur commandeered all the food that had been stored up but never used for the invasion of Kyushu, and he turned it over to the Japanese people.”

On the evening of December 8, 1980, Kristy Mundt, a cashier at Vons, was relaxing in her Lemon Grove home, watching the Miami Dolphins play the New England Patriots at the Orange Bowl. When Howard …

l baked a chicken the night I left my wife. It was a chubby-thighed roasting hen I rubbed with olive oil and salt and hefted into a 500-degree oven where I left it to sizzle …

For the past 25 years, Peter Dreher, an artist from Freiburg, Germany, has painted the same 100-year-old, half-liter glass 3200 times. Dreher's method is simple: in either day or night, in either artificial or natural …

'Let's say that you're an American man, living in France, and you meet and marry a French woman. You decide to spend your honeymoon in America, and while you're here your wife discovers she loves …

“I can tell when someone’s from that area. There’s a way they pronounce words, a certain intonation. Sometimes they’ll try to disguise it. The Chinese are just as class conscious as anyone else, maybe more so.”

When Martin Luther invented Protestantism, he created anarchy. Luther's unmooring of Christianity from centuries of Church practice and teaching generated ironies and contradictions that remain unresolved. Reverend Cindy Witt is a recent orphan of the …

He pointed out the apartment where, in 1992, two Hmong boys had been shot by Crips. With his finger Vang traced the path across the lawn that one boy had taken as he tried to escape.

At around 1:00 a.m. a hard rain began to fall, chasing everyone from the plaza, sending dogs scuttling under trucks, silencing the skyrockets that had rattled the air above this small town since dawn. Midday …

Sedaris was smoking a Kool near the entrance to the La Jolla Marriott when I explained that the zoo was probably touchy because the feds had recently nailed the zoo's reptile curator for dealing snakes on the side.

"You must understand," she says, "the attitude toward Iranians when we first came here. The revolution. The hostage crisis. People thought we, who'd fled the revolution, were all terrorists. We were all suspect.”

The evening began a little after eight in the bar at Sanborn’s on Revolución where eight poets gathered for drinks and chisme (gossip). Around midnight one of them suggested we move on to El Lugar …

On the coffee table in front of the fireplace the maid set out Earl Grey tea and thick slices of Christmas cake. A German shepherd dozed on the Oriental rug near the crackling, popping fire. …

Those unfamiliar with the Anglican Communion's range of belief and practice were puzzled in early August when, on the lawn of Kent University in England, Bishop Emmanuel Chukwuma of Nigeria tried to lay hands on …

Viewers tuned to the June 12 broadcast of CNN's Larry King Live were treated to an exercise in confusion. King's guests were at such opaque odds, spoke at such broad cross-purposes, that the program seemed …

Secretaries and a janitor crowd around John Hunter in the leafy courtyard of a Carmel Ranch office building. They squeal and whine "I wanna try it! I wanna try it!" like crazed kids and paw …