A great opera can be mined from each immigrant’s story. I hope the stories in this book reflect that.

1) DELFINO I: A Sunday Afternoon Dream in the Alameda
Most of every week during his teenage years, Delfino Juarez mixed concrete and lay brick at construction sites around Mexico City. He was 19, and had already been working construction for eight years in the capital. But on Sundays, Delfino was one of the best breakdancers among the rural construction workers who congregated at the park in downtown Mexico City known as the Alameda. He was the first of his village to go alone to Mexico City to work. To him, the capital was a river promisingly polluted with money, danger, and adventure and enticing to a 21st Century Huckleberry Finn, and he found freedom in it. Finally, though, he made plans to leave for the United States. His country would consider his departure a minuscule loss, but this delusion is what crippled the country.

2) The Tomato King
Andres Bermudez crossed the U.S. border in the trunk of a car and made a fortune growing tomatoes near Sacramento, California. Thirty years later, he returned to his Mexican hometown to run for mayor. He wanted to show the rich people in town how a poor man from the United States could do it better than they had. During his campaign, this beer-guzzling man dressed in black became an international symbol of the immigrant. Media from around the world covered his campaign. Warner Bros bought the rights to his life story. Immigrants in the United States saw in him their own emerging influence and a chance to have a voice in changing the home country that had run them out and always treated them like traitors when they returned. Bermudez let the attention go to his head. Then he had it all taken away.

3) The Saga of South Gate
The city of South Gate, California spawned a mutant strain of small-town democracy that spread like some laboratory creation in a bad horror movie, oozed out of control. Honesty stood in its path and was devoured and replaced by a thick slime of deceit. This is the story of how Albert Robles, a Latino Joe McCarthy, used Mexican immigrants to take control of this Southern California suburb. He and his council flunkies bankrupted the town, spent millions on lawyers, poisoned politics with rancid mailers, solicited bribes from contractors, and gave away a house. South Gate became a cautionary tale about the emergence of Latino political power. Then townspeople decided this kind of corruption was why they’d left Mexico in the first place. So the saga of South Gate became a story of what they did about it.

4) Doyle and Chuy Wrap Juarez in Velvet
Doyle Harden never could paint a lick. But he became the Henry Ford of velvet painting on the border. A Georgia boy seeking fortune, Doyle came to El Paso/Juarez and turned velvet painting into the 1970s pop icon it became. He had a factory that employed dozens of painters who daily churned out acres of Dogs Playing Poker, Aztec Warriors and JFKs. Chuy Moran was the pre-eminent painter in Doyle’s factory, the King of Velvet Painting in Juarez, whose name appeared on more velvets than anyone. America’s demand for velvet turned the great despised art into salvation for thousands of working-class Mexican border youths. Palestinians and Scientologists made a good living selling Juarez velvets in the U.S. and Canada. Before it died in the early 1990s, velvet painting had given birth to the border’s art scene. This is the history of velvet painting on the border, and of the men who made it happen.

5) DELFINO II: Diez in the Desert
In June of 2003, eleven Mexican immigrants set out through the Arizona desert, heading for Los Angeles.A woman expires in the heat. Their trek becomes a death march. The group is led by a 16-year-old coyote named Diez, who wanted to earn money to buy the nicest truck in his village. Among the group he leads is Delfino Juarez, leaving Mexico City for the United States.

6) The Beautiful Insanity of Enrique Fuentes
When opera gripped Enrique Fuentes, it led him to build an opera café in one of Tijuana’s roughest neighborhoods. This is the story of how in this classic border town opera emerged as an underground art, promoted by people who sought harmony and exactitude amid the cacophony of strip bars, shanty towns, and traffic jams. They nurtured it until opera forged a soft soul for a city that had once been only an economic combine. Achieving that required such passion and torrid pursuit that their stories came to resemble the very operas they adored.

7) Atolinga
In March of 2001, robbers shot and killed Raul Briseno, owner of a couple taquerias in McHenry, a suburb north of Chicago. Briseno was from Atolinga, a small village in Zacatecas. Beginning in the 1970’s, Atolingans began arriving in large numbers in Chicago to work as dishwashers. They came timid and fearful. Yet over the next thirty years, Atolingans were among the first Mexican immigrants to run taquerias in Chicago. The pioneer in all this was an Atolingan immigrant named Chon Salinas. As Salinas was becoming an American businessman, he used his taqueria income to build himself a home back in Atolinga. In this house, he invested himself, believing he’d return to it one day.

8) A Soccer Season in Southwest Kansas
The high school soccer team in Garden City, Kansas, home to the world’s largest beef packing plant, where most of the workers are Mexican immigrants, had never had much success. The team had come to be seen as an extension.... This is also the story of how one man’s innovations changed America, especially the prairie of southwest Kansas. So that the prairie, which gave our country its most enduring icons -- cowboys, pioneers, the family farm, the Wizard of Oz, self-reliance -- again offered a clear view of an America under construction.

9) DELFINO III: Alive in L.A.
Surviving the desert death march, Delfino landed in Los Angeles. He found work installing flooring, and a place to live in the small suburb of Maywood, now a Latino immigrant enclave. In time, he learned a bit of English and became a foreman for his crew of flooring installers. He sent money home. In two years, his family went from one of the poorest in Xocotla to one of the wealthiest. He built himself a house with the largest windows in Xocotla. When he did, he changed his village.

Epilogue: Leaving Mexico
My last Mexico tale, the story of how I went to the traditional German-speaking Mennonite settlements in Northern Mexico. I wanted to understand why so many of these old-world peasants have become alcoholics, crackheads, and proficient drug smugglers. In the end, though, it is the story of how asking the wrong Mennonites the wrong questions forced me, finally, to leave Mexico, too.