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 Sam Quinones grew up in Claremont, California, and graduated from Claremont High School in 1977.
He attended U.C. Berkeley, lived in the legendary, now-defunct Barrington Hall, where he also produced punk rock concerts of bands such as the Dead Kennedys, the Zeros, the Mutants, the Offs, Flipper, and Black Flag.
He graduated in 1982 with bachelor's degrees in economics and American history, and wrote a senior thesis on the bebop jazz revolution of the 1940s. He lived for a year in Europe, where he supported himself playing guitar on the streets and teaching English.
In 1987, he found his first journalism job at the Orange County Register, covering the city of Costa Mesa and a school district. In 1988, he moved to Stockton, California, where for four years at the height of the crack epidemic, he covered gangs, dope and murder as a crime reporter for the Stockton Record.
In 1992, he moved to Seattle to write about county government and politics for the Tacoma News-Tribune.
But he was unhappy in the rain and gray. No offense to the folks who live there, but he was a California boy. Plus he found himself covering noxious-weed ordinances and dog-leash laws in Seattle, when in Stockton he'd been covering double homicides, Crips/Bloods, Nortenos/Surenos and the like. You can imagine his chagrin.
So he left the Pacific Northwest for Mexico in 1994, intending to study Spanish for a few months.
But he spent his first week in Mexico in Michoacan, in a village called Jaripo, which changed his life by showing him the stories of Mexican immigration.
Hankering to stay, he then went to Cuernavaca, where while studying Spanish, he lived with a couple who were the last Trotskyites in town. They had the complete works of Lenin and photos of Che and Fidel throughout their tiny apartment and had to tolerate the presence of the yankee in their midst.
They had a son, Leon Ernesto -- named for Trotsky and Guevara. Leon Ernesto was fully into Michael Jordan and had numerous posters in his room of Jordan jamming the pill, not to mention a bunch of posters of buxom Budweiser beer models. Leon Ernesto and Quinones later went to an NBA game in Mexico City, where Dennis Rodman played, sporting then a beet-colored dye job.
A couple months into his stay, in Mexico City, Quinones found a reporting job that paid fully 5 percent of what he'd been earning in Seattle - plus no benefits -- at an English-language magazine called Mexico Insight.
He jumped at it, returned to Seattle, sold most of his stuff, and moved to Mexico.
After a year, Mexico Insight magazine folded and he became a freelance writer. There, for the next nine years, he covered the country, as Mexico went through its historic political transformation. (He was the first foreign reporter to walk through the halls of PRI headquarters after the party lost the presidency to Vicente Fox in 2000. The mood was grim, but not that grim as the PRI itself had died years before and ever since then the party had just been putting on appearances that they actually knew the country.)
Based in Mexico City, he traveled far and wide. He visited all the major immigrant-sending states, spent time with gang members and governors, taco vendors and Los Tigres del Norte. He wrote about soap operas; about white elephant construction projects; about Nezahualcoyotl, the massive suburb, once a shantytown, east of Mexico City, after it elected its first non-PRI government.
He lived briefly in a drug-rehabilitation clinic in Zamora, while hanging out with a street gang. He did the same with a colony of transvestites in Mazatlan, with the merchants in the Mexico City of Tepito, and with the colony of relegated PRI congressmen known as the Bronx.
On the border, he spent time with the last apostle of a splinter group of polygamous Mormons, Fernando Castro, who lived in a small house in Zarahemla, a community south of Ensenada, with three of his six wives, and some of his 42 children and 128 grandchildren. Quinones hung out with the promoters of Tijuana's opera scene and with the makers of plaster statues of Mickey Mouse and Spiderman in that city's Colonia Libertad.
In 1998, he was awarded the Alicia Patterson Fellowship, one of the most prestigious fellowships in U.S. print journalism, for a series of stories on impunity in Mexico, including one story of a lynching in a small town.
He published his first book in 2001. TRUE TALES FROM ANOTHER MEXICO: The Lynch Mob, the Popsicle Kings, Chalino and the Bronx (Univ. of New Mexico Press) is a collection of non-fiction stories about contemporary Mexico that grew from his reporting on the country.
Since its release, TRUE TALES has been used in more than 150 university classes at 75 universities in 26 states.
In 2004, after a decade in Mexico, he returned to the United States to work for the Los Angeles Times, covering immigration-related stories and gangs.
His second book of non-fiction stories --ANTONIO'S GUN AND DELFINO'S DREAM: True Tales of Mexican Migration-- was published in 2007 also by the University of New Mexico Press.
ANTONIO'S GUN was called "genuinely original work, what great fiction and nonfiction aspire to be, these are the stories that stop time and remind us how great reading is." (S.F. Chronicle)
The L.A. Times Book Review said "over the last 15 years, he has filed the best dispatches about Mexican migration and its effects on the United States and Mexico, bar none."
The S.F. Chronicle Book Review called him "the most original American writer on the border and Mexico out there."
He and his wife, Sheila, and their daughter, Caroline Kateland, live in Southern California.
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