Sam Quinones

www.samquinones.com

In Mexico, he traveled far and wide, visiting all the major immigrant-sending states, and writing prolifically about Mexican immigration. He spent time with gang members and governors, taco vendors and Los Tigres del Norte. He wrote about soap operas and 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.

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 about 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. His second book of non-fiction stories --Antonio's Gun and Delfino's Dream: True Tales of Mexican Migration-- was published in 2007.

 The S.F. Chronicle Book Review called him "the most original American writer on the border and Mexico out there."

He returned to the United States in 2004 and now works for the Los Angeles Times, covering immigration-related stories and gangs.