Daniel Hernandez

MEXICO CITY — Felipe Calderón was holding his latest I-am-the-president-no-matter-what-anyone-says press conference. Standing before a backdrop that brazenly proclaimed “Felipe Calderón, President of Mexico, 2006–2012,” he told the media gathered at the headquarters of his conservative National Action Party (known as PAN) that he planned to tour the nation to......

MEXICO CITY — A SOUPY RAIN FELL on the people. Fireworks that sounded like revolutionary cannons kept exploding in the sky. And around midnight Sunday in this nation’s largest and most important public square, the Zocalo, the victory-party-that-never-was happened anyway. Leftist populist presidential candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador took command......

MEXICO CITY — Election Day in Mexico is Sunday. And after all this buzz about a stronger democracy, a more legitimate election infrastructure, people here still use air quotes around the word “democracy” in conversation. Late Tuesday in this city’s version of Los Feliz, the Condesa district, Mariana, a young......

Developer Ralph Horowitz is puzzled by all this talk about an offer from Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s office to buy his 14 acres at 41st and Alameda streets, otherwise known as the lightning rod of the modern environmentalist and Chicano movement, the South Central Farm. “?‘An offer of a proposal’ —......

JUST WHEN IT LOOKED LIKE the South Central Farm was doomed, the fate of the 14 acres of contested land at 41st and Alameda streets has turned into a whole new ball game. The arrival of Hollywood celebrities and old-school folk singers to try to save it only masks the......

WAS AGUSTIN CONTRERAS a gang member? His family and friends say no. Police say it’s “unconfirmed.” And “jack of all Latino legal causes” Luis Carillo says definitely not. But it might not matter much any more. The 17-year-old Contreras is dead, and a city that seems to have a morbidly......

LEAVE IT TO L.A., where even Spanish-speaking immigrant workers can look quickly past the void of celebrity, to welcome Mexican President Vicente Fox with chants of “Murderer!” Fox, peering out a dark SUV’s back-seat window, was smiling at first when his motorcade drove past Pershing Square downtown shortly after he......

THE NATIONAL COUNCIL OF LA RAZA, the big, slick and powerful Latino civil-rights lobbying force based in Washington, D.C., is going to have its national annual conference at the L.A. Convention Center this summer. To celebrate this news, some of the heaviest heavy hitters in the Latino advocacy game showed......

WHO’S READY FOR ANOTHER big immigrant-rights’ march? President Bush made his immigration-reform speech this week amid a growing sense that the struggle to reform the law and absorb millions of undocumented people and their cultures is far from over. “What maybe we need to do is hit the streets once......