Sam Quinones's Blog

I admire rich people who do something creative with their money instead of just buying more stuff.

Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappo, lives in Las Vegas and brought his company there, then started what’s known as the Downtown Project, which uses $350 million of his own money to revitalize what was the town’s main street before The Strip — this roughly in the 1930s, I’m told.

I was just in Las Vegas briefly and stumbled upon this project on Fremont Street. What I saw amounts to transforming the town’s first motels, which had become hooker and parolee hangouts, into small mini malls, keeping the motels’ structures and improving the signs, and renting the rooms to microentrepreneurs with business ideas: photo galleries, sound studios, pottery, cafes, vegan foods, etc.

Added to that are Burning Man art installations.

I’m reading that this project has been underway for some time. More was expected by now.

Nevertheless it is beginning to bear fruit, and what I saw looked fantastic. The Ferguson Motel is now one such mall, with a cafe dug out of the patio, a restaurant at street level, and a dozen or so small businesses in what used to be motel rooms.

Of course, several motels are boarded and fenced up and waiting their own transformation, I suspect.

But the whole thing is beyond cool and creative. Nothing to do with gambling, either.

Hsieh, by the way, lives in a trailer park behind one of these motels, that is packed with tiny houses and Airstream trailers (Those who know me will know I believe Airstreams are the coolest vehicles ever made and remember that among the first stories I ever did as a journalist were those I wrote about the Wally Byam Caravan Club International’s annual Airstream convention in Boise, Idaho in 1986, while I was an intern at the Idaho Statesman that summer.)

Anyway, here are some of the shots I took while I was there.

The post Las Vegas’ Downtown Project & Tony Hsieh appeared first on .

In 1998, while I was living in Mexico, I had an encounter with the LeBaron clan, which has been in the news lately due to the massacre of family members in the state of Sonora, apparently at the hands of drug traffickers.

At the time, I was working on a story about the agricultural Valley of San Quintin, south of Ensenada in Baja California. I had noticed a highway sign – “Zarahembla” — on my bus trips up and down the valley.

Young Mormon missionaries on the bus one day spoke of it in frightened terms. The place was tainted, they said, by heresy and murder, excommunication and polygamy, and they were warned to keep away from it. Others said that was long ago; many people simply didn’t know the history. 

So one day I got off the bus at the highway sign and walked a couple miles down into the community and introduced myself to Zarahembla’s patriarch, Fernando Castro.

Castro was 82, the last apostle of the LeBarons’ annointed messiah, Joel LeBaron. Castro had six wives, 42 children and an unknown number of grandchildren and great-grandchildren. He told me he stopped counting at 126. 

He was a frail man, with large spectacles perched on his nose and a mustache of white whiskers curving around his mouth. He had children in Utah, Minnesota, Colorado, Phoenix, San Diego, Washington. Most of them were construction workers. Joel LeBaron had been also his son-in-law, father to Castro’s grandson — Jose Fernando LeBaron.

Castro lived isolated in the desert and entirely according to his religious beliefs. Baja California was where Oaxacan Indians, Sinaloans, lapsed Catholics were remaking themselves and forgetting their pasts. New Protestant churches along the peninsula highway, built from concrete block and slapped with white or blue or yellow paint, were signs of that rebirth.

This is what Fernando Castro did.

He told me the story of Joel LeBaron and the LeBaron clan. Suffice to say the LeBarons were polygamists in Utah who believed the oldest son, Joel, was the messiah returned to earth. The Mormon Church excommunicated them and the family and its followers fled Utah to northern Mexico. Their first outpost was in Chihuahua. But as years passed, they had Castro lead a band of followers west to colonize Baja California. They named that outpost Zarahembla – from a larger ancient city that Mormons believe once existed in the Americas.

Several years later, Joel LeBaron was murdered, in a story out of Cain and Abel, by his brother Ervil, who was jealous and believed that he was the messiah. The killing took place on a street in Ensenada in the 1970s. Without a messiah, the LeBaron utopia screeched to a halt. Castro followed his prophet’s vision and stayed at it, the faithful apostle. The bad water, the wind and murder blew away the other pilgrims and twisted Joel LeBaron’s utopia into something more like the real world, where dreams are scorned and killed. Castro lingered on over the next decades.

When I met him, he lived in a concrete block home, painted a fading yellow. Off in the distance was a grove of olive trees, stunted for lack of water. He said Joel LeBaron’s dream was to have a community free of hate and racism. Part of that dream of peace was to grow trees in the desert.

Castro was only 5’9”, still he towered over his three youngest wives, who each measured about 5 feet—quiet and sweet women who spoke Spanish with slight Indian accents and whom he met in the villages near his hometown of Atlixco in the state of Puebla. His first three wives had left the compound years before and lived in Colonia LeBaron in Chihuahua, he said.

The house stood on the basin of a desert valley, a windy plain of sandy and milk-chocolate earth that covered wide streets. Roosters’ crows occasionally caromed across the valley, breaking the calm. There were cacti planted in rows, homes of concrete, with column and arcing doorways, tire carcasses and an occasional junked car.

It was the kind of desert place where families came once to stake a future; some left and their homes stood vacant and incomplete for years, good ideas that didn’t quite work out and instead become blank canvases for midnight graffitiers.

He reproached me not being married or having children. “Who will populate your planet with you when you die?” he asked. I allowed that I didn’t know and we changed the subject. I met his wives, children, grandchildren. We spoke about a lot – about Joel LeBaron’s death and other things.

He told me to visit the colony in Chihuahua, but I never did. Work took me elsewhere.

The last I saw of Fernando Castro, he was waving me goodbye as I walked back to the highway to catch a bus. I suspect he died many years ago now. But he was a nice and generous man to me.

The post My Visit to the LeBaron Clan Outpost appeared first on .

For more than 15 years now, I’ve followed the way Tijuana has developed an opera scene that is one of the artistic jewels of Mexico.

One of the scene’s great products, Guadalupe Paz, a mezzosoprano, performs in Tijuana at the CECUT theater, not far from the border, on May 16.

The emergence of opera in Tijuana was a story I included in my second book, Antonio’s Gun and Delfino’s Dream.

It’s a bizarre tale involving the importing of an entire Russian orchestra after the end of the Cold War, and fans who acted like guerrilla warriors, fighting in DIY style to establish a beachhead for their music amid the techno, disco and ranchero.

It also involves Mercedes Quinonez, who had tried all her life to find classical voice instruction in Tijuana, only to find it too late, when she was 51. A poignant tale that I’ll never forget. (See photo below.)

Today, opera and classical music are part of the town. Growing from it all, there are today youth orchestras in some of the toughest barrios in Tijuana. (Listen to a radio story I did for LA’s radio station KCRW.)

Opera in Tijuana struck me as completely out of place with the city’s fame and reputation as a town of sin and late-night drunkenness.

But I took opera as a sign of how the town was evolving, with a middle class, an optimism, and an energy — the three of which were hard to find in combination in cities in other parts of Mexico.

That’s why I’ve spent so much time paying attention to it.

Many years ago I also did a report for NPR with my Mexico City colleague Franc Contreras about the phenomenon in Tijuana, which you can listen to here.

There’s also an annual Opera Street Festival in July that is a fantastic event, taking place 150 yards from the border wall, in Colonia Libertad, a place known more for its immigrant smugglers and the artisans who make Tijuana’s plaster Mickey Mouse statues.

The post Guadalupe Paz & the TJ Opera Scene appeared first on .

As I travel the country, I’ve been attempting to see the major rivers of this country.

Late this past winter, I was up in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, through which runs the beautiful Snake River. This was just before the snow melted.

Hope you like this video.

The post The Snake River appeared first on .

Four years ago today, April 15, Dreamland was released after a lot of work, interviews, travel, and endless revisions.

At the time, my family and I thought the book would fail and fade quickly because throughout my research I found people – families mostly – very reluctant to talk. This issue remained largely hidden, though I judged it to be the country’s worst drug scourge.

But those families were ashamed, mortified that loved ones were addicted, and thus they kept silent.

In the four years since Dreamland came out, I’ve been thrilled to watch awareness of the problem spread, and the response to the book grow every year more intense.

Media outlets now devote large pieces to it.

Families now speak publicly about it, instead of staying in the shadows. Their obituaries are more likely nowadays to tell the truth. That’s healthy for those families, and for the country.

Politicians have expanded budgets and enacted new policies to fight this problem.

Opiate addiction is now recognized as one of the top issues facing the country, which is where it should always have been.

When I was writing Dreamland, there were three lawsuits against drug companies. Today, there are some two thousand plaintiffs: counties, towns, Native tribes, Attorneys General, and more.

So I wanted to take a moment to thank all of you who have read Dreamland, who’ve passed it around, read it for book groups or in classes, gave it as gifts, pestered co-workers to read it, and talked about it endlessly.

Thanks, too, to elected officials who have used it to shape policy, doctors who’ve used the book to inform their practices, families who’ve gone public, and podcasters for sharing it.

As I’ve spoken all over this country — more than 200 times since the book came out — I’ve realized how important word-of-mouth has been.

I have cherished the chance to speak to so many kinds of groups: public health nurses, judges, drug counselors, coroners, librarians, doctors, legislators. And more.

I’ve especially loved the chance to visit small towns where I assume authors don’t often show up: Tiffin, Bluffton, Leadville, Hendersonville, Whitewater, Whitehall, Marion, Peoria, Van Wert, Springfield, Newark, York, Worchester, Jeffersonville, Chico, Morehead, Mishiwaka, Spartanburg, Simi Valley, Greensboro, Scottsburg, Chillicothe, Grosse Pointe, Ashtabula, Marysville, and others.

I want to thank all the folks who helped me with the book when they didn’t have a clue who I was. Especially the good people of Portsmouth, Ohio, where I kept on showing up to listen to stories of pill mills, of a beloved swimming pool, and finally, of recovery.

There’s still a long way to go in all this.

The numbers of deaths remain staggeringly high. Each one reflects crushed families and friends. I think a lot about them as I’m on the road. I meet them everywhere, though I often don’t know what to say, or whether what I say is of any help. So I tend to do a lot of hugging.

One crucial issue is convincing insurance companies to reimburse for pain treatment that does not involve opioid painkillers. This would allow doctors to fashion a more holistic array of treatment for chronic-pain patients, instead of just cutting them off from the pills and forcing them, cruelly, into the black market.

A Young Adult version of Dreamland will come out this summer, which I hope will allow high school teachers to guide students in understanding, discussing, and, who knows, taking action in their communities.

I’m working now on a follow up to Dreamland, which will chart the epidemic and all that’s happened surrounding it in the last several years.

All that is to come.

For now, I’m shaking my head at the long amazing trip that Dreamland has been so far, and my family and I thank all of you who read it for allowing the book to play a role in our national story and yours.

The post Dreamland Turns Four appeared first on .

I was recently in Northern Kentucky, where I met Jo Martin, a retiree from the corporate world who now spends her time removing tattoos.

With her children grown and out of the house, Martin, was tutoring jail inmates, most of whom were repeat offenders and long-time drug addicts, when a friend told her about a priest in Los Angeles working with gang members.

Father Greg Boyle had begun Homeboy Industries, which offered paths out of gang membership, the friend said. Boyle was speaking at a university in Ohio, so Martin went to see him.

She was especially taken by Homeboy’s tattoo removal service, she told him. Every jail inmate she tutored had them, and the stains were impediments not just to them getting work and renting apartments, but in fully leaving behind a damaging way of life.

Some part of why people remained in addiction seemed to have to do with their tattoos, she said. The markings served to keep them mired in crime and drugs, pulling them back even when their intentions were good. Removing the ink, on the other hand, seemed to imply a commitment from which there was no turning back.

She emailed Boyle later to find out more. “Come to California,” he wrote back. She went, toured Homeboy Industries and saw the organization’s tattoo removal operation. 

She returned to Northern Kentucky and formed a tattoo-removal nonprofit, Tattoo Removal Ink. Using the life insurance her late husband had left her, she spent $55,000 on a laser machine – an Astanza Duality – that removes tattoos of black and red ink.

Astanza sent people to train Martin in using the machine. “Never in my life had I touched a laser,” Martin told me. “None of us knew how, but it’s very doable. To practice, we did a whole bunch of people who weren’t incarcerated, charging them nothing.”

In 2016, from a small office, Martin and two nurses began removing tattoos of those leaving the jail where she used to tutor – with particular emphasis on those on the face, neck and hands, as well as the markings of gang membership, and the tattoos pimps apply to brand their prostitutes.

Soon she began to see the bizarre – the man with a Hannibal Lecter mask tattooed across his lower face. Another with a dotted line tattooed down the middle of his face, with one side of his face clean, then other mightily tattooed.

“We take a lot of swastikas off,” she said. “And teardrops.”

The post Tattoo Removal Ink in NK appeared first on .

Just finished his biography.

Caught between a torment of a wife and a storm of a mother, with a spinal birth defect that created lifelong pain, an alcohol habit that grew ferocious, to which he and others then added pills of all kinds, and an unmerciful road schedule that pinned him to events every night for months and ground him out like a spent cigarette.

Hard to know which of all that played the biggest part in killing him.

And still he wrote, mostly while on the road. His songs defined country music and spoke simply to folks. He took their titles often from conversations. “You’re gonna change or I’m a gonna leave” “You win again” and others were lines he heard spoken.

He referred to himself often in the third person, as “Ole Hank.”

But he was only 29 when he died.

One beautiful character who emerges in his story is Ernest Tubb, a rock to whom Hank turned often during his constant marital problems with Audrey, whom Chet Flippo portrays as a conniving, money-grubbing plague on Williams’ life – not that Hank didn’t contribute to the disaster that was their marriage. Tubb was by contrast sober, wise, and had learned to manage the country music life in a way that Hank never did. 

So, too, an almost-was singer named Braxton Schuffert, who turned his back on the music business and devoted himself to his family back in Shreveport and his job delivering for Hormel Meats. Apparently a talented singer, Schuffert saw the life his friend was leading and didn’t want that for himself, though Hank was often urging him to move to Nashville, offering to get him on the Opry, plying him with songs he’d written. Sounds like Schuffert had a career waiting for him if he’d wanted it. Hank visited him every time he went to Shreveport and Schuffert seemed one of the few in Hank’s life who cared for the singer, but took him as a cautionary tale, no matter how big and famous he got.

The last few months of Hank’s life are painful to read. Constantly drunk or stoned, incontinent, weak and bone thin, plied pills and morphine by a quack ex-felon he hired as his personal physician, divorced from Audrey whom he still loved and hated, banned from the Grand Ole Opry, missing his son Bocephus, barely remembering the words to his own songs, on stage hanging onto a microphone stand, marrying a young country girl three times on the same day, twice in front of legion of paying fans, not remember any of it.

Clearly a man in need of serious addiction and pain treatment, both, and a long break from the road.

The incredible thing is during those last months he wrote Your Cheatin’ Heart, Jambalaya, Settin’ the Woods on Fire and I’ll Never Get out of This World Alive– each one a country classic. It’s not even clear he ever performed Your Cheatin’ Heart live.

He was dying for days before he passed, which he did on New Year’s Eve, 1952 in a Cadillac taking him to a show in Canton, OH. He was only discovered so by his driver, who stopped in Oak Hill, WV, lost and unsure which highway to take to Ohio.

In the back seat lay Hank Williams, cold to the touch. In his hand was a slip of paper with a shard of a song that he composed, likely to his ex-wife, minutes before he died.

“We met, we lived, and dear we loved, then comes that fatal day, the love that felt so dear fades far away.

 Tonight one hathe one alone and lonesome, all that I could sing. I you (sic) you still, and always will, but that’s the poison we have to pay.”

The post Hank Williams appeared first on .

Not long ago, in eastern Tennessee, I had the chance to record a conversation with Isabel Workman.

Isabel is an elementary school teacher who, along with her husband, adopted two children born to different mothers, but both dependent on opiates.

She and I had a poignant chat about one of the most lacerating byproducts of the opiate-addiction epidemic in America: the rise in infants born with Neonatal Abstinence Syndrome, essentially in withdrawals from drugs, these days mostly from narcotics.

That in turn has overwhelmed the foster-children agencies. Many are being raised by their grandparents, while others are being adopted by couples like Isabel and her husband. Without these folks, the country would be in even more serious trouble.

All across America this is increasing, but Eastern Tennessee is one place where it’s felt with special intensity.

Our conversation lasts slightly less than 25 minutes (piano by my daughter).

Please share this if you can.

The post Isabel Workman: Adopting drug-dependent infants appeared first on .

The other day, I was out in Pomona – 40 miles east of Los Angeles — and took a swing by what was once one of the region’s most notorious parks.

In south Pomona, it was for years officially called Madison Park, but known to everyone around as Sharkie Park. The 12th Street gang, which dates to the 1940s, had its territory nearby, took the nickname the Sharkies and used the park as its main hangout.

Gang members who killed were allowed to get a shark tattoo. They feuded famously and endlessly with Cherryville, another Pomona neighborhood gang. They were among four Pomona gangs targeted last year by a federal task force in Operation Dirty Thirds.

Today, the park is an emblem of how gang culture has retreated in Southern California.

Madison (Sharkie) Park was rechristened Tony Cerda Park, for a local Chicano activist. From Facebook, I’m seeing that it occasionally has exercise classes. Police I spoke with can’t remember the last shooting there — a remarkable fact. Indeed, the park was quiet, with only an elderly fellow riding by on a bike.

I spent some time driving around 12th Street and I found what I’ve found in other once-notorious gang neighborhoods.

Nothing.

No one hanging out. No graffiti.

Blank walls everywhere. The only sign that graffiti was once there is what appears to be a floodwaters stain about seven feet high, which is about as high as gangsters could reach with a spray can. It’s where wall owners, or the city, had to paint up to to cover the graffiti.

After that, the wall slightly changes color. You can see this in these pictures.

This is the new sign of Southern California’s change – this floodwater look, as if seven feet of water was once here and has receded. (Beneath it, you can bet, are layers and layers of graffiti alternating with beige or white paint, going back decades.)

You see this everywhere. It’s a hopeful mark. It means that the scourge that once drowned working-class neighborhoods has departed.

I have no idea if Pomona 12th Street still exists and, if so, in what form; nor do I know what’s happened to their feud with Cherryville. I can say that whatever they’re up to, they no longer are visible on the streets where they gained their reputation. So homeowners no longer have to invest in painting over their graffiti.

Southern California still has some pockets where gangs are an issue. But they’re the exception now.

Once notorious, ex-Sharkie Park is now the rule.

The post Pomona: Floodwaters & Blank Walls at (ex-)Sharkie Park appeared first on .

My dad died early Friday morning. He was a great father, loved his boys fiercely, a beloved and tempestuous literature professor at Claremont McKenna College, a husband, scholar and author. 

I’m only beginning to understand how much I’ll miss him.

Here’s my obituary for him, which I’ve submitted to the newspaper in our hometown:

_________________

Ricardo J. Quinones, a long-time Claremont resident and retired comparative literature professor at Claremont McKenna College, has died from complications of a many-year struggle with Parkinson’s Disease.

Prof. Quinones was also founding director of the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies at the college, which now has a distinguished lectureship in his name. For several years, he served on the board of directors of the National Council for the Humanities, appointed in 2004 by President George W. Bush.

He died in hospice care at his home in West Los Angeles on Jan. 25, 2019. He was 83.

Prof. Quinones and his young family arrived in Claremont in an old Buick station wagon in 1963, straight out of Harvard University, where he earned his PhD under renowned literary scholar Harry Levin.

Over the years he became a fixture on the small, growing campus, a beloved teacher for generations of students, in love with his subject. He was chosen Professor of the Year in the mid-1970s. He was also at times a tempestuous figure. He protested the Vietnam War, supported the Civil Rights Movement, loved Robert F. Kennedy and voted for George McGovern. Years later, with increasing encounters with a stifling political correctness in academia, his politics veered away from the Democratic Party, believing it had left him, though his favorite presidents remained Harry Truman and John Kennedy.

He was one of the first presidents of the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers – which formed in 1994 in opposition to the politicization of debate in the humanities and as an alternative to the Modern Language Association, the mainstream organization of literature scholars.

Through it all, he loved reading and literature and all kinds of stories, baseball and basketball, movies, especially gangster movies, and The Godfatherabove all. He was as delighted by Bird and Magic as he was by T.S. Eliot and King Lear. During the 1963 move to Claremont, he entertained his then-two young sons with the stories of Odysseus, and his office was a famous chaos of books and papers piled in seemingly incoherent stacks, in a filing system only he could decipher.

In his long career, he wrote nine books of literary criticism, including three in retirement while battling Parkinson’s. He was a noted scholar and expert on the works of Shakespeare, Dante, and James Joyce.

His last book, North/South: The Great European Divide, in 2016, was a discussion of Protestant and Catholic Christianity and their effect on economic development. His first book,The Renaissance Discovery of Time(1972), is considered a standard of literary studies of the period.

Novelist Charles Johnson used Quinones’ book, The Changes of Cain, an exposition on the Cain-Abel theme in literature, to influence his 1998 historical novel, Dreamer, about the life of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

In retirement, he also wrote five books of poetry. His poetry tended toward storytelling. He wrote a poem about the plane that went down in that Pennsylvania field on September 11 – Shanksville– and another about his memories at age 10 of the men returning from World War II.

As the disease withered his muscles and twisted his fingers and toes, he nevertheless held poetry events, with actors reading his work, combined with a cellist or a violinist.

Ricardo Quinones grew up in Allentown, PA, the second child of Laureano and Maria Elena Quinones: He an immigrant from Galicia, Spain and a worker in a brewery; she a worker in a sewing factory, born in America to a large family of immigrants from Calabria, Italy. Growing up, he was an altar boy and a copy boy at the Allentown Morning Call newspaper. A friendly priest channeled him into college, something rare for kids from Allentown’s teeming neighborhoods of southern and eastern European immigrants. 

He attended Northwestern University. Originally intending to be a journalist, he fell under the mentorship of Donald Torchiana, a Northwestern literature professor, and from there his career focus shifted to academia. 

At Northwestern, he also met his first love, Lolly Brown, a student from Des Moines, Iowa. They were married in 1956. Their early days were spent in Europe on a Fulbright Scholarship, studying in Italy, Germany, and France, where he played basketball for a club in the town of Clermont-Ferrand. 

He came to Claremont as the town was morphing into a place of great musical, artistic, and cultural effervescence. His friends were poets and artists, then later political scientists and economists. His sons attended Oakmont Elementary, El Roble Junior High, and Claremont High School, and he sent them to Berkeley, Yale, and CMC.

He encountered death too young. His mother died when he was 11; his father when he was 22. His second son, Nathaniel, died at 18 in a car accident in February, 1979, followed by his wife, who died of cancer that May.

After that, he raised his two youngest sons – Ben and Josh – alone. They went on to become attorneys. His oldest son, Sam, is a journalist and author.

In the late 1990s, he met Roberta Johnson, a literature professor at Kansas University specializing in Spanish women writers. They fell in love and married in 1998. One of his books of poetry is titled Roberta. She cared for him through his illness, along with his wonderful caregivers, Anthony, Marlon and Ferdie. 

Up until his death, he was working on another book, this one undefined except that its focus was on the 1800s. His stack of reference books on the dining room table included Treasure Island, Huckleberry Finn, and biographies of Napoleon and U.S. Grant.

At his last Christmas dinner, he read to his family For the Union Deadby poet Robert Lowell.

A public memorial service will be scheduled in Claremont, with a date to be announced later.

The post Ricardo J. Quinones: 1935-2019 appeared first on .