Biography
As a native of East Hollywood, Hector Tobar grew up reading the Los Angeles Times. He devoured the sports pages, especially, but never ...
Walking a mile in an immigrant's moccasins
November 2, 2009
The wedding was all set. The bride would travel from Mexico City to Rexburg, Idaho, where she would walk down the aisle of the Mormon temple in her white dress. She would marry that crazy guy from the radio who had been courting her.
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A Guatemalan grandmother's secret is revealed
October 27, 2009
It isn't every day that a 50-year-old family secret comes tumbling out of the closet.
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Literacy brings immigrants closer to full participation in life
October 20, 2009
In her one-bedroom apartment in the Pico-Union district, garment worker Julia Rodriguez lives surrounded by young readers.
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Vin Scully's is a rare voice
October 19, 2009
Before the Internet, before cable television or even color TV, there was radio.
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Three lives and a literate city's shame
October 13, 2009
There is a neighborhood in L.A. where you can hear people converse in the language spoken by the Aztec emperors Montezuma and Cuauhtémoc.
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USC's Archives Bazaar resurrects L.A.'s history
October 6, 2009
They gathered outside a nightclub called the Black Cat one winter night in 1967, perhaps a few hundred men and women in all, joined together in a moment of happy subversion on a Silver Lake street. Weeks earlier, police had swept through the club and arrested 14 people after witnessing, at the stroke of midnight on New Year's Eve, the "crime" of one man kissing another.
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Cal State students, it's time to stand up
October 5, 2009
I was invited to Cal State L.A. for a "Walk of Shame."
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Language as a bridge and an identity
September 22, 2009
I was invited to speak on Sunday to a group of 5-, 6- and 7-year-olds, and to their odd, tiny "classmate" -- a stuffed bear.
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Hope endures in a recession-battered area of L.A. County
September 15, 2009
In South Los Angeles' flat plain of humble homes, apartments and palms, there is a community officially (but rarely) called Westmont that has no "mont," not even a hill. It got its name, it seems, from being west of Vermont Avenue.
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Readers share thoughts on immigration
March 16, 2009
When I was a boy growing up in Los Angeles circa 1970, I did something that brought dishonor to my people.
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Villaraigosa cruises to his coronation
March 3, 2009
Jim Hubbard was one of the legions of people who followed the 2008 presidential campaign obsessively. Primaries, polls: He took it all in, from Iowa to election day.
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Winter unveils Southern California's wonders
February 24, 2009
In Southern California, winter is our season of renewal.
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Friendship Park's intended purpose is lost in fog of border war
January 6, 2009
There are just two weeks left in his presidency, but down in San Diego County the heavy machinery is grinding away at one last grand project from the administration of George W. Bush.
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Ties to power win Nuñez's son special treatment
December 23, 2008
I have no idea if Esteban Nuñez is a "gang member," a term that's used and misused so often that I prefer to give it a home inside quotation marks.
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East L.A.: The tragic underside of the census
December 16, 2008
A lot of us Angelenos take East Los Angeles for granted.
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Zoo without elephants would be a loss for the children of L.A.
December 9, 2008
Stand behind the curtain of bamboo just outside the paddock of the last, lone elephant at the Los Angeles Zoo and you'll hear the daylong drumbeat of running feet.
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