[His father, to Miguel] "I know that a man's honour means nothing to your generation, but it is all that a man possesses in this life." - Michael Nava

The room took shape in all its squalor: clothes scattered everywhere; plates of half-finished meals; the long table used as a desk, every inch of its surface covered by moldering documents, books, and sheaves of paper bestrewn with his father's tiny script.

It really was a brutal place, Los Angeles, less a city than a collection of hostile villages united only in their mutual suspicion of each other and a susceptibility to disasters, natural and otherwise. Fires, floods, riots and earthquakes; it was looking more and more like Armageddon-by-the-Pacific.

"Abuelita," he said, groping for words to frame his thought. "Was today history?" "History is simply the passage of time, José, so we are in history at every moment."