GEN - Julia Reichert’s film wants to change hearts and minds—and won an Oscar in the process

Heated – San Pancho, Michoacán, Mexico. We’re sitting in the afterglow of a long, late lunch, our bellies full of carrot soup, macerated blackberries, and a gentle shot of local mezcal. It’s the end of the rainy season here, and we’ve taken shelter in the dining room of a family-run inn where cookbook author Diana Kennedy entertains out-of-town guests when she isn’t cooking for them in her home. It’s in this quiet moment that Kennedy makes an offhand remark about her plans for “the last four years,” tucked in right before a “thank you” for the meal and a characteristically impatient search for the check.

Los Angeles Times - Chef Elena Reygadas is making dessert: a salad of fresh herbs and ice cream, one of the signature dishes at her Mexico City restaurant Rosetta. The plate — essentially a pile of greens — bears little resemblance to the gut-bombs of butter and chocolate that often finish out meals at fine dining restaurants. Nested in the lemon thyme, sorrel and mint leaves is a small scoop of rosemary ice cream, and over the top, a drizzle of rosemary syrup and good olive oil.

The New York Times – The film’s star was on her way to being a teacher when she landed the role. Now she’s part of a conversation about Indigenous people and inequality.

Los Angeles Times – Angelica Guadalupe with her sister, Marisol, 14, in Ecatepec's Jardines de Morelos neighborhood in Mexico. Angelica Guadalupe scans the ground for rocks big enough to hurt someone, but small enough to hide in the palm of her hand.

Literary Hub – In 2014, waves of unaccompanied children approaching the U.S.-Mexico border from countries in Central America’s Northern Triangle—Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador—spent time at shelters in Northern Mexico before attempting to cross the Rio Grande. As they tried to figure out how to raise the funds and summon the courage to complete the final leg of their journeys, some killed time by talking to reporters.

Los Angeles Times – And not by paying a bribe. One day last month, Saqib Keval and Norma Listman wandered into a Mexico City cafe to drown their sorrows in a bottle of mezcal. They had just learned that their popular new restaurant, Masala y Maiz, had been shut down by city officials.

Los Angeles Times - In the hours after a 7.1 earthquake thrashed Mexico City on Sept. 19, half-truths and rumors were spreading rapidly. So, too, were urgent questions: Which intersections had become death traps, subject to falling rubble? Where was help needed?

Daily Beast - The effect of standing in a place where tragedy has occurred and viscerally registering its history cannot be matched with words or images.

Los Angeles Times – Rafael Sifuentes Barba normally spends Holy Week visiting the United States. It’s a tradition Barba started when he got his tourist visa four years ago, and he’s enjoyed traveling to San Antonio, New York and San Francisco for shopping and sightseeing. He says he often spends $1,000 a day on such trips.

Los Angeles Times - Jesus Rodriguez Ernesto Ortiz leaned against his bike Wednesday and peered through a chain-link fence at the wreckage of the San Pablito fireworks market.

In this community, the sale of fireworks touches nearly every family, and so too did the explosion Tuesday afternoon that left the market a field of twisted metal, burned-out cars, broken glass and human remains.

Literary Hub - In what must be one of the most incendiary opening sentences in modern literature, Janet Malcolm proclaims at the top of her seminal work, The Journalist and the Murderer, that, “every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying upon people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.” She goes on to say that the subject reads the book that’s been written about them, expecting to find his or her story on the page—the story they have told to the reporter. Instead, they realize, the journalist “always intended to write a story of his own.”

Los Angeles Times - When it’s time to distill their mescal, Manuel Ramos Sanchez and his father, Victor Ramos Lucas, stay up all night. Then they stay up for the next 11 nights. Apart from a cat nap and a small break here and there, the second- and third-generation mescal producers stay by their still, carefully stoking the embers beneath, washing and rewashing the components between batches, and hauling fermented maguey to the vessel.

Los Angeles Times – In Ana Patricia Gomez Diaz’s El Salvador, the government has advised women to avoid pregnancy for two years because of concerns about the Zika virus, but the mother of two with the kind smile was already pregnant and en route to the United States over a month before the alarm sounded.

Los Angeles Times – In September of 2014, modern Mexican history was severed into two distinct periods: before and after 43 students at a rural teachers college, Escuela Normal Rural de Ayotzinapa, disappeared. At least, that’s how many Mexicans who identify with the humble families who lost their sons view the event, referred to simply as Ayotzinapa.

On Monday, Luis walked up a steep path at the Senda de Vida migrant shelter in Reynosa, Mexico, and through a dirt lot strewn with broken pieces of a jungle gym. He approached a chain-link fence that encloses the lot, and looked through it for the first time. There, the muddy-green waters of the Rio Grande flowed gently toward the Gulf. Crossing the river might have taken mere minutes, but Luis couldn’t simply jump the fence. Guards with gang ties patrol the river and charge migrants to cross. Luis, 20, has been running from gangs in his native Honduras for more than 1,500 miles, and even now, 25 yards from the U.S. border, he isn’t safe.

Bloomberg – In a glass-walled conference room at the California headquarters of Space Exploration Technologies Corp., Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk told Texas officials he was interested in building the world’s first commercial rocket launchpad in their state -- if the state could compete.

The New York Times – he artist Patricia Ruiz-Bayón recently met with three migrants in a shelter in this ravaged border city and invited them to take part in one of her performance works. The piece, “70+2...,” commemorated an act of extreme brutality that continues to traumatize the region: a 2010 massacre of 72 migrants in nearby San Fernando that the Mexican authorities say was carried out by the Zetas criminal gang.

The New York Times – The writer Jesmyn Ward’s brother is buried in a cemetery next to the park where they used to play as children. Graves are beginning to fill up the space between the two, and she says she worries that one day the park will be swallowed up by the headstones of friends and neighbors, too many of them dying too young.