Discovering God's children in strangers.
Byline: Phyllis Hockley For The Register-Guard Watching neighbors? As Eduardo and Juan cross the park to the school bus this morning, my mind jogs back to a memorable summer I spent as director of a school for migrant children. The giving and the receiving of that summer...

Talks, tours, tortillas highlight Main Stories.
Byline: CITY BEAT/SPRINGFIELD By Bob Keefer The Register-Guard SPRINGFIELD - Pack up your memories and head downtown on Tuesday to take part in Main Stories, an event designed to bring people to the city center and get them talking about Springfield's past. Well, about the...

Churches fight migrant harassment near border. (News).
It remains an isolated problem, but one that still angers Ricardo Ramirez, the Catholic bishop of Las Cruces, New Mexico. The details may vary slightly, but the facts are essentially the same along the boundary between the U.S. and Mexico. Overzealous Border Patrol agents station themselves a...

Wrap artist: these tortillas are all in the family.
Little Joaquin Davis dives into the flour with both hands--it's on his shirt, his cheeks, the tip of his nose. "Guess he's in the family business," says Marla Madrid, mother of the boisterous 2 1/2-year-old. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] That business is tortillas--colorful, flavored tortillas--with fresh ingredients...

Tortilla maker nurtures fresh-daily reputation.
Byline: RETAIL NOTEBOOK By Joe Mosley The Register-Guard Ciro Gutierrez's ambition is to do for the tortilla what Krispy Kreme has done for the doughnut. To sell them fresh each day, and preferably still warm from the baking. "All my life I've eaten...

?Mas menudo? love it or not, this savory Mexican soup is legendary in the Southwest. (Travel).
Frankly, it's been decades since I've overdone it on New Year's Eve, but that doesn't stop me from indulging in a favorite New Year's Day ritual: I savor a steamy spicy, chewy bowl of menudo, the legendary Mexican soup traditionally eaten after a night of revelry. It's been said...

Guam mystery disease from bat entree? (Troubling Treat).
A famous unsolved medical puzzle of last century--why a neurological disease spiked on Guam--may hinge on the local tradition of serving boiled bat. After World War II, doctors noticed that the Chamorro people of Guam experienced 100 times as high an incidence of diseases resembling amyotrophic lateral...

Lore and learning: the Southwest comes alive on these vacations that combine rich scenery with vivid human history.
We had just seen a petroglyph site rich with images, the grave of Joaquin Murrieta (the outlaw who inspired the legend of Zorro), and a pristinely preserved mission church established in the 17th century by Jesuit missionary Eusebio Kino. But at the present moment, our 10-person group was mostly...

Tortillas to robots at San Jose's youthful museums.
After a protracted adolescence, California's oldest city may finally be coming of age. Two innovative museums for people young enough to be experiencing their own growing pains are among the more exciting products of the billion-dollar renovation of downtown San Jose. More like hands-on classrooms and playgrounds than conventional...

Yucatan breakfast ... and other Mexican surprises.
One of the two most popular Sunset cook books is our Mexican book (the other? The Barbecue Cook Book), first printed in 1969; about 2 million copies are in use. But now we have dramatically revised this classic, with 70 percent new material and the size increased to 128...