From the editor.

• Author: Kiernan, James Patrick

In this issue of Americas, we visit with two Mexican authors, both of whom have worked principally as journalists and whose lives reflect, within different periods, the promises, possibilities, and disappointments of the Mexican Revolution. Caleb Bach chats with Andres Henestrosa, who was nurtured in the creative ferment of the early years of that human upheaval and who by his own determination and drawing on the fables of his indigenous world produced works that are considered landmarks of Mexican letters. Elena Poniatowska, the widely acclaimed contemporary writer, is described by Elizabeth Coonrod Martinez as a voice of the people whose journalism focuses on social injustices in today's society and whose fiction deals with those, particularly women, who are "erased and unacknowledged," like the soldaderas of the Mexican Revolution.

In two very different ways we explore man's relationship to the land and to nature. Jeffrey Cohn explains how in the Sonoran Desert of both Mexico and the United States, ranchers are finding that efforts to conserve rather than modify their environment are ultimately profitable and will sustain a longer relationship with the land. Ricardo Carrasco Stuparich describes a popular festival during the winter solstice in the high...