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One of my biggest inspirations is President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. Yea, President Hugo.

I've always admired President Chavez for standing up to imperialism and the meddling of the American government in South America.

The most memorable interviews for me are folks whose names I don't know: young civil rights leaders in the South, showing great courage as they walked into a town in the dark of night. A doctor working for 'Doctors Without Borders' in Somalia, operating by kerosene light in a tent. Those are the kinds of people that linger in your memory.

I like my subjects to be American, and not too dead, so I can interview people who knew them.

I was interested in a lot of subjects from very early on. And that's uniquely Chicano because every Chicano I knew always had three jobs.

My life experiences are different than the average person because I've spent the last 10 years living in Mexico. I generally don't know what's going on in America, and when I do visit for work, I'm often interrogated about my life choices by random strangers.

For fiction, I'm not particularly nationalistic. I'm not like the Hugo Chavez of Latin American letters, you know? I want people to read good work.

I think I'm still chewing on my years as a foreign correspondent. I found myself covering catastrophes - war, uprising, famine, refugee crises - and witnessing how people were affected by dire situations. When I find a story from the past, I bring some of those lessons to bear on the narrative.

Interviewing politicians and movie stars, you know what you'll get. I like the people-stories better.