Zacatecas

Our social life was centered on my parents’ native ranchos, whose residents transplanted themselves from Zacatecas to Southern California along with their music, culture and español.

Designating the cartels as terrorist organizations, as he pledged, is so empty a threat, it’s as if a piece of paper in Washington D.C. will scare guys wearing respirators in a fentanyl lab down in Zacatecas.

Usually warm and chatty, Atencio, who was raised in the Mexican state of Zacatecas, got uncharacteristically quiet.

Baseball, not soccer, is the preferred sport in Zacatecas, so the Arellano boys played games on a makeshift dirt field in an arroyo with rolled up pantyhose as the ball, tree branches for bats and a mano pelona — gloveless.

In the 1980s, he and other men from the ranchos of Jerez, Zacatecas, began to play in Sunday league games against men from other Mexican states.