Congrats to Daniel Hernandez!

I’m leaving L.A. for a little bit, a year, maybe more, for Mexico City. I’m sealing a deal with editor Colin Robinson at Scribner to write a book about the underground, basically — youth and subcultures. I’m gonna do a lot of writing, a lot of reading, a lot of drinking and eating, and a lot of walking. My boots are my best friends. Participation does a body good.

Months ago, while I was in New York for business, I asked my editor at Scribner if the rumor was true: Was the best damn publishing house on Earth really talking with Daniel Hernandez about bringing him into our familia? My jefe said sí, and I rejoiced.

Hernandez, for those of you who aren’t familiar, is an award-winning 26-year-old chingón: a staff writer at LA Weekly, keeper of one of Southern California’s more eclectic blogs, as apt to write about mustaches as he is deflating false saints. A good guy, talented as fuck–and the man who made my career.

In February 2006, Hernandez wrote a profile about me and ¡Ask a Mexican!. It would be his last piece for the Los Angeles Times before defecting to the LA Weekly. To be blunt, his Column One changed my life. Gracias to him, I received the two-book deal from Scribner, the Colbert Report appearance, the requests to emcee events. Whereas others wept and moaned about my good fortune, Hernandez was characteristically humble. “There was some attention thrown my way [because of my article on Gustavo], but I’d like to think I was just doing my job,” Hernandez toldLAist in an interview last year. “My sole intent was to tell the world about a revolutionary journalistic voice causing desmadre right under our noses. Whatever happened after that was not my concern. But it was cool to watch, definitely.”