There's a lot more to Mexico man Acapulco and the silver mines of Taxco," says Staff Writer Jack White. "More than Tijuana, tequila, tortillas and tacos," adds Bernard Diederich, who has been chief of TIME's bureau in Mexico City for more than a decade. Yet cornmeal cliches have often flavored American thinking about the neighbor across the Rio Grande. This week's cover story, written by White and reported by Diederich, assesses the social, political and historical landscape of a country described by Diederich as "big, beautiful and as complicated as any on earth." The story also examines the issues raised by last week's visit of Mexican President Jose Lopez Portillo to Washington. Says White: "We can no longer afford to patronize, misunderstand and ignore a country that contributes the fastest-growing minority segment to our population, and one that could have the resources to bring us comfortably through the energy crisis."

A TIME staff member since 1972, White has specialized in stories about the developing nations of the Third World since studying that subject as a Nieman Fellow at Harvard two years ago. After writing about the civil war in Rhodesia and the revolutions in Iran and Nicaragua, he found Mexico's relative political stability "a refreshing change." The roots of revolution, he says, have long been there-- "high levels of unemployment, explosive population growth and a harshly inequitable distribution of wealth. Yet there hasn't been a revolution in Mexico since 1917. It's hard to figure out."

Such mysteries also captivated Reporter-Researcher Tam Martinides Gray, who often collaborates with both White and Diederich on Latin American stories. Says Gray: "Mexico has a fatalistic, almost mythical perception of itself. It is easy to get caught up in the character of the people, their eloquence, their national pride." White, for his part, got caught up in the history and mythology of Mexico's pre-Columbian people. Thus, in homage to Quetzalcoatl, the tribal god of the Toltecs, and in commemoration of this week's cover, White named his newly acquired feline house pet Quetzalcatl.

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