Yvette Doss, a self-described 'Mexican-American half-breed and twentysomething,' is on the phone with Time magazine in her crowded San Francisco apartment, trying to persuade them to do a story on her magazine. 'There is a Latino publishing revolution going on,' she says. 'That would be your national angle.'

Click. The conversation ends like so many others she has had with members of the publishing world's inner circle: in defeat. Ever since this 26-year-old daughter of a Mexican immigrant and a white military man from Virginia began publishing frontera magazine in December last year, she has found the invisibility of young Latinos like herself both frustrating and galvanizing. Her splashy quarterly journal for English-speaking Latinos--particularly Mexican-Americans--captures the vibrancy of millions of young people who haven't been able to find a reflection of their lives in any of the mainstream media.

Caught between two worlds, this 'refried nation' (as the magazine refers to its readers) is as fond of punk and apple pie as it is of Mexican quebradita music and south-of-the-border sweets like pan dulce. Doss' magazine, which already has a circulation of almost 20,000, is in an excellent position to ride the wave of opportunity expected to hit in the next decade as Hispanics surpass blacks as the nation's largest minority.

'I feel like we're chronicling a generation from the trenches,' she says. 'Twenty years from now, I'm going to look back and say, `Wow, I was part of that change.' But for now, we don't register on the mainstream radar. We're not even a blip.' The name frontera, which Doss thought up in the shower, reflects the pending change: It's Spanish for frontier, but it can also be read as two English words: front era.

Doss, a philosophy and creative writing graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, never intended to enter the fiercely competitive magazine world. 'I wanted to write books about the big questions in life,' she says, tugging at her short pigtails, 'but I also wanted to write the great American novel.' When she soon learned that neither would pay the bills, she enrolled in the graduate journalism school at Berkeley. There, she took a class in magazine publishing from New York founder Clay Felker and was inspired to launch frontera.