April 2, 1995

JOSEFINA JOLON, a small dark-haired woman with an easy smile and the dream of being a teacher, is a volunteer at Mary T. Murphy Elementary School in Branford. Two mornings a week, as youngsters paste together cards or learn to spell a new word, she helps Dotty Young, a first-grade teacher. Among the 23 children in the class, 5 receive special instruction in English as a second language. They come from India, China, Japan and Cambodia. Mrs. Jolon, 23, understands the difficulties faced by foreign-born children, because she is a newcomer herself. In 1988, she and her husband, Juan, now 28, fled the fears of Guatemala.

FROM the sprawling roof of the Silvercup Studios building in Long Island City, Alan Suna, the owner of New York's largest grouping of production stages, can see the Kaufman Astoria Studios in nearby Astoria. It is his nearest competitor in the business of providing production stages for the television programs -- action shows and situation comedies, pilots and weekly series, made-for-TV movies and talk shows -- that are increasingly turning to New York City as a production base.

FINGERS point and mouths gape when the Impact, General Motors' prototype electric car, glides by. Even blase New Yorkers stare at the futuristic coupe from sidewalks or crane their necks from their plain old gasoline-powered cars. Ninety years ago, it must have been like this to drive a horseless carriage. "How fast will it go?" they ask. "How far?" And, "How much?"

By now we should get the message. The Arkansas Razorbacks are just much too comfortable being uncomfortable. "You can't be lucky," said Nolan Richardson, the coach of the Razorbacks, "if you don't put yourself in position to be lucky." They have overcome the imperfections that have not been tolerated for a defending national champion with five returning starters. The Razorbacks have put themselves in position to play for the national collegiate championship the same way they have advanced through the harrowing defense of their title -- the hard way.

THEY swelter in the dust and the filth of the colonias, the poorest communities in America's poorest counties, often without even the indoor toilets that most of us take for granted. Yet the Mexican immigrants who crowd these squalid settlements along the Texas border are also a source of wealth -- for the colonia owners and developers. Buying cheap land, sometimes for a few hundred dollars an acre, sometimes in flood plains for much less, politically powerful developers can resell it for thousands or tens of thousands of dollars an acre to immigrants who struggle to build houses on their plots, board by board. Some developers reap hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.