Mexican - Poet | August 20, 1955 -
There is beauty in our roots. Sometimes we think our roots are shameful, and people tell you that you're no good or your ancestors are no good or that you come from a neighborhood of no hope and terrible crime. But it's about the beauty of those places, and I carry that with me.
Luis Alberto Urrea
GoodBeautyHopePeopleMeRoots
It's not like Mexicans have an illegal immigration organ in their body and at 14 kicks off a hormone and shows them how to come to the United States illegally. It's a question of desperation for a vast majority of them.
ImmigrationBodyIllegal Immigration
When I was doing missionary work when I was younger, which started this obsession of mine with the literature of witness, I was a translator for a missionary group, and I spent years in a Tijuana dump. People were really thrown by the fact that the Mexican poor, many of them pureblood indigenous people, seemed happy.
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In the end, I'm really interested in people and what we do with our short time here on earth. I'm interested in the human soul.
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I was torn between the Americanness my mom wanted for me and the Mexicanness my father wanted - they were wrestling for cultural influence over me.
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I have often said I come from a family of unreliable narrators. I tend to believe their struggles with racism, identity, nationality do dovetail with my motivation to write.
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The stupidity of militarized fences between two worlds is a metaphor for all the things that divide us as human beings.
StupidityHumanTwoThingsUs
It's almost easy for me to write about a magnificent tropical village with orchids and dragonflies. That's intoxicating, but the United States is magical, too. We just forget this.
MeEasyVillageForgetWriteUnited
The situation was kind of complicated in that my mother didn't speak Spanish. My father spoke English, you know, as best he could.
FatherMotherBestSpeakYouKnow
Spanish was my first language. Honestly, I learned to first speak in Spanish, not English, because my poor mother had to go to San Diego every day to work and then come back. And she would come home when I was an infant long after I was asleep.
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I had not seen lawns till fifth grade - big green lawns.
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Borders are liminal spaces. Anyone worthy of the title of 'writer' is a border writer. We all are border people.
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