Luis Alberto Urrea Quotes
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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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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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I came to believe the green fuse that drives spring and summer through the world is essentially a literary energy. That the world was more than a place. Life was more than an event. It was all one thing - and that thing was story.
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I don't like being angry all the time; it's not good for me. I have to have serenity or else go to war.
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I'm a theological writer mistaken for a political writer. My theme is grace versus karma.
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I was deeply infected with storytelling from the get go, and I truly love it.
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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've been treated beautifully wherever I've gone, and I really think we all want to love each other.
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A great Chicano forebear of mine in writing is Rolando Hinojosa-Smith. He was writing good border mysteries for Chicano readers back in the '80s and '90s.
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Way back when I was working at the dump, I saw that, even when living among the trash, that some people would decide to choose joy in their lives.
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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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The concept of a literature of witness - of bearing witness - has embedded in it the need for action. One must not simply hide in the shadows and type; one must also stand in the light.
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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.
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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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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.
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I used to work with a relief group that took care of the people in the dump. We took them food and water and medicine and built homes and took them to church services, whatever was needed.
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I often say poetry was my first love.
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I love books with titles like, 'How Do You Spank a Porcupine?,' 'Arnie, the Darling Starling,' or 'The Bat in My Pocket.'
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The French-Cajun culture is similar to mine - they're Catholic, they play accordions, and they eat hot chiles.
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Books are like chocolate. Can't eat just one.
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During grade school, we moved to a white, working-class suburb in San Diego, and there were no Mexicans.
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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.
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Many of us writers tour like a literary Bachman Turner Overdrive. We ain't pretty, but we're on the road. Many of us wish we were rock stars anyway. For my part, I live in my iPod. The musicians there are my constant companions on the road.
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The tone of 'Into the Beautiful North' is really the way I write. 'Hummingbird's Daughter' was the anomaly. It was a once-in-a-lifetime phenomenon.