Mexican Americans

"People say the South is racist, but it wasn't until I moved north that I was really barraged with microaggressions on a daily basis. One instance was when I was sick and missed a couple of days of classes. This was reported to my adviser as my having missed weeks of coursework. When I was in class I was ignored, but when I was not there I stuck out like a sore thumb. It's hard to separate your microaggressions when you deal with intersecting minoritized identities. Was it because I was the only woman? The only Black person? The only Mexican? The only lesbian?"

"Jedidah Isler visited Syracuse, and she reached out to me to have lunch. I wasn't doing well—I had failed my quals—but the fact that this prestigious Black woman physicist reached out to me made an impression. I was embarrassed to go, but her candor and vulnerability about going through these spaces that were not built for us helped me understand that it was not my fault that I didn't fit in. Meeting with her validated my feelings. We discussed impostor syndrome. We discussed finances."

"I think there was a lack of understanding around the police killings and how they mentally and emotionally affect Black people. But I think my colleagues are listening and want to learn, and the lab is responsive."

"We want to make a cultural shift in physics, and we have laid out seven strategic goals. They include hiring Black scientists, restructuring leadership and decision-making entities, and investing in Black communities."

"It’s what we do as cartoonists, to cut through the [bull] and expose it."

"(the cockroach) is a metaphor of how immigrants, Mexicans, have been represented as insects, as a nuisance, as space invaders, the Latino threat to be eliminated. Alcaraz appropriates this and turns it upside down. It’s a way of empowering through this image that was actually used to marginalize."

"La cucaracha speaks for the disenfranchised with humor and a cutting voice"

"I feel like, definitely, melancholy, mixed emotions. I’m sad that we’re still — I’m now drawing again almost the same cartoons that I was drawing 22, 23 years ago, during Prop 187 in California, the first anti-immigrant — big anti-Mexican-immigrant law that came out, modern time."

"And I eventually — when I went to Berkeley, which is where I got my masters in architecture, there I met other Chicanos that wanted to do sketch comedy, wanted to make music, wanted to write comedy. And we, of course, aggregated, and that’s when I realized, wow, this is what I was meant to be doing."

"why did I not learn in school that my culture is older than 2000 years. It’s maybe 20,000 years old. And how come they don’t teach you that in school?"

"And I do push Spanglish. I do push biculturalism, to make it normal. That’s what I didn’t see, growing up, on TV. I grew up on the border, in San Diego, as a kid. Never saw brown people on TV unless I watched the stuff in Spanish. But so eventually I realized, wow, we are just not anywhere — what’s going on?"

"in Hollywood, I mean they don’t know we exist. They’re barely starting to figure out that there are Mexican Americans. And so I use humor as a way to cope with that and to let our community know that we’re not invisible, at least not to us."

"In college I was an editorial cartoonist for my school paper, The Daily Aztec...I did straight, news-oriented editorial cartoons. Occasionally, my Chicano background snuck in to the toons simply because I might do a César Chavez toon about how the School Student Board was too stupidly racist to allow him to speak on campus or other anti-frat toons on how they were so racist in doing fund-raisers for Tijuana kid charities--dressed in sombreros and begging with tin cups."

"I dug Mad Magazine, my brain is wired to mock, and Mad just confirmed my world view since I was a kid."

"I'm just a guy who was predisposed to be a cartoonist, who happened to make it through all the bullshit that comes with being poor and brown."

"The other person (sending hate mail) is at war with me, but I’ve already defeated them. I made some drawings that will be in their heads forever."

"There is still this American societal attitude that we are foreign."

"We’re not here to fix the world’s problems but to shine a big, fat light on them hopefully."

"I cartoon because I got tired of feeling excluded from the comic stage."

"Much has been lost in U.S. culture because of secularism. The values of the immigrants are very basic, reflecting a profound Catholicism where faith, family, and expressions of piety, etc., are part of our daily life."

"No one is excluded from their proclamation that Jesus is Lord, that God loves all people, that all of us are sisters and brothers, beloved children of the one God, for God alone is able to feed the deepest hungers of the human heart."

"My natural tendency is to write dramatic music, but the job of a composer is to write whatever a show requires. The range is indeed quite broad, as you know, and in truth, each and every style has a unique set of challenges and rewards. It is not unusual for me to go from a very dark and dramatic scene to a lighthearted one. And my one comment would be that the difficulty lies in shifting gears! But shift we must, and we composers do it every day."

"Though they have not caught up with native-born whites in most measures of economic mobility, people of Mexican origin have experienced an appreciable degree of structural assimilation as measured by education, occupation, residential location, and intermarriage. The structural assimilation of Mexican Americans has also weakened the hold that ethnicity has on how parents raise their children. Over time, the use of the Spanish language diminishes, ethnic customs play a decreasingly important role in family life, and the ties that Mexican Americans have to family in their ethnic homeland diminish."

"At the national level, the Mexican-origin population exhibits the lowest levels of education of any other racial or ethnic group. Only 7.3 percent of Mexican Americans hold a bachelor’s degree or higher, compared to 28.8 percent of whites, 16.1 percent of blacks, and 45.8 percent of Asians. Mexican Americans are also the least likely of all groups to be employed in middle- (service and skilled blue-collar jobs) to high-status occupations (professional, technical, white-collar occupations) and are largely concentrated in low-wage labor."

"“La Tierra es vida” (The land is life) is a popular dicho (folk saying) used by the Mexican-origin people of northern New Mexico and southern Colorado to describe the belief that humans must respect the land because it is the source of life. This land ethic instructs people to act as caretakers of the earth. It also requires of them a sense of political responsibility because the community must actively confront greed before it leads to abuse of the land. This aspect of the Mexican American land ethic is retold in folktales like that of the Forest Spirit. The “Forest Spirit drove the man out of the forests for cutting down too many trees, for he was greedy and without shame.” Folktales like this relate the folly of greedy people who act out of balance with nature and community because they suffer from sinvergüenzas - a shameless indifference to the harm that others suffer as a consequence of their actions, which are designed solely for individual gain."

"One of the initial debates in the study of Mexican American English revolved around the question of whether it should be considered a native variety of English or a Spanish-influenced transitional language that would eventually converge on one of the regional dialects of English. Some researchers have viewed Mexican American English as nothing more than English with a Spanish accent… In contrast, other scholars recognize Mexican American English as a set of stable features, sometimes arising from Spanish influence, that is shared among large numbers of Mexican American speakers. Allan Metcalf, for example, defined Chicano English as “a variety of English that is obviously influenced by Spanish and that has low prestige in most circles, but that nevertheless is independent of Spanish and is the first, and often only, language of many hundreds of thousands of residents of California.”"

"A writer is always so conflicted about their work, so it was liberating to be able to be in this space of my words, without being judgmental or changing anything. I vividly remembered the ideas that I had, where I was when I had them, how I imagined this moment of holding this book, I was emotionally connected to it. I reflected on the story of my arrival, and then my time as a young woman. I cried during the scene of my rape, and I found myself rooting for my character as I read on! I laugh about it now because I am the character, she is me! The process of narrating completely transformed my relationship to the memoir, even after I never imagined that it would."

"The hardest part of my narration was when I read about my assault. I cried. It took me a while to get through it, maybe because of the way I wrote it. It was very graphic and one of the parts of the book that I wrote while crying. It felt like the scab was off, and I was diffing deeper into my wounds when I talked about this moment and others.…"

"Imagine this story as if you were telling it to your mother. I always write with this in mind. Keep in mind this doesn’t necessarily work when writing a memoir, but it helps to focus on telling the story to one person. I didn’t have an image of a reader, per se, but I knew that I had to use my voice to connect to them. When you connect to somebody’s writing, it is powerful because it is such an intimate experience, but imagine an added element—the element of your voice. You can use your own voice to exude sensuality, anger, love, raw emotions. I go into the studio a lot, so doing this wasn’t particularly hard for me. I just close my eyes and go into a space."

"Research on the Mexican Americans’ prehistory needs to consider their ancient past in Europe and Africa, because Mexican Americans are a racially mixed people with a complex history of conquest."

"The success of Mexican Americans in maintaining a distinctive culture in the Southwest did not lie in the fact that they violently or even overtly resisted Anglo Americans’ steady encroachments on their way of life. Rather, the ultimately political and social significant of the perpetuation of distinct Mexican American communities throughout the Southwest lay in the fact that Mexican Americans were able to survive and persist as an ethnically distinct people despite the change in political sovereignty over their homeland. In technical, political terms, although Mexican Americans, by virtue of their new status as American citizens, were no longer Mexicans, American racism and Mexican Americans’ de facto subordinate status in the new social order encouraged them to consider themselves Mexicans in a way they never had before."

"Even as American colonizers tapped a native elite to govern in a region with far more Euro-American soldiers than civilians, they also needed to keep Mexican Americans and Indians in their racial place. For Mexican Americans, as the native elite in [New Mexico], the distinction between political and social equality became paramount, if not always openly discussed. Though Euro-American men ceded formal political equality to Mexican American men, this did not translate into social equality between Euro-Americans and Mexican Americans."

"The struggle is inner: Chicano, indio, American Indian, mojado, mexicano, immigrant Latino, Anglo in power, working class Anglo, Black, Asian--our psyches resemble the bordertowns and are populated by the same people. The struggle has always been inner, and is played out in outer terrains. Awareness of our situation must come before inner changes, which in turn come before changes in society. Nothing happens in the "real" world unless it first happens in the images in our heads."

"The Texas Rangers brutalized Mexican American communities in Texas. The rinches, as many Mexican Americans called them, were originally a group of deputized gunmen hired to protect the land of Anglo ranchers and farmers from perceived predators. The reality was that in most instances, Mexican Americans were trying to retrieve land stolen from them by Anglos."

"World War II, then, imbued the ongoing Mexican American civil rights movement with new leadership and a new attitude of entitlement - Mexican American men had, in large numbers, served their country as Americans; now it was time to reap the benefits of full citizenship rights."

"I ultimately left with my family's blessing. I didn't really realize at the time how final that trip was for me. I think Texas is beautiful and there is a part of the Lone Star State that I will always carry with me. I am very proud of being Tex/Mex. The difficult part for me was being a very aware child while growing up in Texas in the '50's and '60's. Racism was prevalent. I felt it and saw it in big ugly ways and I felt it and saw it in subtle, painful injustices that affect me to this day…"

"Most trained actors can pick up a scene and give it a good sturdy first read, but a few coaching sessions does not a trained actor make - a lesson which has stayed with me ever since."

"Teaching, good teaching, is a remarkable gift which I highly revere. One of the saddest things that has happened to education, I feel, is the loss of respect and honor once given to educators as professionals…"

"When I arrived in Los Angeles and began going on auditions, I was never considered for Latina roles. I was "ethnic" but not decidedly Latina looking. If they were hiring a Latina to play a Latina, they wanted her to "look like a Latina" e.g. high cheek bones, dark skin and a mane of black hair. Well, I just couldn't get arrested by casting directors as a Latina. I think this led to the realization that I was going to have to blaze a trail for myself because I didn't fit into one particular "type."…"

"…We had a great life together, we really did, good and bad, the ups and the downs, there were a lot of downs. But at one point I told him, “I’m not here to play your music to get paid because it’s money, money has nothing to do with it, I’m here because I love you. I don’t care about your money.”…"

"We’d just sing a lot of things and sometimes slip in a little something here and there…There are no limits, there are no laws, there are no rules, we’re just gonna do whatever."

"People don't understand how important it is for funk to be funky, the only way to do that is to allow space to happen. Space is the most important part of music, it's the space that allows the song to breathe that's so important."

"…The first girl I ever saw playing drums on television was Karen Carpenter, so I thought I play drums how come I don't have a television show?"

"If you can strum the guitar a little, hit the drums — it’s always fun and a good way to release tensions…You can have a hard day at work, pick up your instrument and just feel better. You also can appreciate why a performer is up on stage and see how they have spent their life learning their craft."

"Family is very important to me because my own family was so disruptive ... Me and my brothers and sister were like ping pong balls, we didn’t know where we would end up."

"That did it for me, the applause, the vibe…I said, “that’s it man, that’s what I want to do. Forget the art.”"

"…When I was a kid, I didn’t know what I was going to do. Even when I started playing music, I had no idea that I would get to this point in my professional life…"

"For someone born in the US but whose parents hail from Mexico, there is always a disconnect that happens between the present culture and the one before. Sometimes, it is a flimsy synapse, and sometimes the disconnect can be a chasm…"

"I’m not a poet, but I do like heightened language that can exist in the theatre. Many plays are sounding more naturalistic these days, more like TV. I still take my cues from Shakespeare. I would rather have the story exist more in the audience’s heads than on a screen."

"…I learned to violate the rules of time and space—that they can be protracted, or that an entire war can happen in two or three lines of dialogue. I learned from movie montage, how to use language as montage. And for the scene of the judge’s assassination, I learned a lot from Julius Caesar…"