"All over the country today, La Raza is in motion. A spirit of awakening runs through the big city barrios, small towns, colleges and universities, the countryside. Our people are refusing to be filled with shame any longer, they are refusing to be oppressed, they are demanding liberation and a decent life...They are working on problems like working conditions and pay, education, welfare rights, housing, child care, police brutality. They are forming groups of women with names like Las Chicanas and Las Adelitas."

"we know that more Chicanas must become involved. It is our job as Chicanas to wake them up, encourage them to see that they have a responsibility larger than their immediate families-a responsibility to the whole familia of La Raza, the whole family of oppressed peoples. And a responsibility to their own un-used talents, brain, energy."

"I didn’t want to be ahead, I wanted to be with the people in the moment. But, you end up being ahead because you’re different. That’s the irony of it."

"They perceive how our oppressor uses "machismo" against us-for example, by appealing to a Chicano's sense of supposed manhood in order to get him to kill Vietnamese. Sexism is a useful tool to the colonizer; the men are oppressed but they can beat and mistreat women, who thus serve as targets for a frustration that might otherwise become revolutionary. Some men understand very well that the full participation of women is needed if our people are to win the liberation struggle."

"The fact is, nothing could be more truly Chicana than the Chicana who wants to be more than a wife, mother, housekeeper. That limited concept of women did not exist under our Indian ancestors for whom the woman was a creative person in the broadest sense and central to the cultural life of the tribe. Later in Mexican history, we find that the woman has played every possible role-including that of fighter on the front lines."

"ours is an age of intensified empire-building in which no war is unthinkable."

"…it’s just another front in the battle against racism. And that’s what it was, because New Mexico was much more colonial than any other area, but it was all the same damn racism. And so I never felt like I was breaking any life pattern; I was just shifting to another front.…"

"As my good friend the poet Susana Cabañas says in the last lines of her poem "Elegía a Julia de Burgos" ("Elegy to Julia de Burgos"): "Yo rehuso convertirme en otra estadística./Seré yo y será borinquen/Libre!" ("I refuse to be turned into another statistic/I and Borinquen will be/Free!""

"Julia de Burgos wrote: "That my grandfather was a slave/is my grief;/had he been a master/that would have been my shame.""

"we wander through the streets of our memory/looking for julia de burgos/in the concrete of our tongue"

"In looking at the Puerto Rican movement as a whole and the positive contributions that we made in the seventies and early eighties, first we need to point out that we built on our legacy of struggle. We stood on the shoulders of such Nationalists as Ramón Emeterio Betances, Pedro Albizu Campos, Lolita Lebrón, and such communists as Luisa Capetillo, Jesús Colón, Bernardo Vega, Julia de Burgos, Juana Colón, Evelina Antonetti, Antonio Corretjer, Genoveva Clemente, Gerena Valentín, and many others."

"The collection is also a question: who is Margarita? Margarita is an intoxicating drink, a flower back home in Puerto Rico, the title of a traditional "danza" that was a favorite of my mother and the name of a woman I love. Margarita is all of these and none. Margarita is my muse, Margarita is my poetry, Margarita is my imaginary lover, Margarita is my Self. And as you read these you may ask yourself: who is Julia? Julia de Burgos is our greatest woman poet in Puerto Rico, Julia is a teacher, Julia is an idol, Julia is a friend. But Julia is, most of all, Margarita. We are all Margaritas and have a Julia within."

"I never strongly identified with Puerto Rican writers from Puerto Rico. My writing comes from a different sensibility...I have, however, read and liked very much Julia de Burgos and José Luis González and Magali García Ramis."

"For Esmeralda Santiago, the impetus to develop a new tradition of Puerto Rican authors comes from her beginnings in literature, back in her childhood when she spent time in the backyard of a family member’s house in el campo. There, she listened to relatives tell trovas – oral tradition in rhyme. She also credits her dad’s love for poetry and Puerto Rican authors Julia de Burgos, Manuel Alonso, and Luis Palés Matos with sparking her interest."

"Julia de Burgos is the eldest of thirteen children, a bottomless spring of emotion, a boundless heart full of desires, a beautiful and eloquent woman who generously spills her spirit onto page after page...Julia de Burgos, the glowing poet of sensual rivers and waves crashing against sea walls, is drowning slowly in despair. I who am also poeta, puertorriqueña, needing both love and art, fighting political battles by day and demons by night, I have stood at the brink of that river of sorrows, tempted by oblivion. I live in a far more generous life, created for me by the labor of countless women, thirty years of collective agitation, thirty years of wrestling with the culture and consciousness of women and men. I do not face her terrible choices, the punishments meted out to passionate creative women of her day."

"The truth is that we need to reexamine and redefine our culture. Some of us do not believe that in our culture, femininity has always meant: weak, passive delicate looking... in other words, qualities that inflate the male ego. The women of La Raza is traditionally a fighter and revolutionary."

"Puerto Rican poet Julia de Burgos and Uruguayan Delmira Agustini are united in an unexpected way, de Burgos searching for desire and love and Agustini searching for freedom to love. Linked for the first time when speaking from the perspective of and about the history of love and absence, recreating the adventures of those lost, either on an abandoned island or an abandoned body, placing the poetry of these two women in the same section is the starting point"

"We are all inseparable from our times, whether we realize it or not."

"Getting back to the Boricua's issue/what history do you know?/Ever heard of/Agueybana/Pedro Albizu Campos/Palés Matos/Rafael Betances/Arturo Alfonso Schomburg/Francisco Oller/Julia De Burgos/Rafael Hernández/Segundo Ruiz Belvis/Enrique Laguerre/Mariana Bracetti/Pedro Pietri/Still havING problems figuring me out?/Or is it that you just don't know/who you are?"

"Julia de Burgos, the poet of love and nationhood"

"Que sea nuestra vida presente de todo./Que busque futuro tan sólo en el alma./Que ensaye verdades. Que sienta en idea./Que siempre se extienda cortando distancias"

"Fui estrella en tus brazos derramada"

"¡Oh amor entretenido en astros y palomas,/cómo en rocío feliz cruzas mi alma!"

"en la noche callada dejé perder un verso."

"No se cuándo ni dónde/pero se que vendrás."

"la verdad respiraba del pulmón de la tierra"

"¿Cómo podrán callarme/cuando todos los ecos del universo sean/sinfonías en mi frente?"

"ya que no tuve nunca un mundo entre los vivos,/un mundo entre los muertos ofrecedme, soldados!"

"el honor echó canas/en el imperio homicida."

"De todos los pueblos/surgirán brazos fuertes,/los brazos de millones de hombres/que pueblan la avanzada de la tierra."

"De mi patria invadida,/es hoy su independencia, el campo de batalla."

"¡Puerto Rico es la espada/que detendrá el avance/del imperio sajón!/Sea su herida la última/que en tu suelo latino/haga el vil opresor."

"La palabra no puede con mi carga de angustia,/y no cabe en mi verso mi dolor exaltado."

"El Imperialismo de Estados Unidos/tiene una ancha fosa:/allí está tu muerta/allí el pequeñuelo/allí tu vaquita/allí está tu yegua/tu "tala" y tu tierra."

"América Latina,/¡Rebélate/contra el yanqui invasor!"

"No temas la mirada que vaciará mi corazón en ti"

"tus dos manos ya no vuelvan a alzarme/a recoger del cielo su cosecha de estrellas"

"Sin embargo no has muerto José Martí, sólo duermes;/la tierra te pidió como bandera"

"A tu pecho, José Martí, toco entre lágrimas,/en esta hora del hombre y de la guerra,/para que llegues, a la paz, despierto,/sobre el dolor más grande de la América."

"bailaremos la danza de la vida/al ritmo de un incendio de luz/que brotará del sol."

"Somos de la voz nueva, alargada, instintiva/que en idioma de avances habrá de estremecerse."

"¡Mira que el rico se afianza/donde tu pena se inicia"

"General Rafael, Trujillo General,/que tu nombre sea un eco eterno de cadáveres...Dictador de ese hermoso pueblo dominicano/masacrado en tus ansias y dormido en sus iras,/¿de qué llevas tu cetro? ¿De qué sol te alimentas?"

"¿Dónde comienza aquel momento triste/que ahogó la danza de mi espíritu"

"tu que sientes los gemidos de la patria que respira esclavitud"

"yo soy toda soledad/en un corazon rebelde"

"Es en ti (los pueblos hispanos de America) donde canta mi canción, donde grita/libre grito mi voz iniciada en montañas."

"Altamira del mundo por donde los instantes/ruedan como latidos del mundo de mañana."