Women Activists From The United States

"yo soy toda soledad/en un corazon rebelde"

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

"Le diste corazón al universo/que se ocultaba en mí"

"Iba fiel la tormenta sobre mi alma cansada/cuando te apareciste con ternura de estrella."

"la palabra amor/se alzará de la tierra/en volcán inocente/que renueva universos"

"He sabido la inmensidad del cielo alto sobre las rosas"

"Debe ser la caricia de lo inútil,/la tristeza sin fin de ser poeta,/de cantar y cantar, sin que se rompa/la tragedia sin par de la existencia."

"La que juzga mi alma por la piel que me arropa/ni siquiera se extiende lo que alcanza su voz."

"Humanamente, y libre,/y distante, y materia/que allá abajo muy hondo/rimaré una canción."

"¡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 sombra del mañana me vigila la vida"

"Yo, fatalista,/mirando la vida llegándose y alejándose/de mis semejantes...Yo, dentro de mí misma,/siempre en espera de algo/que no acierta mi mente."

"¡Obreros! Picad el miedo./Vuestra es la tierra desnuda./Saltad el hambre y la muerte/por sobre la honda laguna,/y uníos a los campesinos,/y a los que en caña se anudan./¡Rómpanse un millón de puños/contra moral tan injusta!/¡Alzad, alzad vuestros brazos!"

"Los Hitler, los Mussolini.../¡Balas! ¡Balas! ¡Balas! ¡Balas!/Las dos víboras de Europa/que con la muerte se pactan."

"Hacia el alma es muy largo el camino que andar"

"A cada paso adelantado en mi ruta hacia el frente/rasgaba mis espaldas el aleteo desesperado/de los troncos viejos."

"Cantemos desde ahora, que la vida se va"

"Ya no es canción./Es grito./Grito de fuerza viva,/de hombres que luchan,/de mentes que se libertan,/de brazos sueltos/prestos a no caer./Las masas rugen./Piensan./Son."

"Carry yourself seriously but speak with a sweet voice. Humiliate no one, since, as you know, adolescence is characterized by unbridled self-love, and when a teacher shines light on the good qualities of a child, it does much more than focusing on their vices."

"To save something beautiful you must destroy it, so it does not fall, limp and degraded, from our miserable human hands."

"Yo fui la más callada./La voz casi sin eco./La conciencia tendida en sílaba de angustia,/desparramada y tierna, por todos los silencios...Yo fui la más callada./La que saltó/saltó la tierra sin más arma que un verso./¡Y aquí me veís, estrellas,/desparramada y tierna, con su amor en mi pecho!"

"All the flowers… are open, awaiting my arrival, and they clothe beaches of the most beautiful blue, to receive my life, whole and healthy like before. I want to spend days by the sea, burning myself in the sun like we did in our juvenile days, and to be able to return and see my river, with the same tranquil and yearning eyes as I did when I was its bride."

"Sólo dejarme, como estoy, soñando/a ser lucero enamorando al sol"

"¡Qué inmenso es ser al creerse muerto!"

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

"A last gift of the letters should be mentioned. They show how vital is the need, especially though not only, for young whites to take the initiative in changing their consciousness about racism. To seek out a different perspective from the one they have always known. To listen to what Black, Latino, and other oppressed peoples say in one way or another. For a new consciousness does not come automatically but with persistent effort."

"¡Y aún me piden canciones por palabras,/no conciben mi pulso sin poemas"

"[Without a book like this] you would not hear about our tradition of female resistance to oppression, going back to Aztec women who took to the rooftops in what later became Mexico City and ‘rained down darts and stones’ on the invading Spaniards. Or the woman who filed suit in Oaxaca against her husband for abuse and had her case heard in court-in 1630! Or the Maya women who locked up the local Spanish priest in his church for not having Maya victims of a typhus epidemic buried in church ground. And the massive ‘Corn Riots’ of 1692 by women who refused to starve."

"Ask almost anyone outside of academia to name famous US women of Mexican origin and you will probably hear ‘Dolores Huerta.’ If the person knows our contemporary writers, maybe ‘Sandra Cisneros’ and ‘Ana Castillo.’ If you ask for a name from earlier times, you might get ‘Sor Juana’-the rebel nun of the 1600’s. When you try to dig deeper, your companion may whimper, ‘I give up! Well…there’s the Virgin of Guadalupe, she’s on a lot of T-shirts. It was inevitable, then, that the need for a book like this would be recognized."

"I had too much power, I thought. I might consume him out of my own curiosity simply because I could. I could stay or go. He could not. He had too much power, I thought. He could reject me. He could break me in two."

"What the heart desires is medicine to itself."

"You are my first love.” And then, “You will be my only love."

"Part of what I wanted to do with Baby Love was to suggest that not only are you giving birth to a baby, but also you can use the experience to give birth to a new sense of yourself."

"Their take on me was, 'Look, you're not afraid you will be gassed, you're not drinking out of the coloured water fountain; you've got it really good,' so they didn't really understand that being biracial and the child of divorce would affect me in the way it did."

"She once told me that because I am lighter-skinned than her I would be treated better, and then the divorce from my father, I think she felt betrayed by whiteness in a certain kind of way, and I represent that whiteness."

"And then she said and I have Rebecca, you know? Sort of the idea is I was delightful, and she said I was delightful, but in the context you could see I was a calamity nonetheless. I mean I think there was a real ambivalence about the role of children in lives of independent, thinking women. And what was transmitted to me was not that being a mom was the worst possible choice, but that it could definitely be a serious hindrance. And that there were other things worth pursuing more."

"Playwrights are the most gregarious writers—to get our work done, we need actors, directors, set designers. So whenever I have to go back into my writing cocoon, I get a little scared to be alone. But that's when the voices come to you. Silence is the start."

"I always say that I’m a writer who writes more from place than race."

"I went up to my teacher and asked, “Do you know of any good scenes from plays that occur between two young black women?” She stood there perplexed. 10 seconds went by…then 20….then 30….a whole minute flew by and she couldn’t come up with one answer. “Gee, Katori, I’m so sorry, but I can’t think of one…I mean, there is a scene in Raisin but the two characters are not young…maybe August Wilson? No…most of his characters are male…I’m sorry, Katori. I just can’t think of one.” She walked away. At that moment I said to myself, “Well, I guess I’ll just have to write some then.” I wrote from an intense need to see myself and my experience reflected honestly onstage. It was quite easy to make the transition."

"My mother said I was a weird child. I had about 15 imaginary friends and talked to myself, a lot. I still do sometimes - I love the power of pretend. Now I channel all those voices into my characters. It's probably a saner outlet."

"Certainly youth of color, particularly those in ghetto communities, find themselves born into the cage. They are born into a community in which the rules, laws, policies, structures of their lives virtually guarantee that they will remain trapped for life."

"The political strategy of divide, demonize and conquer has worked for centuries in the United States — since the days of slavery — to keep poor and working people angry at (and fearful of) one another rather than uniting to challenge unjust political and economic systems."

"What has changed since the collapse of Jim Crow has less to do with the basic structure of our society than with the language we use to justify it. In the era of colorblindness, it is no longer socially permissible to use race, explicitly, as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt. So we don’t. Rather than rely on race, we use our criminal justice system to label people of color “criminals” and then engage in all the practices we supposedly left behind. Today it is perfectly legal to discriminate against criminals in nearly all the ways that it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans. Once you’re labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimination—employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion from jury service—are suddenly legal. As a criminal, you have scarcely more rights, and arguably less respect, than a black man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow. We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it."

"For children, the era of mass incarceration has meant a tremendous amount of family separation, broken homes, poverty, and a far, far greater level of hopelessness as they see so many of their loved ones cycling in and out of prison. Children who have incarcerated parents are far more likely themselves to be incarcerated…"

"The shift that's occurred this time around "wasn't by happenstance," Brittany Packnett Cunningham, an activist and a writer, told me, nor is it only the product of video evidence. "It has been the work of generations of Black activists, Black thinkers, and Black scholars"-people like Angela Davis, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Michelle Alexander, and others-"that has gotten us here. Six years ago, people were not using the phrase 'systemic racism' beyond activist circles and academic circles. And now we are in a place where it is readily on people's lips, where folks from CEOs to grandmothers up the street are talking about it, reading about it, researching on it, listening to conversations about it.""

"I think it is precisely the existence of a relative few wealthy, successful African Americans like Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey, and Colin Powell, and even Herman Cain, that creates this mirage of great racial progress even as a system like mass incarceration exists in which millions of poor folks of color are trapped in a permanent undercaste. I think that the existence of Black folks who can be offered as proof that “if you just try hard enough you can make it,” really creates, helps to immunize a system of mass incarceration from serious critique. The appearance that if you try hard enough you can make it, makes it difficult even for many Black folks to view our nation as one that would readily create and sustain a caste-like system again…"

"When we look back over the course of our nation’s history, what we see again and again almost like clockwork are these predictable efforts by the wealthy elite to use race as a wedge. To pit poor whites against poor people of color for the benefit of the ruling elite. Many people don’t realize that even slavery as an institution—the emergence of an all-Black system of slavery—was to a large extent the result of plantation owners deliberately trying to pit poor whites against poor Blacks. And ensure that poor whites would not join in any kind of resistance, movement, struggle, or revolt with poor Blacks…"

"It felt surreal and awful. I’d lost track of who I was and who we were to each other. None of us were the same people who’d lived together in that house in Kigali. Those people had died. We had all died."

"I now felt I’d made a mistake in Uvira. I’d let my guard down. I’d allowed myself to feel I belonged. But there was no real belonging—not anymore. There was only coming and going and coming and going and dying. There was no point in letting anybody get close."

"I resent and revile [the word genocide]. The word is tidy and efficient. It holds no true emotion. It is impersonal when it needs to be intimate, cool and sterile when it needs to be gruesome. The word is hollow, true but disingenuous, a performance, the worst kind of lie."