First Quote Added
April 10, 2026
Latest Quote Added
"I call myself a citizen artist, because one of the things I do is try to get my playwrights â especially my graduate playwrights â interested in the world. Itâs about how you connect art to culture and community here and now, and how we are vital to the expression of our community..."
"When I left South Texas, I realized that I became the other. I was the token of the room. Most of my friends were white so when I went to a party or a wedding or a work function, I would scan the room and only see my face in the people who were serving the drinks or passing around the appetizers. I realized I was the hanging fruit in the room, the living and breathing statue in the room, the object in the middle of the photograph, surrounded by white eyes."
"âŚI realized that what I had been watching was a fairly remarkable hybrid storytelling form: part live theatrical event, part polished television production, part sports spectacular, part collaborative improvised dance â and so much more. Itâs a art form that synthesizes tons of other art forms into what appears to be simple, mindless entertainment, and itâs fascinatingâŚ"
"I like to diversify, so for me writing an article for a magazine is as exciting as writing a play. And I think if you open yourself up to it, lots of opportunities come forward that are not the opportunities that were going to be yours."
"âŚThe play does not purport to be the play of the communityâitâs really about that artistâs idiosyncratic voice and what that encounter elicits in themâŚ"
"Itâs what I know best. Itâs roots. Itâs Dazed And Confused and Friday Night Lights. Itâs border life and El Pato and Whataburger and getting drunk in a back of a pickup. Itâs dancing every weekend to country music, or Tejano music, or club music. Itâs the beach. Itâs, for better or worse, home."
"Growing up in the Pico/Union barrio of downtown Los Angeles in the 1970's was to be born into abject poverty and violence. And even that fed into telling stories and finding ways of surviving. I can see now that I was always a playwright, I just didn't know or have the language for it then."
"Television has lapped theater in a lot of storytelling techniques â realism, depth of character, complicated storytellingâŚWhat we have thatâs different in the theater is the audience in the space with us. And Iâm not interested in ignoring the space between us."
"âŚIâve been thinking a lot in terms of how growing up in the context impacts a personâs sense of place in the world. My sense of it. Never quite believing that anything is permanent, uncontested. Never quite landing. You always are a little bit âobservingââŚ"
"âŚI think, from being an actor, I got the gift of understanding, respecting, and admiring what actors do and the ability to speak in a language that is useful to themâŚ"
"Iâve always resisted being called a âgayâ or a âLatinoâ playwrightâŚI certainly talk about them in my plays, but I donât want to be defined by them. Not because Iâm not proud â but the minute you define yourself in a certain way, there are huge assumptions about what youâre supposed to be. And those boxes donât really fit anymore."
"If youâre a playwright who doesnât want to do people-on-a-couch plays, there are not a lot of avenuesâŚYou can go and do television, or you can stay and fight with organizations that arenât really equipped to support work by people of color or experiment with form."
"I am often inspired by actors and I fall in love with them, so I write towards their strengths and gifts. Sometimes, it is merely about logic and making sense of the poetry in my head and how it translates that can be hard to articulateâŚ"
"A play is an ever-changing dynamic theatrical experience. Every director, cast, design team, audience and reader bring new life to a piece of dramatic literature. A play is not a fixed expression, but a revelation in a particular moment in time."
"Iâm a little bit highbrow and a little bit trashyâŚThatâs what I think good storytelling is. If you can lure in an audience and have a good time with them, but also teach them what itâs like â to be a person of color, to be poor â thatâs a success."
"âŚThere are assumptions made about the kind of work Latinos make. I think that remains a challenge because when people are looking for Latino plays, theyâre looking for plays of that âtype.â Some of that gets defined by your ethnicityâŚ"
"âŚWe Latinos have a rich, dynamic and complex history full of narratives that are dimensional, intelligent, tragic, comedic, absurd, philosophical, violent and loving. There aren't enough stages for our stories. Iâm humbled and honored that these have come into my lifeâŚ"
"I have a natural tendency toward theatricality and poetic language...I've never really written realismâŚand I wanted to give it a shot."
"I was luckyâŚbecause my grandparents, who lived with us, were illiterate but they were great storytellers, so I got a kind of storytelling bug from them."
"âŚI like âmad realism.â I grew up with a mother who wanted to be a nun and we had pictures of angels all over the house. My grandparents told ghost stories. Seeing magic in the world just felt like how you perceive life. I didnât know anything about magic realism, really, until I started reading One Hundred Years of Solitude in college and suddenly everything that I grew up with was there on the page â the same love stories, stories of obsession, stories of interacting with spiritsâŚ"
"âŚI think the most important thing for me is to give flesh and blood reality to people who are far away and distant from most American concerns. It's very easy to stick to the one-dimensional labels, and my hope is to completely explode the labels and reveal the flesh and blood and soul of each of the women in the play and to really make it impossible to walk away from the play with your prejudices still intactâŚ"
"During this period, Latino artists did not shy away from taking on issues of racial and economic inequality many artists displayed a newly politicized style of expression. The music, murals, literature, and theater of the movement period most often explored racial identity, cultural pride, and social inequality. Pedro Pietri's oft-cited poem "Puerto Rican Obituary" is representative of this developing aesthetic⌠Poetry such as "Puerto Rican Obituary" highlights another significant aspect of movement thought: the shift from cultural shame to ethnic pride. Unlike earlier critiques of prejudice and discrimination, movement rhetoric and writings often focused on the emotional and psychic damage of racism, exploring the need to overcome internalized shame and self-hate."
"Little attention has been paid to the fact that the most significant Chicano and Puerto Rican organizations turned to poetry to mark their entry into the public realm...A great deal of "classic" movement poetry has a strong civic impulse-it seeks to be both educative and socializing. Poets such as Gonzales, Alurista, and Pedro Pietri saw their poetry as an organizing tool that served an "agitprop function.""
"When I started writing, there were only two women writers that I knew: Lorraine Sutton and Margie Simmons. There were very few Latinas writing in English... So when I started, I was mainly surrounded by men-Pedro Pietri, Jesus Papoleto Melendez, Lucky Cienfuegos, Miguel AlgarĂn, Miguel PiĂąero, Tato Laviera. Many of them had books already published. I was like a sponge, absorbing different things from these male contemporaries."
"âŚIt goes back to 1945; when my parents, right, they left paradise looking for paradiseâŚDuring the adventure of Operation Bootstrap, a lot of people were brainwashed to believe that if they leave there you can have a better life over here."
"Being a Chicana is a political, societal, economic and spiritual stance for me because I identify myself with the struggle of Chicanos in this marginal border world of identityâstraddling different worlds, the world of the raices in Mexico, the roots, and also the contemporary world of the United StatesâŚ"
"âŚIf I say I âm not a Chicana I might as well cut off my arm or my leg. And if I say I âm not a feminist, well, I might as well cut off my foot. The whole package goes together."
"Remember that the Latino, Chicano, Mexican American writers are following in the footsteps of the African American writers. This has to do with the antepasados, the people who have come before you, who allow you to take the steps you need to take. I always thank the Black writers because they gave me a sense of freedomâŚ"
"Because of that whole kind of philosophy that we Latinos have where your roof caves in, your sink goes out on you, everything bad, but you got to go on with lifeâŚNi modo. No matter what happens to you, you are a survivor. You endure. You keep on going."
"Two of my role models are Ana Castillo and Denise Chavez, who draw on their backgrounds for the work they do. They are fearless. I look at them and know I have no excuse."
"Like I said, it was 1957 when I started in oral tradition by memorizing all the poems I wroteâŚAnd Iâd sit in parties, and barsâthey were just poems to make people feel goodâŚ"
"I was introduced to Langston Hughes, who became one of my favorite poetsâŚI mean, he was a poet; he wasnât about words, he was a poet, he had rhythm."
"The study and practice of poetry can equip you to 'boldly go where no man has gone before,' but it's not enough to go thereâyou have to be able to bear witness. Without witnessing, experience dissolves into nothing."
"Poetry shows up where language shows up â a mysterious supplement, to borrow or deform an old Derrida epithet, that we cannot do without, and that just might be the basis of the material world as we know it. Well, if not language as such, then soundâŚ"
"Writing is a transformative act and writing the occult, which I interpret as writing whatâs invisible, or apparently invisible, is inevitably connected to writing my desire as a womanâŚ"
"Asking poetry to fulfil a (merely) political function would be a mistake. This tends to lead us to poetry that, however cleverly or inventively, can do no better than denounce the apparently evil and/or praise the good. Worse, we get something that is very much in fashion right now: the fetishisation and weaponisation of our own pain.âŚ"
"I try to get everybody to enter my world real quickly. I think the audience starts to see that itâs a person going through a struggle, (and) with each performance piece, the exchange just keeps growing."
"I never interviewed someone so that I could put his story in the film. There is no specific person that I had in mind when I was writing the script. It just seemed that when I was ready to put it together, my head was filled with so many stories and people that it just flowed out. I almost didnât have to think, just feel."
"Thereâs always somebody in my plays whoâs the outsider looking in. And when you donât fit into the family structure, youâre the outsider. And the more fascistic a country is, the more that it wants to punish the outsiderâŚ"
"Much of the time, weâre still looked at as foreigners, despite being here for four or five generations. This gives an overview of our experiences, how varied they are. Really, I want Asian Americans to look at ourselves, to be proud of our heritage. For non-Asians, I just want to inform. . . . Of course, I hope everybody is entertained along the way."
"I would always approach a show from the perspective of what I wanted to say historically, politically and socially. I examine the Asian American experience through my eyes and my perceptions. One thing I can tell you is that people who come to one of my shows, will leave the theater with a totally different perspective of the Asian American maleâŚ"
"To perceive Latin people as menial workers, with some sort of underground element. Not to see people as individuals, to always see people in terms of their racial group. Thatâs who youâre fighting all the time; thatâs who youâre fighting in theater, as wellâŚ"
"Itâs the duty of the playwright to sneak in as many effronteries as he can. If you act completely effrontive to people, theyâll never go listen. So you gotta sneak it past themâŚ"
"It was a challenge to always be a Latino to Whites, but a Cubano to L.A.âs Chicanos. I was married to a woman for awhile and no one asked about my sexual behavior; but when I came out, itâs often the number one question asked by journalists, which I find insulting as it distorts the purpose of the interview. This notion that I must somehow be sleeping with anyone famous [heâs not] is too much about my private life."
"Oral tradition is really how Chicano literature came to be. I was not exposed to the written word, but I had the greatest teacher. I always tell people that my mother was my inspiration because she was the best chismosa, and she had the best stories. And if anyone taught me about drama, it was my mother because she knew how to tell a story. And my grandfather also told stories. One of the reasons why I waned to be a writer was because I was fascinated by stories of La Llorona, supernatural stories and things like that and I love hearing chisme (gossip)âŚ"
"In the beginning I felt like I wasnât represented on stage or on film. As Latinos, we have been told in every which way that we donât matter, that we are invisible â especially people who are indigenous, people who value their Native American roots. Weâve been eradicated, made invisible, and thatâs one way that weâve been disempowered. So, I realized the most powerful thing you can do is to own your humanityâŚ"
"âŚAs a poet, Iâm an Imagistâdriven by and focusing on visualsâŚ"
"I know itâs a good play if Iâm afraid to show it to my grandmother."
"âŚOur society has never experienced a dictatorship on our soil, has never seen civil liberties stripped away. So at times, it can be a challenge for American audiences to imagine how a dictatorship might begin and who would be perceived as a threat to such a regimeâŚ"
"âŚI think theatre in general is very poetic. Thatâs what first drew me to playwriting. Plays are like living poems: visual, emotional, narrative. Lorca said, âA play is a poem standing up.â I couldnât agree more."