Feminists

"History should be taught from the kindergarten level, adding that the current practice in some tertiary institutions where students undertook history as a course for one semester “is not enough."

"I urge parents, teachers, and religious leaders to read about the country’s history and teach their children."

"I urge the Ministry of Education to make history a compulsory subject in schools. That would enable young people to know their true identity as Ghanaians and Africans, and empower them to become responsible citizens."

"I would suggest that in its depiction of Mariana and Luz, La "Flor de Lis" offers a concrete and particularized version of what Adrienne Rich describes as the terrible ambivalence-love, anger, rivalry, desire, rejection-that the daughter feels for the mother in patriarchy."

"(What Mexican books deserve greater attention in the United States?) I read Spanish too slowly to have any expertise here. But I do love and admire the works of Elena Garro, Elena Poniatowska and Rosario Castellanos, and, most recently, Fernanda Melchor and Cristina Rivera Garza."

"Working-class women's literature, women of color, specifically Latina women's writing like my friend Ana Castillo's, or my friend Cherrie Moraga's, Helena Viramontes's, Elena Poniatowska's, and Marguerite Duval's sends me all the way to my typewriter as much as Manuel Puig's stories."

"In light of her later books, we tend to read irony into Elena Poniatowska's claim of meek docility, but the lesson of her early interviews predicts Audre Lorde's eloquent and cautionary charge that "the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master's house as their only source of support.""

"The question of being encouraged or discouraged by this or that event cannot be asked if one is to go on with a certain moral conviction."

"The ultimate outcome of our ­actions cannot be known. But despite our limited awareness, I believe we must always act with compassion."

"Like the Mexican writer Elena Poniatowska, I have tried to tell the stories my characters would tell if they were writers"

"There is an immense abyss between the very few who have money and the vast number who are poor—and there is scarce concern on the part of those who have for those who do not. The politicians can be numbered among those who have. So my being a Mexican writer and loving my country has come to find its expression in opening up this reality to other Mexicans and to the larger world, expressed through the voices of the least empowered—women, especially, and poor people of both genders."

"It is one thing to identify oneself as a citizen of a country and to love its landscape, its people, its arts and culture. It is quite another thing to assess the workings of its social and political structure—the degree of freedom and opportunity enjoyed by its people, its standard of education and quality of life. A Mexican peasant has virtually no chance of becoming anything else. The standard of education was low fifty years ago and, if anything, is even lower today."

"(What moves you most in a work of literature?) I’m not yet the writer I aspire to be, but at my age, great books written by women over 60 give me hope. Diana Athill, Colette, Harriett Doerr, Marguerite Duras, Grace Paley, Elena Poniatowska, Jean Rhys, Mercé Rodoreda, to name but a few."

"We have all been made bad, we are all needy, all unwanted guests around the feast, invited at the last minute. In recognizing this lies our creativity."

"I learned, as they say, by doing. I began as an interviewer for the society pages of Excélsior—the only sort of thing a young woman could expect in those days...Since Excélsior is a daily paper, I had to produce these pieces every day with almost no time for review. Then I would read them in print and see that I had spent too much time on things of little importance and failed to ask about what mattered most. And so,with frequent embarrassment, that is how I learned. One also learns ­humility doing interviews, because people may not want to give you much time and so keep you waiting in an anteroom or are dismissive or in a bad mood, and all this has to be accepted."

"Of course, imaginative writing always contains elements of the writer’s lived experience, but there is a ­different sort of freedom in it than there is in reporting or in novels based on interviews."

"That the poorest Mexicans don't deserve their ruling class is a truth that leaps out at once."

"I live to the rhythm of my country and I cannot remain on the sidelines. I want to be here. I want to be part of it. I want to be a witness. I want to walk arm in arm with it. I want to hear it more and more, to cradle it, to carry it like a medal on my chest. Activism is a constant element in my life, even though afterwards I anguish over not having written "my own things." Testimonial literature provides evidence of events that people would like to hide, denounces and therefore is political and part of a country in which everything remains to be done and documented."

"I have always had questions, and to this day, I don't have a single answer."

"style, as I see it, is not an adornment added to a work. It is more, as Buffon said, that “le style c’est l’homme même”—style is the man himself...That famous line is actually the conclusion of a longer thought—“Writing well consists of thinking, feeling and expressing well, of clarity of mind, soul and taste.” In my own words, I would say that style is a manifestation of the writer’s being, which, of course, changes over time but retains something essential of who he is...One does not develop a style. One develops oneself. Or, perhaps more accurately, one is born with a certain character and life shapes it. And then, if you write or paint or sculpt, you do those things with the person you have ­become. And that is style."

"I have always been drawn to characters like Jesusa Palancares. María Sabina, the one who performed the ceremony of the sacred mushrooms (LSD in Oaxaca), Juan Perez Jolote (the Chamula peasant from Chiapas), Demetrio Vallejo (the railroad leader), all popular heroes, even if they are not recognized. I admire them because of their wisdom and the way they impart it, with great patience, great prudence, with respect for the ignorance of the person who asks the questions."

"Life is very resistant. People-the same cannon fodder that nourishes great universal misfortunes, "the wretched of the earth," as Frantz Fanon called them. Suddenly, during an earthquake, one of them saves a life."

"I would like to return to earth because I love life."

"in Latin America reality surpasses fiction."

"Carefully I asked them questions, visited them in their crowded neighborhoods, watched their kites cross the sky in February, treated them like kites, because that's how testimonial literature is. It fills one with anxiety, with insecurity. One handles very fragile material, people's hearts; their names, which are their honor; their work; and their time. And one tries to turn it into memorable material."

"Without realizing it the maids provided me with a version of Benito Juárez; they were all like Benito Juárez. Like him they vindicated themselves: "Dirty foreigners." Like him they defended Mexico, as stubborn as mules. Like him they had no roof of their own and had eaten only poor people's food, and for me, a girl raised on French mashed potatoes, discovering them meant entering into "the other.""

"if I had been, say, a French writer, I would have been free to write whatever I wished, which would have been writing of an imaginative sort. But in Mexico, because of the suffering that is the result of centuries of corruption, there is a moral obligation to write of this. I could not ignore it, and, because I have become known for it and have refined my ability to write this way through practice, it became my principal work."

"To this day, if I ask so many questions, it is because I don't have a single answer. I believe I will die like this, still searching, with a question mark engraved on my eyelids."

"I have always responded to challenges, followed apocalyptical personalities, apostles, Rasputins, Joan of Arcs who hear voices that come from Heaven, illuminated guides of humanity, holders of truth, priests."

"The locomotive was the main protagonist of the Mexican Revolution, but the Adelitas and Valentinas came a close second."

"Nellie Campobello, a great writer, published Cartucho (Cartridge) in 1931. Her explosive book was more like a grenade that laid bare the tragedy of the Mexican Revolution. In a succession of brief chapters, Nellie sketches a cruel, stark picture of the uprising as seen through the eyes of a little girl who was born before original sin. There are dead men-killed in battle or executed by firing squad-on every page. The girl eagerly watches from her window as men are shot down, and their corpses become her toys. When her favorite one is finally taken away, she misses it because it has entertained her for five days…If Nellie Campobello had not recorded her experiences, we would have been deprived of the most creative view of the Mexican Revolution ever written. Yes, I know, we have the writers Mariano Azuela, Martín Luis Guzmán, Rafael F. Muñoz, and the boring Francisco L. Urquizo, but there is no one as authentic as Nellie, no one who could say, as she did…Nellie Campobello-who wrote two novels, Cartucho and Las manos de mamá (A Mother's Hands)-was never granted the legendary status she deserves despite the fact that she is the only woman to have authored works about the Mexican Revolution. Her colleagues never acknowledged her nor paid her tribute of any kind, so much so that we are unsure exactly when and how she died."

"I write in order to belong."

"According to the El Paso Morning Times, in 1914 there were seventeen thousand men and four thousand women in Pancho Villa's army, but there are many other statistics that show that, without the soldaderas, there would have been no Mexican Revolution."

"Widows used to go around the way the poet Jaime Sabines would like them to: "There is one way, my love, that you could make me completely happy: die." Now widows are not even merry."

"We women treasure faces; in fact at any given moment life becomes a single face that we can touch with our lips."

"Boundaries, after all—of custom, of language, of what is and is not permitted—not only function to keep others out but also keep those inside from expanding."

"I absorbed Mexico through the maids. A system still persists in Latin America which consists of privileged people having at their beck and call the poorest of the poor."

"Chatterji is also a standard and predictable face at major events supporting Kashmir separatists, having declared herself to be working on ‘self-determination in Indian-administered Kashmir’. At one such conference on Kashmir, organized by the Pakistani Students Association at George Washington University, the Embassy of Pakistan, and Pakistan’s Minister of Kashmir Affairs, she spoke of the ‘growing concern among civil society groups about human rights crises in Indian-occupied Kashmir in the areas of social, political, cultural, religious, and economic rights’. She accused India of ‘continued occupation of [certain areas of] Kashmir’. Muhammed Sadiq... explains how Angana Chatterjee uses human rights concerns in a lopsided way to play in the hands of Islamic terrorists: [Angana Chatterji] announced the formation of the ‘International Peoples’ Tribunal on Human Rights and Justice in Indian Administered Kashmir’ on 5 April in Srinagar. Interestingly, this organisation too insists that the focus of HR investigations should be on the Indian side of Kashmir and not in PoK too. Moreover, this is a fault-finding mission. Its only aim is to slam the Indian security forces, further highlight HR issues and vitiate the situation. There is no attempt at reconciliation, offering succour to HR victims or working with the government to ensure that HR violations do not take place. Dr Chatterji, like many before her, are, intent on primarily demonising the Indian security forces and thereby fanning hatred."

"It’s clear that there is no peace without justice. There is no peace without truth."

"I don’t want to be controversial, but I do see that under Ronald Reagan and Bush’s administration there was a fantasy created of a third World War. And this fantasy really damaged the mentality of the military in Guatemala and Guatemalan fascists, and they still believe that communism exists. I don’t know what they’re referring to, but the truth is that here in Guatemala, women were raped, girls were raped, they strangled children, they assassinated and wiped out entire indigenous peoples, just because they thought they were so-called subversives and communists. So humanity really has to look into what occurred."

"The Mexic Amerindian woman has inherited the sexism instituted by dominant Mexican and U.S. society compounded by the sexism within certain oppressed indigenous cultures. In neither the creative literature nor the ethnographic documentation, did I hear her speak for herself. Only in 1992, the quincentenary of European conquest, was the world delivered the voice of one Mesoamerican woman, the Mayan Rigoberta Menchu who received the Nobel Peace Prize for her ongoing activism on behalf of her people's human rights."

"One of the most interesting classes I took, "Europe and the Americas," detailed the systematic and brutally efficient decimation of indigenous peoples and cultures. One of the required books, I, Rigoberta Menchú, recounted the struggle of indigenous Guatemalans. Later on, in "Imagining the Holocaust," I heard the horrific account of what happened to Jews during World War II. At Stanford I was forced to pull back from my tight community and understand how a common thread ran through so many other cultures around the world where people had to fight for their rights."

"I think that it’s very important, and what’s really crucial here is the memory of the victims and the search for the truth, and also the commitment to substantiate the truth. So the truth is foremost, because they accused us of being liars. They tried to denigrate the memory of the victims."

"I think in some ways Rigoberta Menchú, the Nobel Peace Prize winner-a Guatemalan human-rights activist-may be a good rallying force for all of us. She represents to me the very best of what native womanhood is about. I am awestruck by her life and accomplishments, as are many other native people in Central, South, and North America"

"Rigoberta Menchu lives on as a symbol of defiant survival."

"At the turn of the century, Sara Estela Ramírez, the Villarreal sisters, Leonor Villegas de Magnón, Jovita Idar and the staff members of La Voz de la Mujer and Pluma Roja were organic intellectuals of their times who revealed different discursive positionings of women within their societies, positionings informed by the master narratives of nationalism, religion and anarchism. Until now these women's work as publishers and their written contributions have remained virtually unrecognized. Either because of political affiliations or gender discrimination, their work has not been recognized in Mexico. In the United States, these factors, as well as linguistic biases, have relegated their work to oblivion. These women's stories and their publishing efforts, nonetheless, capture the realities of a people, the significance of whose daily existence transcends the limitations imposed by political and national borders."

"The U.S. -Mexico borderland saw mexicanas fighting for the revolution, often with the PLM, and also to win justice for tejanos. They included Sara Estela Ramírez, who lived in Laredo and became known to thousands of tejanos as a labor organizer, human rights activist and poet. She launched a revolutionary feminist newspaper, Aurora, in 1904. She died in 1910 at the age of 29 but her unique, visionary poetry rings true today."

"it is to him, untiring and tenacious struggler, that the future of humanity belongs. May you, beloved workers, integral part of human progress, yet celebrate, uncounted anniversaries, and with your example may you show societies how to love each other so that they may be mutualists and to unite so that they may be strong."

"Tejana socialist labor leader and political activist Sara Estela Ramirez would not live to participate in El Primer Congreso Mexicanista held the following year. Ramirez's ideas, however, would resonate in the words of her compañeras. Composed of South Texas residents, this Congreso was the first civil rights assembly among Spanish-speaking people in the United States. With delegates representing community organizations and interests from both sides of the border, its platform addressed discrimination, land loss, and lynching. Women delegates, such as Jovita Idar, Soldedad Peña, and Hortensia Moncaya, spoke to the concerns of Tejanos and Mexicanos."

"The worker is the arm, the heart of the world."