"I got very obsessed with documenting nineteenth-century family life and our relationship to history because I meet so many people who feel we have no foundation in history. We had to reinvent history after the Mexican Revolution. We have sort of cobbled together a history out of what we know and our place in the United States, which included, from all of society that surrounded us and brought us up, this notion that you are not worth anything; you are at the bottom of society. And so I think it's important that we see that we have roots that go deep into the earth here, in the United States and Mexico and in Spain, and all of this is something we can claim as our own heritage. That's certainly how I take it. Rather than being confined to being a mall rat in Southern California, I claim all of this as my heritage. I guess I would like other people to see that as well."