"I think it had to have begun pretty early on, [with] that life passion for the curiosity of people's lives and for their stories. As a kid, I would love to listen to my mother and to my aunt talking. When they would sit around the table to do tamales, for example – making tamales is a communal effort. One person can't make tamales, it's got to be a number of people. And so, several of my aunts and my mother would sit down around the table to put masa on the corn husks. And as they were doing that, they would share stories, share jokes, laugh, remember things, and I would love sitting under the table and just listening to all this…"
January 1, 1970
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Helena_Maria_Viramontes