Latino Quotes

“Your friends, and your associates, and the people around you, and the environment that you live in, and the speakers around you - the speakers around you - and the communicators around you, are the poetry makers.
If your mother tells you stories, she is a poetry maker.
If your father says stories, he is a poetry maker.
If your grandma tells you stories, she is a poetry maker.
And that’s who forms our poetics.”
― Juan Felipe Herrera

“My African roots made me what I am today. They’re the reason I’m from the Dominican Republic. They’re the reason I exist at all. To these roots I owe everything.”
― Junot Díaz

“The fact that I
am writing to you
in English
already falsifies what I
wanted to tell you.
My subject:
how to explain to you
that I don't belong to English
though I belong nowhere else,
if not here
in English.”
― Gustavo Pérez Firmat

“Even the most political poem is an act of faith.”
― Martin Espada

“This is definitely / for the brothers / who ain't here.”
― Willie Perdomo, Where a Nickel Costs a Dime

“The scent of him was subtle, beautifully fresh, and she couldn’t think clearly. No man had ever brought out these intense feelings in her. Chris Augustine was dangerous and she could get lost in his arms.”
― Suzan Battah, Mad About the Boy

“Join my gang, the better whites. It's an open ethnocrypto network, basically we're latinos & mediterraneans and don't trust cash”
― stained hanes, 94,000 Wasps in a Trench Coat

“Join my gang, the better whites. It's an open ethnocrypto network, basically we're latinos & mediterraneans and don't trust cash.”
― stained hanes, 94,000 Wasps in a Trench Coat

“It was ironic, really, that the only reason I became eligible to adjust my status was because I married a U.S. citizen. I laugh when I think about the many times my mom told me, 'You have to be independent. You have to make your own money. Don't depend on a man!' I did. I made my own money. But I still needed a man to save me from my illegality.”
― Julissa Arce, You Sound Like a White Girl: The Case for Rejecting Assimilation

“Young and beautiful crowds filled the myriad bars and clubs in El Poblado, in the heart of Medellín. Amid the hypnotic sound of Latin music, vibrant colors swayed back and forth across a tiny dance floor as I walked into the Iguana Roja, or Red Iguana, salsa club.”
― Kayla Cunningham, Fated to Love You

“In college I was an editorial cartoonist for my school paper, The Daily Aztec...I did straight, news-oriented editorial cartoons. Occasionally, my Chicano background snuck in to the toons simply because I might do a César Chavez toon about how the School Student Board was too stupidly racist to allow him to speak on campus or other anti-frat toons on how they were so racist in doing fund-raisers for Tijuana kid charities--dressed in sombreros and begging with tin cups

(from an interview in the book Attitude, 2002)”
― Lalo Alcaraz

“I have been accused of being a bully. I think a lot of that stems from precisely my resistance to feel like I need to do the emotional labor of making people feel comfortable about what I’m saying. In particular, as a Latino scholar doing work in bilingual education, I’m particularly resistant to the idea that I need to make white people feel comfortable doing work in bilingual education. I put my work out there. I let it speak for itself. I certainly have never targeted anyone individually and personally insulted them, which is what bullying actually is, right?”
― Nelson Flores

“What are we to make of [Enrique] Tarrio — and, more broadly, of Latino voters inspired by Trump? And what are we to make of unmistakably White mob violence that also includes non-White participants? I call this phenomenon multiracial whiteness — the promise that they, too, can lay claim to the politics of aggression, exclusion and domination.

(1/15/2021 in Washington Post)”
― Cristina Beltrán

“Before Trump, conservatives seeking to appeal to Latinos typically embraced the politics of conservative multiculturalism. Politicians such as George W. Bush reached out to Latino voters by showing a familiarity with their language and history, emphasizing the values of diversity and inclusion. Depicting Latinos as a distinct and valuable part of America’s democratic mosaic, conservative multiculturalism connected Latino culture to Republican values, emphasizing conservative approaches to faith, patriotism and the traditional family.

Trump, by contrast, knows nothing of the history of Latinos in the United States and rarely even pretends to find value in Latinos’ distinct identities. Rather than offering his non-White voters recognition, Trump has offered them multiracial whiteness.”
― Cristina Beltrán

“Both Chicano and Puerto Rican activists continually stressed the importance of community control of local institutions, arguing that oppression and inequality would never end until Chicanos and Puerto Ricans controlled the institutions that directly affected community life.”
― Cristina Beltrán, The Trouble with Unity: Latino Politics and the Creation of Identity

“During the late 1960s and 1970s, Mexican American and Puerto Rican activists put forward a politically charged critique of American politics. Bringing together a paradoxical mix of cultural nationalism, liberal reformism, radical critique, andromantic idealism, the Chicano and Puerto Rican movements created a new political vocabulary, one emphasizing resistance, recognition, cultural pride, authenticity, and fraternity (hermanidad). The movements-organizations, issues, and events left a profound legacy.”
― Cristina Beltrán, The Trouble with Unity: Latino Politics and the Creation of Identity

“It is my contention the category ‘Latino,’ like the category ‘women,’ should be reconceived as a site of permanent political contestation”
― Cristina Beltrán, The Trouble with Unity: Latino Politics and the Creation of Identity

“Rather than speaking in terms of specific and distinct subgroups (Mexicans, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, etc.) ‘Latino’ and ‘Hispanic’ have become the shorthand designation of choice among journalists, politicians, advertising executives, academics, and other influential elites.”
― Cristina Beltrán, The Trouble with Unity: Latino Politics and the Creation of Identity

“Hispanic" and "Latino" are terms whose descriptive legitimacy is premised on a startling lack of specificity. The categories encompass any and all individuals living in the United States who trace their ancestry to the Spanish-speaking regions of Latin America and the Caribbean; Latinos hail from Colombia, Mexico, Paraguay, Puerto Rico, and beyond-more than twenty countries in all. Such inclusivity is part of the problem: "Hispanic" and "Latino" tell us nothing about country of origin, gender, citizenship status, economic class, or length of residence in the United States. An undocumented immigrant from Guatemala is Hispanic; so is a third-generation Mexican American lawyer. Moreover, both categories are racially indeterminate: Latinos can be white, black, indigenous, and every combination thereof. In other words, characterizing a subject as either "Hispanic" or "Latino" is an exercise in opacity-the terms are so comprehensive that their explanatory power is limited. When referring to "Latinos in the United States," it is far from immediately clear whether the subjects under discussion are farmworkers living below the poverty line or middle-class homeowners, urban hipsters or rural evangelicals, white or black, gay or straight, Catholic or Jewish, undocumented Spanish monolinguals or fourth-generation speakers of English-only.”
― Cristina Beltrán, The Trouble with Unity: Latino Politics and the Creation of Identity

“The collective memory of every Latino people includes direct or indirect (neo-)colonialism, primarily by Spain or Portugal and later by the United States. Among Latinos, Mexicans in what we now call the Southwest have experienced US colonialism the longest and most directly, with Puerto Ricans not far behind”
― Elizabeth Martínez, De Colores Means All of Us: Latina Views for a Multi-Colored Century

“Reclaiming my identity has been a painful birthing process. Something beautiful has been born, but not without blood and tears. The Latino identity is complex...even the very words we use to describe our community cause controversy. How we are counted in official forms like the census have created unintended consequences, or maybe it's by design that we are treated as America's bastard child, as perpetual foreigners no matter how many generations ago we became American.”
― Julissa Arce, You Sound Like a White Girl: The Case for Rejecting Assimilation

“These nativists—these racists—imagine a U.S. utopia of white people that has never existed. We've been here. Mexicans, and more broadly Latinos, have have never invaded Texas. Our land was stolen, and now we're the ones who are viewed as thieves. White supremacy doesn't care if we are here legally, or if we were born here, or if our families have roots in America dating back centuries, perhaps even longer than theirs. The fear many white people have is not whether we will assimilate, but whether our Latino bodies, and those of our children, will roam this land.”
― Julissa Arce, You Sound Like a White Girl: The Case for Rejecting Assimilation

“Why don't you speak English? Why don't you speak Spanish? Being Latino in America means the answer to both of these questions holds us to an impossible standard to prove we're both sufficiently American and authentically Latino. I am tired of the interrogation, the unattainableness, the in-betweenness. I am enough to stand on both sides, fully and completely.”
― Julissa Arce, You Sound Like a White Girl: The Case for Rejecting Assimilation

“We live in a country where there are more than 60 million Latinos, making up almost a fifth of the American population. But we aren't the ones narrating our own story; rather we became subjects at the mercy of someone else finding us worthy of taking up space in the world. Until our history, struggles, and unique experiences are unearthed, the whole country will suffer because the American story will remain incomplete. It's incredible what our people have survived in this country, and how little Americans of all races, ethnicities, and backgrounds know about it. When our rich past is kept from us, it leaves people to believe that we belong somewhere else—outside this country. Without an accurate telling of our history, we cannot fully address problems that are rooted in the past. When we are viewed as foreigners, our issues become someone else's problems—not America's problems.”
― Julissa Arce, You Sound Like a White Girl: The Case for Rejecting Assimilation

“...my racial identity is a concept that escapes intellectual conversations about race. My personal experiences contradict the idea that Latino is only an ethnicity and not a race. But suggesting that Latino should be a race confounds the situation even more, because we are all so different and experience the world differently, though the same could be said of any other racial group.

When others state, 'Latino is not a race, it's an ethnicity,' they ignore that not all Latinos have the same ethnicity, either. And though we don't all share the same ethnicity, the exact language, religion, customs, culture, food, and so forth, and though we are not the only ethnic group in America, we are the only people who are singled out by our ethnicity.”
― Julissa Arce, You Sound Like a White Girl: The Case for Rejecting Assimilation

“We cannot make ourselves or allow others to make us small so we can fit in the minds and hearts of white people. America might never love us back, so we must love ourselves.”
― Julissa Arce, You Sound Like a White Girl: The Case for Rejecting Assimilation

“Not hard to figure out, just hard to help.”
― Luis J. Rodríguez, The Republic of East L.A.

“...saying her name the way she did, it felt like being baptized all over again.”
― Luis J. Rodríguez, The Republic of East L.A.

“...he felt this gnawing emptiness cradled in anger, like he was owed something.”
― Luis J. Rodríguez, The Republic of East L.A.

“Odi profanum vulgus et arceo.”
― Orazio, Odi, III, 1, v. 1