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" I was torn between the Americanness my mom wanted for me and the Mexicanness my father wanted - they were wrestling for cultural influence over me. "

Luis Alberto Urrea

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" Poetry is how I feed the soul, and it's how I fire the furnace of writing. "

Luis Alberto Urrea

" I came to believe the green fuse that drives spring and summer through the world is essentially a literary energy. That the world was more than a place. Life was more than an event. It was all one thing - and that thing was story. "

Luis Alberto Urrea

" A great Chicano forebear of mine in writing is Rolando Hinojosa-Smith. He was writing good border mysteries for Chicano readers back in the '80s and '90s. "

Luis Alberto Urrea

" The French-Cajun culture is similar to mine - they're Catholic, they play accordions, and they eat hot chiles. "

Luis Alberto Urrea

" With a name like Luis Alberto Urrea, it's political no matter what I do. "

Luis Alberto Urrea

" I was deeply infected with storytelling from the get go, and I truly love it. "

Luis Alberto Urrea

" I don't like to see people get kicked around. You have to stand up for them. "

Luis Alberto Urrea

" My dad looked like Errol Flynn, and I think my mom thought she was moving into a hacienda, but they lived on a dirt street in Tijuana, a house jammed with relatives, nobody speaking English. She didn't know a word of Spanish. She grew up well and was appalled and humiliated, terrified of anyone ethnic. "

Luis Alberto Urrea

" I read most often in bed as part of my attempted sleep ritual. But I spend a lot of time reading on planes and in hotels, too. "

Luis Alberto Urrea

" I used to work with a relief group that took care of the people in the dump. We took them food and water and medicine and built homes and took them to church services, whatever was needed. "

Luis Alberto Urrea

" It's not like Mexicans have an illegal immigration organ in their body and at 14 kicks off a hormone and shows them how to come to the United States illegally. It's a question of desperation for a vast majority of them. "

Luis Alberto Urrea

" Borders are liminal spaces. Anyone worthy of the title of 'writer' is a border writer. We all are border people. "

Luis Alberto Urrea

" It became really important to me if I was going to write 'Hummingbird's Daughter' to try to do honor to women. "

Luis Alberto Urrea

" I'm a theological writer mistaken for a political writer. My theme is grace versus karma. "

Luis Alberto Urrea

" Spanish was my first language. Honestly, I learned to first speak in Spanish, not English, because my poor mother had to go to San Diego every day to work and then come back. And she would come home when I was an infant long after I was asleep. "

Luis Alberto Urrea

" When I was doing missionary work when I was younger, which started this obsession of mine with the literature of witness, I was a translator for a missionary group, and I spent years in a Tijuana dump. People were really thrown by the fact that the Mexican poor, many of them pureblood indigenous people, seemed happy. "

Luis Alberto Urrea

Indigenous People

" I'm always trying to, using literature, subvert people's responses. "

Luis Alberto Urrea

" Writing went from being a calling to being a job. Business ruined things. It became like making sausages in a sausage factory. "

Luis Alberto Urrea

" I have often said I come from a family of unreliable narrators. I tend to believe their struggles with racism, identity, nationality do dovetail with my motivation to write. "

Luis Alberto Urrea

" The stupidity of militarized fences between two worlds is a metaphor for all the things that divide us as human beings. "

Luis Alberto Urrea

" There is beauty in our roots. Sometimes we think our roots are shameful, and people tell you that you're no good or your ancestors are no good or that you come from a neighborhood of no hope and terrible crime. But it's about the beauty of those places, and I carry that with me. "

Luis Alberto Urrea

" Books are like chocolate. Can't eat just one. "

Luis Alberto Urrea

" We're all funny. Humor unites us. "

Luis Alberto Urrea

" I am addicted to poetry, but the truth is I cannot pass up a good hard-boiled mystery. "

Luis Alberto Urrea

" People think of me as a political writer, but I don't think of myself that way. "

Luis Alberto Urrea

" The situation was kind of complicated in that my mother didn't speak Spanish. My father spoke English, you know, as best he could. "

Luis Alberto Urrea

" Masculinity is kind of a toxic curse, isn't it? The expectations of it were hard on me. "

Luis Alberto Urrea

" I used to approach writing like a football game. If I went out there and aggressively saw more, I'd know more, and I'd capture more, and I'd write better. Hut, hut, hut: First down and haiku! "

Luis Alberto Urrea

" When I was a little boy in Tijuana, it was wonderland. We left when I was probably four - I was dying of tuberculosis. "

Luis Alberto Urrea

" I love books with titles like, 'How Do You Spank a Porcupine?,' 'Arnie, the Darling Starling,' or 'The Bat in My Pocket.' "

Luis Alberto Urrea