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" I'm always fascinated by the disjunct between what's really happening on the ground and the propaganda machine that feeds America alarmist news about immigration. "

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" 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

Happy

Indigenous People

Work

" 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. "

" 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. "

" To me, writing is prayer. I pray all the time. "

Luis Alberto Urrea

Pray

Prayer

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

Luis Alberto Urrea

Expectations

Kind

" In the end, I'm really interested in people and what we do with our short time here on earth. I'm interested in the human soul. "

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

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

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

Luis Alberto Urrea

Name

Political

" I often say poetry was my first love. "

" 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. "

" I've been told not to tour down in Mexico. I am too well-known now. The kidnappers may think that my publisher will pay a ransom. "

" I've been treated beautifully wherever I've gone, and I really think we all want to love each other. "

" I saw 'The War Wagon' with John Wayne and Kirk Douglas, but it was dubbed into German. And it had Japanese subtitles and then this little strip with some Spanish words, and I've never forgotten that weird image. It was so magical and funky. "

" Way back when I was working at the dump, I saw that, even when living among the trash, that some people would decide to choose joy in their lives. "

" The tone of 'Into the Beautiful North' is really the way I write. 'Hummingbird's Daughter' was the anomaly. It was a once-in-a-lifetime phenomenon. "

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

Luis Alberto Urrea

Two

Divide

" I don't like being angry all the time; it's not good for me. I have to have serenity or else go to war. "

" I'm interested in the eternal soul. That's what I write about. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" Many of us writers tour like a literary Bachman Turner Overdrive. We ain't pretty, but we're on the road. Many of us wish we were rock stars anyway. For my part, I live in my iPod. The musicians there are my constant companions on the road. "

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

" We want to ascribe a kind of tragic grimness to people, but people are funny. "

" 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

Wrestling

Father