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" The concept of a literature of witness - of bearing witness - has embedded in it the need for action. One must not simply hide in the shadows and type; one must also stand in the light. "

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" 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

Writing

Better

Football

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

Luis Alberto Urrea

See

People

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

Luis Alberto Urrea

Name

Political

" 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

Titles

Books

" I often say poetry was my first love. "

" 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. "

" 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

" 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. "

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

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

" During grade school, we moved to a white, working-class suburb in San Diego, and there were no Mexicans. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Writers write without support. "

" 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 almost easy for me to write about a magnificent tropical village with orchids and dragonflies. That's intoxicating, but the United States is magical, too. We just forget this. "

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

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

" 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

Women

Important

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

Luis Alberto Urrea

Pray

Prayer

" 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. "

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

" 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