"It was from this day on that I began to notice a real difference between our vaqueros on the ranch from Mexico and the gringo cowboys. The American cowboys always seemed so ready to act rough and tough, wanting to “break” the horse, cow, or goat or anything else. Where, on the other hand, our vaqueros—who used the word “amanzar,” meaning to make “tame,” for dealing with horses—had a whole different attitude towards everything. To “break” a horse, for the cowboys, actually, really meant to take a green, untrained horse and rope him, knock him down, saddle him while he fought to get loose, then mount him as he got up on all four legs, and ride the living hell out of the horse until you tired him out, taught him who was boss, and “broke” his spirit. To “amanzar” a horse, on the other hand, was a whole other approach that took weeks of grooming, petting, and leading the green horse around in the afternoon with a couple of well-trained horses. Then, after about a month, you began to put a saddle on the horse and tie him up in shade in the afternoon for a couple of hours until, finally, the saddle felt like just a natural part of him. Then, and only then, did a person finally mount the horse, petting and sweet-talking him the whole time, and once more the green horse was taken on a walk between two well-trained horses."

“His name was Howard, but by the way he said it, none of us were able to figure out what his name was for the first few days. Still, I liked him, so one day I tackled him out on the playground and we started wrestling on the grass.”

“Suddenly I remembered Jeannie Windflow, who’d taught me how to kiss when we were kids. At the age of seventeen, she’d run off with a Mexican guy from Pozole Town who was nineteen years old, had a job, and was one of the handsomest guys I’d ever seen. He was a semi-professional boxer and real dark. She was a track star, a straight-A student, and real blonde.”

“And I realized: I've got to write the story about our people to anchor us to creation. And then no matter how much we get abused, we'll still feel special and we'll still feel good.”

““Mundo, you start paying closer attention to our mama and papa. They didn’t get this far in life because their eyes are closed.” I nodded. I’d never had a conversation like this before with my brother Joseph”

“The written word is holy…When we write our stories, it helps us bring understanding.”

“Suddenly, I wondered what the hell was going on. Ramón had been the smartest and most capable guy in our whole grade in “thinking” and “figuring” out things, and he’d been considered dumb, too. And now Gus, he was also the smartest guy of all of us during recess and he just said that he’d been flunked before. This didn’t make any damn—I mean, blessed—sense to me at all! The smartest kids I knew were all considered stupid.”