"In some way the Chicano movement strikes me as being revolutionary, but only in a pathetic way, because the genius of Mexico has always been assimilation. I tell Mexican American kids all the time—if I get a chance to talk to them without their teachers—that they come from a culture that violates borders. Kids are coming up every night across the border in violation of Protestant lines. These kids represent a force of anarchy in the world. We are not people of pure race. We are people of mixed race. We have violated those borders already. We are people whose identity assumes the continuousness of experience rather than the segregation of experience. I tell them to be proud of that experience. Don't say to the United States, "I want a separate math class in Spanish." That's not going to scare them. Instead, terrify America by saying, "I'm going to marry your daughter." Or see what happens to the Chicano movement when you announce to the blonde people next door, "I'm going to start dating your son," or "You're going to be my best friend," that "We're neighbors."

“And lately fashion photographers, bored with Rome or the Acropolis, have ventured farther afield for the frisson of syncretism. Why not Calcutta? Why not the slums of Rio? Cairo? Mexico City? The attempt is for an unearned, casual brush with awe by enlisting untouchable extras. And if the model can be seen to move with idiot stridency through tragedy, then the model is invincible. Luxury is portrayed as protective. Or protected. Austere, somehow—“spiritual.” Irony posing as asceticism or as worldly-wise.”

“It's the technology. There is this thing between you and the viewer. The viewer is watching this magnifying glass, and technology exaggerates you. You are left with the sense of how small you are, not with the sense of how big you are—if you're smart. If you're dumb you begin to believe that you are the image—that you cannot be replaced. But you can be replaced in a minute. For every Madonna there's another. For every Dan Rather there's another.”

“I wanted, however, something more from the new middle-class institution than either the decadent romanticism of the sixties or the careerism of the seventies. I wanted students more aware of their differences from persons less advantaged.”

“There are people in every age who come early or late to a sense of the futility of the world. Some people, such as the monks of the desert, flee the entanglements of the world to rush toward eternity. But even for those who remain in the world, the approach of eternity is implacable. “The glacier knocks in the cupboard, / The desert sighs in the bed,” was W. H. Auden’s mock-prophetic forecast. He meant the desert is incipient in the human condition. Time melts away from us. Even in luxuriant weather, even in luxuriant wealth, even in luxuriant youth, we know our bodies will fail; our buildings will fall to ruin.”

“The genius of American culture and its integrity comes from fidelity to the light. Plain as day, we say. Happy as the day is long. Early to bed, early to rise. American virtues are daylight virtues: honesty, integrity, plain speech. We say yes when we mean yes and no when we mean no, and all else comes from the evil one. America presumes innocence and even the right to happiness.”

“Supporters of bilingual education today imply that students like me miss a great deal by not being taught in their family’s language. What they seem not to recognize is that, as a socially disadvantaged child, I considered Spanish to be a private language. What I needed to learn in school was that I had the right—and the obligation—to speak the public language of los gringos.”