"A smart-alecky boy threw a pebble at me and said “This isn’t the Mexican bus stop. You have to go to the Mexican bus stop…I had never experienced racial tension, but in La Jolla we saw incredible—to us—prejudice."

“There's so much Aztec in the Chicano culture that you feel in California and even here in New Mexico. But the rest of South America has so many European blends. Europe is really the old continent and corrupt. I think that that's what makes Mexico so much more interesting.”

“The term "Hispanic," to me, encompasses everybody that has a history, a background with the Spanish Language. The problem with the label is that "Hispanic" is going to be stretched and stretched to cover a whole range of things-Chicanos in the Southwest, Puerto Ricans in New York, Cubans in Miami-until I don't know what good the label is…”

“Immediately after you get into that stage of relaxation, think of a situation before you were ten years old. Let's just say there's somebody sick in your house, and you go into your memory to see what happened. When I do that, I remember the kind of shoes I was wearing. You remember your favorite shirt, your favorite dresses and things that you wore and how it felt. That someone was sick in your house absolutely connects you to whatever relationships you had. You don't really "think" about it. In this way, what comes out is really true.”