Latinx Quotes

“There's no way y'all have been around for thousands of years without there being one person not fitting into the 'men are this, women are that' bullshit." Julian sounded so convinced, so sure. His obsidian eyes locked onto Yadriel's. "Maybe they hid it, or ran away, or I dunno, something else, but there's no way you're the first, Yads.”
― Aiden Thomas, Cemetery Boys

“You know who you are, I know who you are, and our Lady does, too." She said with fierce conviction. "So screw the rest of them!" Maritza grinned at him. "Remember why we're doing this.”
― Aiden Thomas, Cemetery Boys

“My son.
A brujo.
How long had he been waiting to hear those words? Having them said aloud, to a room full of brujx, made Yadriel's legs feel weak. It was like a dream, but so much better.”
― Aiden Thomas, Cemetery Boys

“Our family was stuck in a cosmic hamster wheel of toxic love, making the same mistakes, saying the same words, being hurt in the same ways generation after generation. I didn’t want to keep playing a role in this tragedy of errors.”
― Yamile Saied Méndez, Furia

“The sense of wonder and possibility – that I owed to the Argentine women who had fought for freedom before the universe conspired and the stars aligned to make me.”
― Yamile Saied Méndez, Furia

“I’ll rescue myself. No one will ever lock me up in a tower.”
― Yamile Saied Méndez, Furia

“The girl Diego said he loved was the strong one, the winning Camila, the one with a future she was forging for herself… If he rescued me, if I quit for him. I wouldn’t be the girl he loved. I wouldn’t be myself.”
― Yamile Saied Méndez, Furia

“I was tired of running. We were all buried underneath mountains of blame, shame, guilt, and lies.”
― Yamile Saied Méndez, Furia

“Did something count as a miracle if it possible only because of a lie?”
― Yamile Saied Méndez, Furia

“this is the conversation I’ve been having since the 2016 election ended and liberals and progressives have been scrambling to figure out what went wrong. What was missing from the left’s message that left so many people unenthusiastic about supporting a Democratic candidate, especially against Donald Trump? So far, a large group of people (mostly white men paid to pontificate on politics and current events) seem to have landed on this: we, the broad and varied group of Democrats, Socialists, and Independents known as ‘the left,’ focused on ‘identity politics’ too much. We focused on the needs of black people, trans people, women, Latinx people. All this specialized focus divided people and left out working-class white men. That is the argument, anyways.”
― Ijeoma Oluo

“Twenty years from now, would that be me? Would I be resigned to my fate, pushing my daughter toward the light so she could be free? Or pulling her down so I wouldn’t be along in the dark?”
― Yamile Saied Méndez, Furia

“I wanted what he Diego had. I needed to play on a team like that, to feel the love of the fans. I needed the chance to do something impossible and amazing. To be great.”
― Yamile Saied Méndez, Furia

“Keep your goal in sight. Keep your priorities straight, and it will all be worth it.”
― Yamile Saied Méndez, Furia

“I had forgotten how beautiful fútbol was. Without referees, lines on the ground, trophies, tournaments, or life-changing contracts, the ball was a portal to happiness.”
― Yamile Saied Méndez, Furia

“Rosario showed a different face depending on how you looked at her. She changed when you saw her from a bus, or a luxury car, or your own feet.”
― Yamile Saied Méndez, Furia

“When we played, we were all the same. We were all one.”
― Yamile Saied Méndez, Furia

“Scoring a goal is almost like kissing. The more you do it, the more you want. I wanted to keep scoring until it hurt.”
― Yamile Saied Méndez, Furia

“You guys know about vampires? … You know, vampires have no reflections in a mirror? There’s this idea that monsters don’t have reflections in a mirror. And what I’ve always thought isn’t that monsters don’t have reflections in a mirror. It’s that if you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves. And growing up, I felt like a monster in some ways. I didn’t see myself reflected at all. I was like, “Yo, is something wrong with me? That the whole society seems to think that people like me don’t exist?” And part of what inspired me, was this deep desire that before I died, I would make a couple of mirrors. That I would make some mirrors so that kids like me might see themselves reflected back and might not feel so monstrous for it.”
― Junot Díaz

“You cross a border because you are searching, because you want more, because you want to match where you are with who you are, because you want to test your place. Maybe because you want to expand your sense of place. You are searching for something that may as yet be indefinable. A border crosser questions the very idea of home.”
― Sergio Troncoso, Nepantla Familias: An Anthology of Mexican American Literature on Families in between Worlds

“Everyone's had a tortured high school experience. You're not an anti-hero, you just suck.”
― Kit Steinkellner, Quince

“In the case of the Chicanx population, the US conquest and annexation of Mexican territory (a geographical area extending from Texas to California) following the Mexican American War (1846-1848) created a situation in which people of Mexican ancestry became subject to White domination...It was the general feeling among White settlers that they were superior to Mexicans...The question of how Mexicans should be classified racially was decided in 1897 by Texas courts, which ruled that Mexican Americans were not White. In California, they were classified as 'Caucasian' until 1930, when the state attorney general decided they should be categorized as 'Indians,' though 'not considered "the original American Indians of the US"'.”
― Beverly Daniel Tatum, Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?

“We are exploited for cheap labor in vast economic contributions to the gross domestic product of the United States ($428 billion annually) as well as for our additional billion dollar contributions to federal, state, and local taxes. In the same breath, we are blamed for the economic and national security woes of the country by wily politicians eager for the power of elective office.”
― Robert Chao Romero, Brown Church: Five Centuries of Latina/o Social Justice, Theology, and Identity

“Latin not Lethal (The Sonnet)

Yes I am latino and proud,
That doesn't make me a thug.
Yes I am brown in color and loud,
That doesn't mean I'm a lethal bug.
Some of us can't speak English,
That doesn't make us second-rate.
We care for family as much as you,
In friendship we walk to the world's end.
Savage imperialists walked on our corpses,
While they snatched our lands and homes.
Yet you call us illegal and dangerous,
Showing no remorse or desire to atone!
None of us can undo the past I know.
Our kids may walk together, let's make sure.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Earthquakin' Egalitarian: I Die Everyday So Your Children Can Live

“In college I was an editorial cartoonist for my school paper, The Daily Aztec...I did straight, news-oriented editorial cartoons. Occasionally, my Chicano background snuck in to the toons simply because I might do a César Chavez toon about how the School Student Board was too stupidly racist to allow him to speak on campus or other anti-frat toons on how they were so racist in doing fund-raisers for Tijuana kid charities--dressed in sombreros and begging with tin cups

(from an interview in the book Attitude, 2002)”
― Lalo Alcaraz

“I have been accused of being a bully. I think a lot of that stems from precisely my resistance to feel like I need to do the emotional labor of making people feel comfortable about what I’m saying. In particular, as a Latino scholar doing work in bilingual education, I’m particularly resistant to the idea that I need to make white people feel comfortable doing work in bilingual education. I put my work out there. I let it speak for itself. I certainly have never targeted anyone individually and personally insulted them, which is what bullying actually is, right?”
― Nelson Flores

“NNHS students discussed Americanness in their everyday interactions. For example, Mr Ford, a popular White teacher, made a jocular reference to the title of a popular television show when he told a classroom full of seniors who had not completed an assignment that they ‘should be called America’s biggest losers!’ A Mexican girl (Gen 3, Grade 12) retorted, ‘But we’re not even American!’ This kind of comment reflects Latinx students’ awareness that they were positioned as somehow un-American.”
― Jonathan Rosa, Looking like a Language, Sounding like a Race: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and the Learning of Latinidad

“Please take it off Lupe.
She hates wearing clothes.”
― Cindy L. Rodriguez, Three Pockets Full: A story of love, family, and tradition

“Be yourself. Be over the top. Outlast them. Show them that no amount of fear will ever make you chance who you are.”
― Mark Oshiro, The Insiders

“What’s your favorite part of the trip?”
“I don’t have one.”
“C’mon, there must’ve been something.”
“I took a weekend trip to Caño Cristales. I liked seeing the different colors of the river. It was like a liquid rainbow.” Many of the students had spent their time traveling around Colombia on the weekends. No one had a car, but we could hop on a plane for fairly cheap and fly into different areas such as Bogotá, the country’s official capital city, or Cali, the salsa-dancing capital of the world. Amanda had even convinced me to fly with her to the seductive, sizzling city of Cartagena. We climbed the fortified walls that had once protected the city from pirate attacks and watched the sunset. The entire city had a Miami-style skyline and, after the sun went down, infatuation seemed to bloom into fever and take hold of the city. At night we could hear the clink of rum bottles and mojito glasses in cafés on almost every street as moonlight picked out the silhouettes of softly swaying couples. We walked for hours along the coastal city streets. Candle flames beckoned from the dimness of nearby baroque churches.”
― Kayla Cunningham

“It's our responsibility to know our past and use our language and pass it on to our children. That is the one thing they cannot take away from us.”
― Phillippe Diederich, Lalo Lespérance Never Forgot