I think the great Mexican cuisine is dying because there are fast foods now competing, because there are supermarkets, and supermarkets can't afford to keep in stock a lot of these very perishable products that are used for fine Mexican cooking. Women are working and real Mexican cooking requires enormous amounts of time.

One does, after all, take on many of the givens of a society when one takes on its language.

If you're going to be a myth or want to be a myth, you'd better die young.

For the kids, who in their lives have never known the slightest power, delinquency is a way of looking for power.

What I wonder is what would happen in California, say, if all the Mexicans left from one day to the next?

Talking in one language and talking in another, I think inevitably, produce two different personalities, as far as I've seen in other people. I assume it does the same for me.

I may not have a practical mind, but it's very fixated on concrete things. I like detail.