To me, the tragedy about this whole image-obsessed society is that young girls get so caught up in just achieving that they forget to realize that they have so much more to offer the world.

I think Hispanic women are beautiful with their curves. I'm not sure who feels that way in Hollywood. I was never told to lose 50 pounds. If they think that they just don't bother with you. You just don't get the role and you never know why. That's still better than physically harming yourself and becoming unhealthy just to star in a movie.

I realized how Latina I was, and then also, at the same time, how not Latina enough I was, because I’m born and raised in Los Angeles. I speak Spanish, but I don’t speak perfect Spanish, not like a native speaker

I think the body image thing, everybody can identify with that. In our culture there's just so much pressure and so much attention placed on the way we look. You just turn on the TV or flip open a magazine and there's people who don't look like any of us. I think this movie is like, finally, a celebration of reality and of our imperfections. We're not all a size 2 and we're not all a size 0, and you know what? That's OK, because some of us like to eat!

The name America has definitely grown on me. I wish there was a big patriotic story behind it, but the truth is that my grandfather was a librarian who knew all sorts of random facts.

What’s hard about being on the other side of the world is that sometimes the problem feels so big that changing one life doesn’t feel like enough. But it is.

I'm the first one in line to go watch "Spider-Man," but there's definitely something in me that makes me want to go to a movie and see something that makes me feel good about life.