The Gringo, locked into the fiction of white superiority, seized complete political power, stripping Indians and Mexicans of their land while their feet were still rooted in it. Con el destierro y el exilo fuimos desuñados, destroncados, destripados - we were jerked out by the roots, truncated, disemboweled, dispossessed, and separated from our identity and our history.

I can't seem to stay out of my own way.

Living on borders and in margins, keeping intact one's shifting and multiple identity and integrity, is like trying to swim in a new element, an "alien" element.

Books saved my sanity, knowledge opened the locked places in me and taught me first how to survive and then how to soar.

Write in the kitchen, lock yourself up in the bathroom. Write on the bus or the welfare line, on the job or during meals.

Living in a state of psychic unrest, in a Borderland, is what makes poets write and artists create.

I am mad - but I choose this madness.