The Indians had to be either killed, or herded into reservations, which were essentially concentration camps, and forgotten. Their history had to be absolutely obliterated so that we could believe that we were living on virgin soil.

Human unhappiness is evidence of our immortality.

Who knows what Yale thought it was getting when it hired Richard Rodriguez? The people who offered me the job thought there was nothing wrong with that. I thought there was something very wrong. I still do. I think race-based affirmative action is crude and absolutely mistaken.

The difference between being Mexican and being Chinese, as I can see it, is that when you go to Harvard from a Chinese family, the whole family goes to Harvard. When you're a Mexican and you go to Harvard, you betray the family.

Mexico was most powerfully my father's smile and not, as you might otherwise imagine, not language, not pigment.

I became a writer not because my father was one - my father made false teeth for a living. I became a writer because the Irish nuns who educated me taught me something about bravery with their willingness to give so much to me.

Mexico is sex and Canada is mind. There is much about Canada that I find admirable - the treatment of immigrants, for example, particularly those from Central America during the recent civil wars there. But there is confusion too: I know of Croatian Nazis who are subsidized by the Canadian government to maintain their racist culture. There is Canada, trying to sustain diversity without knowing exactly what it's doing.