I think no matter what you do you can't please everybody. You have to ask yourself, "Did I do what I set out to do?"

Sometimes hearing the stories is going to change people's lives much more than if they read it.

I was raised in Chicago, so always used Latina. It's what my Father and brothers called ourselves, when we meant the entire Spanish-speaking community of Chicago.

Believe it or not, Mexican cooking, for those of you who have not gone farther south than Taco Bell, uses a lot of vegetables. But those vegetables were not brought here, like corn mushrooms, huitlacoche, or squash blossoms.

The good thing about Dennis [ Mathis] is, even though he's a white, he respected that I was doing something quirky with my English. He loved it when I would mix up the Americanisms and say, "That's water over the dam."

I wish somebody had told me love does not die, that we can continue to receive and give love after death.

We have all this courage as writers, but then there's this fear.