When I was at home, I wasn't shy. I was the clown at home, because I was loved. It was in the outside world that I was judged and I wasn't loved. That was very clear to me, that I wasn't loved. So I became very quiet. You know, those little girls you see in those pictures that look like they want to hunch, I was trying to disappear into my shoulder blades. The quietest person in the classroom, that was me. But that wasn't me at home.

I've put up with too much, too long, and now I'm just too intelligent, too powerful, too beautiful, too sure of who I am finally to deserve anything less.

If you know two cultures and two languages, that intermediate place, where the two don't perfectly meet, is really interesting.

As Indigenous peoples, we know there is more to the world. We know spirits exist. We know as women, because we're especially attuned to this kind of knowledge, that spirits exist and have a presence in our lives. Some of us are gifted and can communicate with the spirit world. Not everyone has that gift and can perceive the borders between the living and the dead and our society actively discourages us of exploring the knowledge of what many of us have already always known in our cultures.

My mom was a frustrated woman, like so many unhappy women who didn't get the opportunities they wanted.

Friends started saying, "Oh, don't come. No vengas. It's dangerous for us, and we live here." Then there's also the issue, if you go back, and you happen to be Mexican-American, you get treated very differently [in Mexico] than if you're blond. If you say something wrong, they say, "Why don't you learn your mother tongue?"

[Jorge Luis Borges] had short stories, and I was trying to learn how to write short stories, and then he had these things in the middle that were like fables, and I loved hearing fables.