If you're going to write about the river, you've got to get in.

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?"

I think there's a rule that once you want to live somewhere, you can't find a job.

Sometimes I feel I can't quite master my written and spoken Spanish, because I'm too much a student of English. I would need another lifetime to learn it.

I don't close myself to the possibility of someplace outside the United States, but it would have to be someplace with an indigenous community, because that's where I feel at home.

My idea of a meal, if I was hungry, was to open a bag of potato chips.

When you become a driver, they don't tell you that you have to switch languages. The drivers have their own language and they don't tell you that as girls. How am I supposed to know that blinking light means something? There are all these little languages that you have to know, but you don't know.