Gloria E. Anzaldúa Quotes

“Nobody’s going to save you. No one’s going to cut you down, cut the thorns thick around you. No one’s going to storm the castle walls nor kiss awake your birth, climb down your hair, nor mount you onto the white steed. There is no one who will feed the yearning. Face it. You will have to do, do it yourself.”

“By writing I put order in the world, give it a handle so I can grasp it.”

“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.”

“All reaction is limited by, and dependant on, what it is reacting against.”

“What we say and what we do ultimately comes back to us so let us own our responsibility, place it in our hands, and carry it with dignity and strength.”

“A woman who writes has power, and a woman with power is feared.”

“I change myself, I change the world.”

“Nothing happens in the ‘real’ world unless it first happens in the images in our heads”

“Though we tremble before uncertain futures may we meet illness, death and adversity with strength may we dance in the face of our fears.”

“I am an act of kneading, of uniting and joining that not only has produced both a creature of darkness and a creature of light, but also a creature that questions the definitions of light and dark and gives them new meanings.”

“I can’t seem to stay out of my own way.”

“The U.S-Mexican border es una herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country — a border culture.”

“Awareness of our situation must come before inner changes, which in turn come before changes in society. Nothing happens in the “real” world unless it first happens in the images in our heads.”

“I want the freedom to carve and chisel my own face, to staunch the bleeding with ashes, to fashion my own gods out of my entrails...”

“We are taught that the body is an ignorant animal intelligence dwells only in the head. But the body is smart. It does not discern between external stimuli and stimuli from the imagination. It reacts equally viscerally to events from the imagination as it does to real events.”

“Like all people, we perceive the version of reality that our culture communicates. Like others having or living in more than one culture, we get multiple, often opposing messages. The coming together of two self-consistent but habitually incomparable frames of reference causes un choque, a cultural collision.”

“In trying to become ‘objective,’ Western culture made ‘objects’ of things and people when it distanced itself from them, thereby losing ‘touch’ with them.”

“The struggle is inner: Chicano, indio, American Indian, mojado, mexicano, immigrant Latino, Anglo in power, working class Anglo, Black, Asian--our psyches resemble the bordertowns and are populated by the same people. The struggle has always been inner, and is played out in outer terrains.”

“Why am I compelled to write? Because the writing saves me from this complacency I fear. Because I have no choice.”

“I am visible-see this Indian face-yet I am invisible. I both blind them with my beak nose and am their blind spot. But I exist, we exist. They’d like to think I have melted in the pot. But I haven’t. We haven’t.”

Having crossed the Rio Grande into Texas with his mother in search of a new life, Joaquín receives help and friendship from Prietita a brave young Mexican American girl.

Did you come from the other side? You know, from Mexico? So begins the friendship between Prietita and Joaquin, the young boy who, with his mother, has crossed the Rio Grande River to Texas in search of a new life.

Prietita, a brave young Mexican American girl, defends Joaquín from the neighborhood kids who taunt him with shouts of mojado or wetback.

But what can she do to protect Joaquín and his mother from the Border Patrol as the van cruises slowly up the street toward their hiding place?

They have captured not only the hardship of daily life on the border, but also the beauty of the landscape and the dignity and generosity of spirit that the Mexican Americans and the Mexican immigrants share.

Prietita is a young Mexican-American girl living in South Texas, near the Rio-Grande river which is the U.S.-Mexican border. One day, she meets a boy named Joaquin, who meets her clad in a long sleeve shirt (unusual for the summer) and a bundle of firewood.

She notices that his Spanish is different from hers, and asks if he is from “the other side.”

The two quickly become friends, and through this friendship Prietita comes to see the vast differences between her life and that of Joaquin’s, and the challenges that come with being labeled as an illegal from across the border.

In this very real and down to earth book, children will be introduced too many realities involving illegal immigration.

The hardships that these families face, the prejudices against them, and the overall hate that some individuals have for immigrants are all topics highlighted in the text.