Cultures, when they meet, influence one another, whether people like it or not. But Americans don't have any way of describing this secret that has b….

You don't know Mexico, man. You have trivialized Mexico. You are a fool about Mexico if you think that Mexico is five blocks. That is not Mexico; tha….

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

I regret that I was never an athlete. I regret there isn't time in life. I regret that so many of my friends have died. I regret that I was not brave….

I had an Indian face, but I never saw it as Indian, in part because in America the Indian was dead. The Indian had been killed in cowboy movies, or w….

The drama of the essay is the way the public life intersects with my personal and private life. It's in that intersection that I find the energy of t….

For me, diversity is not a value. Diversity is what you find in Northern Ireland. Diversity is Beirut. Diversity is brother killing brother. Where di….

It is not simply that these two cities are perched side by side at the edge of the Pacific; it is that adolescence sits next to middle age, and they ….

I think brown marks a reunion of peoples, an end to ancient wanderings. Rival cultures and creeds conspire with Spring to create children of a beauty….

I don't think writers should be convenient examples. I don't think we should make people feel settled. I don't try to be a gadfly, but I do think tha….

The popular idea of a role model implies that an adult's influence on a child is primarily occupational, and that all a black child needs is to see a….

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 ….

When a society doesn't know what to do with its young, it's in real trouble. When the young don't know what to do with society - at the very least, r….

I came from a white middle class neighborhood. Was I expected to go back there and teach the woman next door about Renaissance sonnets? The embarrass….

We're looking at such enormous complexity and variety that it makes a mockery of "celebrating diversity." In the L.A. of the future, no one will need….

When the Irish nun said to me, "Speak your name loud and clear so that all the boys and girls can hear you," she was asking me to use language public….

fter the O.J. Simpson trial there was talk about how the country was splitting in two - one part black, one part white. It was ludicrous: typical gri….

But lots of emerging racial tensions in California have nothing to do with whites: Filipinos and Samoans are fighting it out in San Francisco high sc….

The fact that we're all hyphenating our names suggests that we are afraid of being assimilated. I was talking on the BBC recently, and this woman int….

I had all this anxiety about what it meant to be a minority. My professors - the same men who taught me the intricacies of language - just shied away….

I think it's an important thing for a Mexican to say, especially now with the rebellion in Chiapas. Mexico has to confront her Indian face, and yet s….