I do know that if you can name certain things and understand them, it allows you to make better choices. Unfortunately, there's so much misinformatio…

- Jimmy Santiago Baca

The whole thing is this: If you don't use just basic grammar, if you don't get the language down, you're not going to have access to a tool that peop…

- Jimmy Santiago Baca

You've got to invite Native Americans to the table, and Asians, and Chicanos. You cannot keep us in the back room anymore and give us notations on pa…

- Jimmy Santiago Baca

Every poem is an infant labored into birth and I am drenched with sweating effort, tired from the pain and hurt of being a man, in the poem I transfo…

- Jimmy Santiago Baca

I believe it's our responsibility as citizens to get in there and not accept the constant failure of prisons to deal with racism, lack of privilege, …

- Jimmy Santiago Baca

How much truth can we bear? Our tolerance for carrying the truth is not very high. I mean, the slightest discomfort about truth and we run to our ref…

- Jimmy Santiago Baca

I emerged from the black oil pools in the forgotten house of dreams in the wild backcountry of the heart. I am heir to the sun, child of Mother Earth…

- Jimmy Santiago Baca

Being a human being without forgiveness is like being a guitarist without fingers or being the diva without a tongue.

- Jimmy Santiago Baca

I culled poetry from odors, sounds, faces, and ordinary events occurring around me. Breezes bulged me as if I were cloth; sounds nicked their marks o…

- Jimmy Santiago Baca