119 Quotes by Luis Alberto Urrea

I'm always fascinated by the disjunct between what's really happening on the ground and the propaganda machine that feeds America alarmist news about immigration.

Borders are liminal spaces. Anyone worthy of the title of 'writer' is a border writer. We all are border people.

Spanish was my first language. Honestly, I learned to first speak in Spanish, not English, because my poor mother had to go to San Diego every day to work and then come back. And she would come home when I was an infant long after I was asleep.

When I was a little boy in Tijuana, it was wonderland. We left when I was probably four - I was dying of tuberculosis.

When 'The Hummingbird's Daughter' came out, there was a certain backlash - 'Well, this isn't 'The Devil's Highway.'' That's just the way it goes.

Poetry is how I feed the soul, and it's how I fire the furnace of writing.

The stupidity of militarized fences between two worlds is a metaphor for all the things that divide us as human beings.

I saw 'The War Wagon' with John Wayne and Kirk Douglas, but it was dubbed into German. And it had Japanese subtitles and then this little strip with some Spanish words, and I've never forgotten that weird image. It was so magical and funky.

The situation was kind of complicated in that my mother didn't speak Spanish. My father spoke English, you know, as best he could.