That first page, sometimes the first paragraph, even the first sentence, can give you everything you need to know to read the novel.

We need first pages–and so do novelists

Idolatry is only the most extreme form of art appreciation

we are restoredto that moment in childhood when we lay awake in the dark listening for a longed for or  dreaded noise

If you want to know how a seventeenth-century saw light, look at a Vermeer. If you want to know how it felt to be a bored housewife in a nineteenth-century French town, read Madame Bovary.

Art can make you smarter, if by smart we mean more aware, responsive, cognizant, quicker, and so forth

Art can be informative, though it is always a mistake to equate intelligence with the amount of information one possesses.

Clearly, more research is needed

But how, I wonder, can we not feel the beauty of any of these scenes?

To say that we try to avoid art that is depressing or disturbing is a backhanded compliment to its power to affect us.

With the advent of the Civil Rights Movement during the 1960s, Chicanos began to assert themselves politically as well as culturally.

who, high on the chemical rush of violence the brink of committing a hate crime or perpetrating a genocidal massacre, would be stopped by the memory of a young girl's diary?

But Hitler had originally wanted to be an artist

Hitler was mildly consoled to find a painting by Caravaggio-Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio-whom Hitler thought was the same person as Michelangelo Buonarroti.

mother and father teased her for going to see fat women in braids and Viking helmets sing for five hours at a time,

I've always hoped that someone would fund a research project to measure the changes that occur in our brain waves when we lose ourselves in a book.

thought–that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but each of us  secretly believes that we are the one with the eye for beauty

"nothing happened" meant that she didn't commit suicide, as she seems to have considered doing.

to over-simplify, part of what makes Cézanne's apples different from theapples we doodle on our notepad or the scribblings of a child

The Greeks, at least, had some ideas: order, harmony, structure.

Unraveling the word beauty can get us so ensnared that it’s no wonder that for a time, critics and academics and even some artists agreed that it was probably better not to use it at all.

Perhaps it would be possible to know nothing about art, to have never seen a painting, and to look at any one of those works and think, Well, that is really gorgeous.

Is there a meaning of beauty on which we can agree?

Perhaps because I grew up being yelled at in Spanish by my parents, yelling in Spanish comes much more easily to me.

"Yes, I know I am married to English now, but Spanish was my first love."

I was humiliated, but I understood why Sandra was concerned. We are both professionals, after all. Our work must be top-notch. I didn't tell her that when my editor asked who should translate my book, I had insisted that I be allowed to do it for two reasons: (1) the thought of seeing a translator's name on the cover of my book was humiliating, and (2) how could I claim Spanish as my mother tongue if I required the services of a translator?

But there was nothing else. Eventually they negotiated a deal with the actual drug dealer, who took the stand against me. When the judge hit me with a million-dollar bail, I emptied my pockets on his booking desk: twenty-six cents.

I began to learn my own language, the bilingual words and phrases explaining to me my place in the universe.

I showed the book to friends. All of us were amazed; this book told us we were alive.

From the time I was seven, teachers had been punishing me for not knowing my lessons by making me stick my nose in a circle chalked on the blackboard. Ashamed of not understanding and fearful of asking questions, I dropped out of school in the ninth grade.

On weekend graveyard shifts at St. Joseph’s Hospital I worked the emergency room, mopping up pools of blood and carting plastic bags stuffed with arms, legs and hands to the outdoor incinerator. I enjoyed the quiet, away from the screams of shotgunned, knifed, and mangled kids writhing on gurneys outside the operating rooms. Ambulance sirens shrieked and squad car lights reddened the cool nights, flashing against the hospital walls: gray—red, gray—red. On slow nights I would lock the door of the administration office, search the reference library for a book on female anatomy and, with my feet propped on the desk, leaf through the illustrations, smoking my cigarette. I was seventeen.

Because of the color of my skin they betrayed me. The dark-skinned woman has been silenced, gagged, caged, bound into servitude with marriage, bludgeoned for 300 years, sterilized and castrated in the twentieth century.

The worst kind of betrayal lies in making us believe that the Indian woman in us is the betrayer.

So yes, though “home” permeates every sinew and cartilage in my body, I too am afraid of going home. Though I’ll defend my race and culture when they are attacked by non-mexicanos, conosco el malestar de mi cultura.

I feel perfectly free to rebel and to rail against my culture. I fear no betrayal on my part because, unlike Chicanas and other women of color who grew up white or who have only recently returned to their native cultural roots, I was totally immersed in mine.

Blocked, immobilized, we can’t move forward, can’t move backwards.

Alienated from her mother culture, “alien” in the dominant culture, the woman of color does not feel safe within the inner life of her Self.

We’re afraid of being abandoned by the mother, the culture, la Raza, for being unacceptable, faulty, damaged.

In a New England college where I taught, the presence of a few lesbians threw the more conservative heterosexual students and faculty into a panic. The two lesbian students and we two lesbian instructors met with them to discuss their fears. One of the students said, “I thought homophobia meant fear of going home after a residency.”

For the lesbian of color, the ultimate rebellion she can make against her native culture is through her sexual behavior.

I am the embodiment of the hieros gamos: the coming together of opposite qualities within

But I, like other queer people, am two in one body, both male and female.

What we are suffering from is an absolute despot duality that says we are able to be only one or the other.

Which was it to be—strong, or submissive, rebellious or conforming?

she must be protected. Protected from herself.

Culture and religion seek to protect us from these two forces.

Women are made to feel total failures if they don’t marry and have children.

If a woman remains a virgen until she marries, she is a good woman.

If a woman rebels she is a mujer mala

The culture expects women to show greater acceptance of, and commitment to, the value system than men

I was the first in six generations to leave the Valley, the only one in my family to ever leave home.

find my own intrinsic nature buried under the personality that had been imposed on me.

mi tierra, mi gente,

I have a vivid memory of an old photograph: I am six years old. I stand between my father and mother, head cocked to the right, the toes of my flat feet gripping the ground. I hold my mother’s hand.

(I’ve printed my name at different schools for indifferent teachers who’ve snickered at my native surname, who’ve turned me in “for speaking Spanish on         the premises”

I too have walked my barrio streets,seen life not worth the lingering grief.

You bring out the Uled-Nayl in me.The stand-back-white-bitch-in me.The switchblade in the boot in me.

Two tongues that come together is not a French kiss but bilingual love.

Bilingual Love Poem

I’d kill myself first.Kill me first?But she was the one who quit!

 maybe I look like a bitch, probably      because that’s what       I am.

 of a woman needing something real              and swearing at the world               (and the world doesn’t have it)

I kind of like the sound of bitch–     such a word.

I am nowcoming up for airYes, I ampicking up the torch.

looking around, each with a dream in their heart,thinking they’ll get a chance to change their lives.

We are born with dreams in our hearts,looking for better days ahead.

La pinche vida         Que a tirones la vivimos                 under a never changing sun         nos sigue jodiendo.

 mi padre también salío                solito         and crawled a gatas        on burning sands of time

Y mi espalda         ardeunder hot Azteca sun        reflecting grains of sand        que caen                through tick-tock hour-glass

    the art form of our slums         more meaningful & significant         than Egypt’s finest hieroglyphics.

Neighborhood that never saw a school-bus        the cross-town walks were much more fun        embarrassed when acquaintances or friends or relatives        were sent home excused from class        for having cooties in their hair!         Did only Mexicans have cooties in their hair?

chasing them in adolescent heat         causing skinned knees & being run off for the night

 Fiestas for any occasion         holidays holy days happy days

Kids barefoot/snotty-nosed        playing marbles/munching on bean tacos

  It was the first time I had successfully joked around with my father. I knew it was a joke that would make him smile.

He had a strange look on his face. I thought for a moment that he was going to cry, but my father wasn’t a crier—and the look went away.

  “The tree in the backyard. My room. My desk. My dad’s truck.” I didn’t tell her about drawing my mother over and over again.

I couldn’t remember her first name. But I didn’t want to forget her face.

He listened to country music. I had never listened to the radio in English and I thought that the songs were sad.

“We’re not so poor.”  She glared at me.  “We have food and a house and—”  She stopped me cold in the middle of my sentence. “What does a boy know about money?”  I didn’t argue with her. My mother didn’t like people to disagree with her.

The voices are getting louder. I turn up the radio.

Finally, it’s cool enough that the earth has begun to release the day’s heat. The scent is what life would smell like if life didn’t depend on blood.

The bathroom mirror showed me a man with swollen eyes. Beard stubble. Sweat-drenched hair.

Before you told me, I’d dreamt of a little girl riding on my shoulders, a little girl with my mother’s name. I heard her laughter and felt her tiny hands in mine.

I have deaths curled inside of me. Layered and limned with my grief. I lost my mother when I was little, my brother soon after I met you, my grandparents after we married, some friends, and now, too, our daughter.

And I knew your home could be mine.

Before he ever said the word love, he said, “If they knew, my brother would fight over who’d put a bullet between my eyes.”

urracas

palomas

But it’s a living, and sometimes that’s enough.

I sleep enough, I guess.

Early enough to shed all of my clothes and warm our bed and for my eyes to become bleary with sleep before you arrive. I hear your car park in the driveway, hear your keys at the door, hear you make tea and drink it in the kitchen, hear the groan when you take off your shoes. And you sit there for a bit and breathe. And when you come to bed, I greet you with open arms and hold you tight. You tuck your face into my neck, and I breathe in the scent of your hair. And you tell me about your day. Sometimes we laugh. Sometimes we cry.

When the whispers began, I tried to outrun them, first on the treadmill then at the university track. I tried weights. I tried punching the bag in the garage. I tried jerking off. I tried drinking. At home and then at the bar down the street.

Some nights I listen to the radio, and then I’m almost happy. I shout sing along. Doesn’t matter what it is—Top 40, country music, the songs I remember from the nineties, the Cure, the Cranberries, new and old Tejano, Michael Salgado and Intocables, and old conjuntos, Los Relampagos and Los Tigres del Norte and Los Cadetes de Linares looping over and over again.

I promised you I’d follow you. To love you is to live here.

I followed you here. I’d follow you anywhere.

     La Raza!Méjicano!        Español!                Latino!                        Hispano!                                Chicano!or whatever I call myself,                I look the same                I feel the same                I cry                         and                 sing the same.

Here I stand,poor in money,arrogant with pride,

Elfego Baca

I killed those men who dared to steal my mine,

I have been the bloody revolution,the victor,the vanquished.I have killed and been killed.

Don Benito Juárez,

The crown was gone                        but all its parasites remained                        and ruled                        and taughtwith gun and flame and mystic power.

priest                        Hidalgowho in the year eighteen hundred and tenrang the bell of independence and gave out that lasting cry–

   THE GROUND WAS MINE.I was both tyrant and slave.

Cuauhtémoc

I must choose                betweenthe paradox ofvictory of the spirit,despite physical hunger,                orto exist in the graspof American social neurosis,sterilization of the souland a full stomach.

My fathershave lost the economic battleand wonthe struggle of cultural survival

confused by the rules,scorned by attitudes,suppressed by manipulation,and destroyed by modern society.

I am Joaquín,lost in a world of confusion,