its sad that mediocrity in communities where education isn't the most prevalent education can be seen as a bad thing kind of like too good for everyone type of tone and being Mexican myself being seen as too smart can be almost a bad thing

him saying that they wanted him to be quiet is very powerful in that it shows his community knew that he was capable of something more than being taunted by the dumber kids or even by authority that wanted to suppress his intelligence

"i refused to fail. I was smart. I was arrogant. I was lucky." i find this quote interesting due to growing up my mom always reminded me to read and nurture my brain because she knew my potential she saw something in me that most people would dismiss

i loved the end of this paragraph because growing up this is how i lived not having what all the other kids have but enough, enough to have shoes on my feet and clothes on my back

Page 16 “And we needed to hear our story told back to us so maybe we could start to understand it ourselves.”

This quote in itself really hits home for me because sometimes your just so caught up in your day to day that you can’t even realize some of the things you’ve accomplished or on the latter made mistakes of not until someone you love or care about is affected by it and you have to sit there in the rubble you’ve created to understand the magnitude of your actions

Page 9 “It was like he was looking around his hood in queens — and around his bedroom, his moms kitchen—and just calling out what he saw.”

This quote really speaks to me in that i can relate to it being a song writer myself the power of Words that are attatched to a sound bring power and imagery to mere letters on a page instead they bring emotion and maybe even a bit of nostalgia

Page 8 “im not gonna say that i thought i could get rich from rap but i could clearly see that it was gonna get bigger before it went away. Way bigger.”

You can tell from this quote alone that he not only saw rap as his passion but as an oppurtunity very early on I’ve always been told its not about if the idea is good its about the timing of it, he saw his oppurtunity and jumped at it

Page 5 “ I didnt care if my friends left me at the light, I had to get it out. Even back then I thought i was the best”. Its interesting that even at a young age before all the sucess and before the world had any idea that hip hop could be lucrative he had the confidence and drive to be the best at his craft