It’s the most absurd story. I grew up in the dirt streets of Tijuana, dying of all kinds of diseases – tuberculosis, fevers, all that – and it somehow turned into this charmed life. I don’t know exactly how. Luis Alberto Urrea Read Quote
There is beauty in our roots. Sometimes we think our roots are shameful, and people tell you that you’re no good or your ancestors are no good or that you come from a neighborhood of no hope and terrible crime. But it’s about the beauty of those places, and I carry that with me. Luis Alberto Urrea Read Quote
I believe God is a poet; every religion in our history was made of poems and songs, and not a few of them had books attached. Luis Alberto Urrea Read Quote
Writing went from being a calling to being a job. Business ruined things. It became like making sausages in a sausage factory. Luis Alberto Urrea Read Quote
When I was doing missionary work when I was younger, which started this obsession of mine with the literature of witness, I was a translator for a missionary group, and I spent years in a Tijuana dump. People were really thrown by the fact that the Mexican poor, many of them pureblood indigenous people, seemed happy. Luis Alberto Urrea Read Quote
