More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
I didn’t want to live in New York or teach at a university—the former because I hated big cities (as a poor person), the latter because universities intimidated me (as a poor person).
!!!!! Probably why i never wanted to live in SF
Home “is not just the place where you were born,” as the travel writer Pico Iyer once noted. “It’s the place where you become yourself.”
Sometimes we need permission, encouragement, someone to fill our heart with desire, because without desire you can’t invent anything.
Love
whatever is done with love, in the name of others, without self-gain, whatever is done with the heart on behalf of someone or something, be it a child, animal, vegetable, rock, person, cloud, whatever work we make with complete humility, will always come out beautifully, and something more valuable than fame or money will come.
To tell you the truth, I’ve always been terrified of traveling alone in Mexico the way only pochas (American mexicanas) can be terrified. Not because we know too little about this country we are visiting, but because as Mexicans from the U.S. side, we know too much. But that’s another story.
Just this morning I was thinking of my next trip to Mexico and how I would ask my parents to come with us
De dónde vienen?” the Pátzcuaro vendors asked us, our clothes and accents giving us away. “From Chicago, El Paso, Austin, San Antonio.” Ah, pochas, they thought—that awful word meaning north-of-the-border Mexicans.
That fine split between my Mexican self and my ’Merican self, those two halves that don’t fit.
I’ve managed to do a lot of things in my life I didn’t think I was capable of and that many others didn’t think I was capable of either. Especially
This isn’t to say I’d never felt this “otherness” before in Chicago, but I hadn’t felt it as deeply.
