Our Migrant Souls Quotes

“In the class structure of this country, the role of Latino people is to build the movie set of white perfection again and again.”
― Héctor Tobar, Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino”

“to know ourselves is to stand before the border that runs through our lives and our history, and to face it, seeing it for all it's absurdity and its arbitrariness. a history of inhumanity and prejudice gave birth to the border and its wall, and we can feel the wounds it has inflicted on us ...We will endure”
― Héctor Tobar, Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino”

“All of us, "Black," "white," "Hispanic," "Asian," and "Native American," live in the quagmire and the prison house of a society built on the deceptions and theft of empire and exploitation. We need to see what young, queer eyes see with clarity: the hypocrisy of the order that aims to contain our free and flamboyant souls, and how we can never be our true selves inside that order.”
― Héctor Tobar, Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino”

“The social and business order of the United States is built on looking away from and forgetting the violence that created it, and the hatreds that sustain it.”
― Héctor Tobar, Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino”

“I look through the frame of the shuttered window and I can see blue sky shining through, and I think: the gods of history kept this wall standings just long enough for me to see it.”
― Héctor Tobar, Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino”

“In our times, deranged men fire assault rifles indiscriminately at their fellow human beings in public places. They arm themselves with weapons that were invented, in part, as instruments of colonial subjugation, and they use them to create a spectacle in which they reenact the massacres of empire building, the genocides that created the modern world.”
― Héctor Tobar, Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino”

“A man whose mother could not read a word in any language had given his son all the words in English. I recognized in that dictionary, with its copious illustrations and pithy and illuminating etymologies, a work of beauty and power”
― Héctor Tobar, Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino”

“in that moment she thinks of the younger, thinner iteration of her father, and she feels the success and tragedy of him, and the scars poverty and migration left on him, and she thinks of all the years she's lived the intimate wound of his loneliness and his ambition”
― Héctor Tobar, Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino”

“This fifty-state, sea-to-shining-sea intimacy with Latino people, and “white” America’s acceptance and rejection of it, is the force holding the United States together, and tearing it apart.”
― Héctor Tobar, Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino”