I'm always trying to, using literature, subvert people's responses.
— Luis Alberto Urrea
I came to believe the green fuse that drives spring and summer through the world is essentially a literary energy. That the world was more than a place. Life was more than an event. It was all one thing - and that thing was story.
A lot of our family was undocumented. My mom and dad were both super conservative. My dad had a green card; my mom was an Eisenhower Republican who did not approve of all the 'illegal people.'
Writers write without support.
It became really important to me if I was going to write 'Hummingbird's Daughter' to try to do honor to women.
To me, writing is prayer. I pray all the time.
I am actually a 'Seven Samurai' fan.
A great Chicano forebear of mine in writing is Rolando Hinojosa-Smith. He was writing good border mysteries for Chicano readers back in the '80s and '90s.
I've been treated beautifully wherever I've gone, and I really think we all want to love each other.
When 'The Hummingbird's Daughter' came out, there was a certain backlash - 'Well, this isn't 'The Devil's Highway.'' That's just the way it goes.
I don't like to see people get kicked around. You have to stand up for them.
People think of me as a political writer, but I don't think of myself that way.
Books are like chocolate. Can't eat just one.
The French-Cajun culture is similar to mine - they're Catholic, they play accordions, and they eat hot chiles.
Way back when I was working at the dump, I saw that, even when living among the trash, that some people would decide to choose joy in their lives.
I missed the Wilco phenom while busy obsessing over rock en Espanol. So imagine my surprise when I found myself at O'Hare getting on a plane with my Chi-town homeboy, Jeff Tweedy. I loved the guy right away and loved his family. How odd to know somebody before you listen to them. I don't know if that's bad or good.
I often say poetry was my first love.
I don't like being angry all the time; it's not good for me. I have to have serenity or else go to war.
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.
During grade school, we moved to a white, working-class suburb in San Diego, and there were no Mexicans.
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.
I'm always fascinated by the disjunct between what's really happening on the ground and the propaganda machine that feeds America alarmist news about immigration.
It's almost easy for me to write about a magnificent tropical village with orchids and dragonflies. That's intoxicating, but the United States is magical, too. We just forget this.
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.
The tone of 'Into the Beautiful North' is really the way I write. 'Hummingbird's Daughter' was the anomaly. It was a once-in-a-lifetime phenomenon.
I used to work with a relief group that took care of the people in the dump. We took them food and water and medicine and built homes and took them to church services, whatever was needed.
'The Hummingbird's Daughter' took 20 years to write.
It's not like Mexicans have an illegal immigration organ in their body and at 14 kicks off a hormone and shows them how to come to the United States illegally. It's a question of desperation for a vast majority of them.
With a name like Luis Alberto Urrea, it's political no matter what I do.
I am addicted to poetry, but the truth is I cannot pass up a good hard-boiled mystery.
Writing went from being a calling to being a job. Business ruined things. It became like making sausages in a sausage factory.
I was torn between the Americanness my mom wanted for me and the Mexicanness my father wanted - they were wrestling for cultural influence over me.
Many of us writers tour like a literary Bachman Turner Overdrive. We ain't pretty, but we're on the road. Many of us wish we were rock stars anyway. For my part, I live in my iPod. The musicians there are my constant companions on the road.
The stupidity of militarized fences between two worlds is a metaphor for all the things that divide us as human beings.
I used to approach writing like a football game. If I went out there and aggressively saw more, I'd know more, and I'd capture more, and I'd write better. Hut, hut, hut: First down and haiku!
Masculinity is kind of a toxic curse, isn't it? The expectations of it were hard on me.
When I was a little boy in Tijuana, it was wonderland. We left when I was probably four - I was dying of tuberculosis.
We're all funny. Humor unites us.
I'm interested in the eternal soul. That's what I write about.
I've been told not to tour down in Mexico. I am too well-known now. The kidnappers may think that my publisher will pay a ransom.
I was deeply infected with storytelling from the get go, and I truly love it.
The concept of a literature of witness - of bearing witness - has embedded in it the need for action. One must not simply hide in the shadows and type; one must also stand in the light.
I saw 'The War Wagon' with John Wayne and Kirk Douglas, but it was dubbed into German. And it had Japanese subtitles and then this little strip with some Spanish words, and I've never forgotten that weird image. It was so magical and funky.
We want to ascribe a kind of tragic grimness to people, but people are funny.
In the end, I'm really interested in people and what we do with our short time here on earth. I'm interested in the human soul.
I love books with titles like, 'How Do You Spank a Porcupine?,' 'Arnie, the Darling Starling,' or 'The Bat in My Pocket.'
I read most often in bed as part of my attempted sleep ritual. But I spend a lot of time reading on planes and in hotels, too.
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.
My dad looked like Errol Flynn, and I think my mom thought she was moving into a hacienda, but they lived on a dirt street in Tijuana, a house jammed with relatives, nobody speaking English. She didn't know a word of Spanish. She grew up well and was appalled and humiliated, terrified of anyone ethnic.
Poetry is how I feed the soul, and it's how I fire the furnace of writing.
