Top 15 Enriqueta Longeaux y Vásquez Quotes

Today, Los Alamos and newspapers like The New Mexican are celebrating August 6. They call it The 25th Anniversary of the Atomic City, or the birth of The Atomic Age, but those are just fine words for a Day of Murder-for the single most horrible slaughter in human history. We cannot celebrate Murder with them. We will celebrate instead the awakening of ourselves and all the Sleeping Giants, rising up everywhere in the world to cry BASTA YA. Let the Manufacturers of Death celebrate the birth of their Atomic Age. We will celebrate the dawn of the People's Age. Power, at last, to the People! (1970)

Let's start thinking in terms of feeding ourselves instead of feeding the grocery stores. Cooperatives are certainly a big answer for the people. Let's go back to being more self-sufficient. Why do we have to support Mr. Safeway, whoever or wherever he may be?

As I look back I remember, To think that at one time even my mother accused me of being a communist and threatened to report me to the government as such. I always respected her and had never answered her, but this time I answered: Go ahead, I will call the FBI for you and you can turn me in. Who do you think I learned to be a revolutionary from? Remember when you would say: 'Si yo supiera hablar inglés, ¿ya me hubieran echado a la prisión?' Pues yo sí sé inglés, y ahora, justed me acusa de ser comunista? Ándele, entrégueme.Her little eyes blinked and after a long silence we both laughed, hugged and cried as she said, Hija de tu nana, me ganaste. I thought, Of course, I won, what do you expect from the daughter of the Mexican Revolution? Later, in 1968, I brought her to visit me in New Mexico and took her to hear Reies Tijerina when he spoke at Española High School. I will never forget the incredible look that came over her face as she drank up every word. After he finished, my mother walked right over to Reies, talked to him and hugged him, tearfully saying, Nunca crei que oyera en este país las palabras y verdades que ha dicho usted. After we left, I smilingly hugged her and reminded her that now, she too was a communist. ¡VIVA LA REVOLUCIÓN, SIEMPRE!

How can one guarantee complete non-violence when one lives in a completely VIOLENT country?

I certainly embrace socialism. I can’t see any other solutions. This country (the United States) could feed the world if it wanted to.

When we speak of Gringo, we do not particularly hate all white people, but we refer to their social system as ‘Gringo.’ That is what we don’t like.

I didn’t want my kids to go through what I went through.

I am but one of many who walked this path of change: it took a movement to change what this place called North Amerika had become.

I learned to listen, not only to words, but to the hearts of people; thus capturing the passion, anger, outrage, and indignation when discussing racism, greed, repression and exploitation. These sentiments became an eruption of hundreds of years of repressed thought now set free.

El Grito Del Norte, a Chicano newspaper based in Espanola, New Mexico, was born from the revolutionary flames that engulfed the Southwest in the late 1960s and the early 1970s.

That we have scholars and Chicana PHDers of this caliber teaching in our educational institutions fulfills a vision of what we hoped would come out of the Chicano Movement. Even more extraordinary is the fact that most scholars do not forget “la causa Chicana,” thus watering the raices of the ancient past and living Chicano epic.

Child care is one of the most difficult problems for a woman to have to face alone. Not only is she tormented with having to leave the raising of her children to someone else, but she wants the best of care for them. For the amount of money that she may be able to pay from her meager wages, it is likely that she will be lucky to find anyone at all to take care of the children.

Then you will find the Chicana with a husband who was not able to fare so very well in the Society and perhaps has had to face defeat. She is the woman that really suffers. Quite often the man will not fight the real source of his problems, be it discrimination or whatever, but will instead come home and take it out on his family. As this continues, his Chicana becomes the victim of his machismo and woeful are the trials and tribulations of that household.

A woman who has no way of expressing herself and realizing herself as a full human has nothing else to turn to but the owning of material things.

And now, today, as we hear the call of the Raza, and as the dormant, "docile" Mexican American comes to life, we see the stirring of the people. With that call, the Chicana also stirs and I am sure that she will leave her mark upon the Mexican-American movement in the Southwest