Sandra María Esteves Quotes

There is the argument that anyone's writing is meant to be shared with the universe. I want to die knowing that my children are going to have some kind of legacy because this is all I have to give-my work.

We know the projections about Latinos becoming the largest minority within the next few years, but you can go to Barnes and Noble across the street, where they have a department store of books, or any other franchise bookstore anywhere in the States, and you won't even find one aisle devoted to Latino literature. So what are they trying to tell us-that we don't have a literature? Or that we don't read or write or buy books? None of this is true. We are a community with a vibrant and extensive literature, but we are still a marginalized culture, even now in this new millennium.

I feel live I'm constantly evolving into my own voice.

When I started writing, there were only two women writers that I knew: Lorraine Sutton and Margie Simmons. There were very few Latinas writing in English... So when I started, I was mainly surrounded by men-Pedro Pietri, Jesus Papoleto Melendez, Lucky Cienfuegos, Miguel Algarín, Miguel Piñero, Tato Laviera. Many of them had books already published. I was like a sponge, absorbing different things from these male contemporaries.

When students write, they often generalize. I want them to be specific, so I ask them to imagine that they're creating a movie, that they're using a camera, and that they have to describe each shot for the listening audience. So I stress detail to overcome the hurdle of generalizing.

I write visually. I'm a painter who uses words.

(At National Black Theater performance) I was in awe of the words I witnessed that day. It was the first time that I heard the works of writers like Gwendolyn Brooks, Nikki Giovanni, Langston Hughes, Amiri Baraka. I heard poetry that was about me, that was very immediate. I connected to it in a visceral way. That experience moved me so profoundly that I went home and that night I wrote my first batch of poems. It was like the floodgates opened. That reading empowered me with a voice and gave me permission to express everything that had been festering in me for years. So I just started experimenting with language and writing all kinds of things.

In boarding school, in the second grade I made the decision that I was going to be an artist because I wouldn't have to talk. I could express myself with colors, and it was safe...So I basically became a listener, an observer. My mother thought that something was wrong with me. I became an extreme introvert who wouldn't talk. You wouldn't believe that about me today because I'm very different, but back then I had a lot of fears about language. It wasn't until that art class that I opened up to words. I started experimenting and incorporating words into some of my drawings.

When I was young, I was placed in a boarding school where I was not allowed to speak my natural Spanish, which was all I spoke until I was five. Not being allowed to speak Spanish in school traumatized me with inhibitions about speaking.

I'm still a painter. I consider myself a painter who uses poetry as a different way of painting. It wasn't until I was in college that I started experimenting with words and language.

I disagree with the statements that all Tainos were wiped out because many fled and hid in the mountains; they mixed and married, so the Taino is still very present in our society. Recent DNA testing has proved this to be true in spite of what the history books tell us. You know, you can't always believe those accounts written in books. It depends on who is writing it and why, what is the point they are getting at to try and convince whoever may be the reader.

My father's family is Puerto Rican, my mother's family is Dominican. I start with Puerto Rican-Dominican, then I go to Borinqueña-Quisqueyana, because Borinqueña means I am a native of Borinquen, the Taino name for Puerto Rico, and Quisqueyana means I am a native of Quisqueya, the Taino name for the Dominican Republic. The Tainos were the indigenous people who inhabited the islands of the Caribbean before Columbus arrived and renamed their land. So if someone calls you Borinqueño, Boricua, or Quisqueyana, they're saying that you're someone who identifies with your past and your culture. It's also a reference to nationhood. I'm making connections to my history by tagging that on. The Africana identifies another part of my roots. I'm saying that I'm American, born in the Bronx, but I'm also Taino and African.

Bureaucrats shifting responsibility,/shuffling lives into despair

born/from the holy tree where one is brother/to all brothers, sister/to all sisters.

suspended from the high branches of an old wisdom tree