Sandra María Esteves Quotes

I think there are many people out there who are ready and want to embrace a multicultural ideology.

I was raised by my mother, but around my father's family. She was alone. My father's family rejected my mother because she was too dark, and they were only a slight shade lighter. Their attitude was based on racist criteria of appearances that people had back then, when the hue of your skin defined who you were, where you were able to go, what you I could learn, do, and achieve in life.

In the old days poets used to go into the factories and the sugar and tobacco plantations and recite to the workers while they were doing their thing. No more. Perhaps it's a fear of intelligence, of language. A fear of self-realization.

Poems are for the livin', that's what I know.

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

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.

I want to know/who will decide our fate?/You, or I, or WE together?/Will I be free to discover my own path?

Climb the stairway of your imagination

I want to learn about my past, my culture. She (her mother) talks to me in broken English, reminding me how wonderful it is to be an American; I talk to her in broken Spanish, attempting to explain why I want to know more about our history and culture.

Intelligence and feelings forming alliances for seeing.

The inner life has no boundaries

Bureaucrats shifting responsibility,/shuffling lives into despair

We are infants compared to the universe

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.

how we are marginalized, how whole communities are sedated with the new slavery of drugs, how we are easily offered various forms of addiction to cope with our situations, anything from drugs, alcohol, religion, sex, television, food, money-take your pick. A poet named Safiya said, "We all are addicted to something." But we still manage to dream in spite of it.