Victor Villaseñor Quotes

I was TORTURED by teachers! You hear me, TORTURED!” I yelled, jerking the whole podium off the floor. “Hell, I flunked the third grade twice because—BECAUSE—” I was crying so hard that I had to wipe the tears out of my eyes with the back of my hand, but this wasn’t going to stop me. I was all guts up front now. I was in that smooth-feeling, all-true place that I got into when I’d go to my room and start writing each morning before daybreak…with all my heart and soul.

Someone finally understood all the “hell” that I’d been through since a child when I’d first tried to understand language. And yet in other forms of communications, like painting, sculpture, music, math, problem-solving, and chess, I’d been very good. In fact, in high school, once I learned how to play chess, I’d play lightning-fast, intuitively seeing all these different possibilities at the same time, and I’d won well over a hundred chess games without losing a single game. And that included beating some of our faculty members who thought that they were very good at chess.

It was from this day on that I began to notice a real difference between our vaqueros on the ranch from Mexico and the gringo cowboys. The American cowboys always seemed so ready to act rough and tough, wanting to “break” the horse, cow, or goat or anything else. Where, on the other hand, our vaqueros—who used the word “amanzar,” meaning to make “tame,” for dealing with horses—had a whole different attitude towards everything. To “break” a horse, for the cowboys, actually, really meant to take a green, untrained horse and rope him, knock him down, saddle him while he fought to get loose, then mount him as he got up on all four legs, and ride the living hell out of the horse until you tired him out, taught him who was boss, and “broke” his spirit. To “amanzar” a horse, on the other hand, was a whole other approach that took weeks of grooming, petting, and leading the green horse around in the afternoon with a couple of well-trained horses. Then, after about a month, you began to put a saddle on the horse and tie him up in shade in the afternoon for a couple of hours until, finally, the saddle felt like just a natural part of him. Then, and only then, did a person finally mount the horse, petting and sweet-talking him the whole time, and once more the green horse was taken on a walk between two well-trained horses.

All I knew was that I’d flunked the third grade twice because I couldn’t learn to read, had a terrible time all through grammar school and high school. Then after ten years of writing, I was finally able to sell my first book to a leading mass-market paperback publisher in New York .

"Papá," I said, "on our first day of school, they screamed at us, 'No Spanish! English only!' Then they slapped Ramón in the face until he was all bloody because he wouldn't stop talking Spanish. And all he was saying was 'Don't yell at me, you're not my mother,' and 'Don't be grabbing me! You have no right to do this.' He was so smart, papá, and so brave and noble, and they kept slapping him, again and again, until his whole face was a bloody mess."

"Promise me," he said, "that you'll say nothing, and if something happens to me, you'll always honor our parents." I swallowed. He was scaring me. "Look," he continued, "I've met a lot of rich kids and their parents at the Academy, and I'll tell you, there are no parents that I'm prouder to have as my father and mother than ours. They rose up with nothing, Mundo, except guts and faith and love. Do you understand?" I shook my head. "No, I don't," I said. He licked his lips. He seemed to be licking his lips all the time now. "You will," he said. "You just pay close attention, and you will."

I nodded. This was something that I really liked a lot about my mother and father. They were always thinking ahead so we didn’t make the same mistake twice.

Yes, amor and peace and prosperity are what we need here in this great nation of ours after that terrible Depression, and then this huge, long, awful World War Two. “But, I’d also like to add that I, personally, didn’t build this house just in honor of Joseph and Mary and Jesus. No, when we made plans to build this house, I immediately sent our architect to Hollywood to find how big Tom Mix’s house was. Because when I first come to this country from Mexico, we see these Tom Mix movies in Arizona, with the gringos on the right side of the theater and the Mexicans and Blacks on the left side. And we see that no-good, fake son-of-a-bitch Tom Mix knock down five Mexicanos with one punch! And one Sunday in Douglas, Arizona—I’ll never forget, I was just a kid—this big, handsome Mexicano from Los Altos de Jalisco got mad and jumped up on the stage in front of the movie and yelled, ‘Come on, you gringo bastards! See if one of you can knock me down with one punch! And I’ll give you the first punch free, a lo chingón!’ And he ripped his shirt open and pounded his chest! “And so—well, yes, of course, a fight got started. Two men were killed and ten more hospitalized. So I tell you, when we started to build this house, I told our architect, GO up to Hollywood and find out how big Tom Mix’s house is, so we could build OUR CASA BIGGER AND BETTER! So I now say to all of you that I didn’t have this house built just for peace and love, but to also tell every DAMN HUMAN BEING ON ALL THE EARTH that here in Oceanside, California, stands UN MEXICANO DE LOS BUENOS CON SUS TANATES IN HAND, free to work or fight with both hands, whichever way the DEVIL WANTS TO PAINT IT! And this is MY TOAST A LO CHINGÓN! SALUD!” SHOUTS ERUPTED!

Here, a man and woman unite for life, but they include in their union all the loves they will live through in their lifetime. But over there, it’s all about changing wives and changing husbands, searching for that one perfect amor.

No, my dad had well explained to me that a real man didn’t get offended if other men ridiculed him for staying close to the women of his familia. That a real hombre was proud of being close and loving with the women of his life.

My mother, a woman, told me this, and I’ll tell you, mijo, that you will learn who you are and who you aren’t in the next four or five years, because not to learn who you are and who you aren’t in the next few years, my mother said, is to be missing the most important part of your whole life.

I began to realize that my parents were going to build the biggest damn house in the whole town! I was shocked! “Are we rich?” I asked my brother. “Yes,” he said. “We are? Then why do I always wear dirty, old work clothes?” I asked. “Because we’re ranchers,” said my brother. “We’re not city people.” “Oh,” I said, “then it’s okay for us to be dirty?” “We aren’t dirty,” he said, laughing. “To be dirty means you never wash. We wash our clothes and take baths all the time. It’s just that people that live on a ranch get dirt on themselves.” My eyes went big. I’d never thought of this. My brother was really smart.

“You know, we’ve got to be careful about what we believe that this Church tells us,” said my dad. “Remember, she’s the one who stole all the best lands de México for herself and enslaved all the Indians that she didn’t kill off.

Suddenly I remembered Jeannie Windflow, who’d taught me how to kiss when we were kids. At the age of seventeen, she’d run off with a Mexican guy from Pozole Town who was nineteen years old, had a job, and was one of the handsomest guys I’d ever seen. He was a semi-professional boxer and real dark. She was a track star, a straight-A student, and real blonde.

First of all,” said Dr. Nacozi to me, “I want you to know that I realize you have a brilliant mind.” “Me?” I said, feeling shocked. “Yes, you,” he said. “And maybe you haven’t done that well in school in the past, but this is all about to change very rapidly for you, because the further you go in university life, the more apt you are to find minds like your own. I never had many friends until I got into graduate school. Before that … well, I always felt confused and lost,” he said, laughing. “And not very capable with the girls and in my social life, either.