Victor Villaseñor Quotes

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.

You are a man now, and to be un hombre, a man must not only know right from wrong, he must also know who he is and who he isn’t. Because if a man doesn’t know who he is and who he isn’t, then no matter how much he knows about right and wrong, he will always be like a fish out of water.

I laughed. I could see her point completely, because in Spanish you’d never say, “I think I love you,” especially after four years. That would be an insult. You’d say, “I feel love for you so deeply that when I just think of you, I start to tremble and feel my heart flutter.” Why? Because Spanish is a feeling-based language that comes first from the heart, just as English is a thinking-based language that comes first from the head.

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.

And no one would interfere with me because of the loaded gun in my hand. Also, a part of me didn’t give a shit anymore if I was caught or not. I could now see that my objective wasn’t just to kill Moses and all these other teachers who had abused us, but for everyone in all the whole world to know why. This wasn’t going to be a surprise attack. This had to be a cold, premeditated act, completely well planned, just as it had been premeditated and well thought out to torture and beat us Mexican kids, starting in kindergarten, so we’d be a people, a gente, with our heads bowed down to authority forever, thinking we were inferior and worthless. I now realized that this was how you enslaved a people. You didn’t just bring them over in chains from Africa. No, you convinced them that they were inferior, not evolved, subhuman, and then when you took off their shackles, so they could go to work, you’d still have them enslaved and shackled inside of their minds for hundreds of years. And this system of teaching was fine with most Anglo teachers, because in the act of convincing us, los Mexicanos and the Blacks, we were subhuman, they’d also convinced themselves that they were superior!

No, I wasn’t very smart, this I knew, but I was beginning to think that maybe, just maybe, I was some kind of crazy-loco genius, burro genius. I mean, to have been able to hold on to my Spirit for this long had to mean something.

e as you, but he couldn’t see me, because I was dark and Indian-looking and didn’t have blue eyes like him. Your mother and me, we are not going to forget you and your sisters like my father forgot me. I swear it!”

“My dad, he didn’t even have the eyes to see me after all of his tall, blue-eyed sons were dead. He started bellowing from the hilltop to hilltop like a madman, saying that God had forsaken him, and he had nothing more to live for, because all his sons were gone!” Tears streamed down my dad’s face. “I was about nine or ten, the same ag

"Yes," he said. "You see, I, too, have been seeing a lot of things, now that I've been spending so much time at the hospital." He took a deep breath. "One night I got up and went down the hallway to see this woman who was crying. She was an elderly woman and the doctors didn't know what to do for her. She was dying. I held her hand and stroked her forehead like she was a child. She immediately calmed down and was able to pass over in her sleep so peacefully. "The night nurse was furious, and the next morning she told the doctors what I'd done. They, too, became upset, telling me I didn't have the authority to visit other patients. That poor nurse and the doctors, they just weren't prepared to accept the simple truth that they aren't in control. No one is in control, Mundo. We're all just God's guests for a short time." I don't know why, but I now asked, "Joseph, are you dying?" He looked at me straight in the eyes. "Yes, Mundo," he said, "I'm dying."

You just remember, mijito, whenever your wife comes screaming at you that she’s going to kill you because you forgot her birthday, that what she’s really saying is ‘I love you, I depend on you for my life and love, and so this is why I hate you and want to kill you!’ It’s always with our wife, our best friends, and our relatives that we end up having most of our troubles in life, mijito.

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!

"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."

“Listen to me good,” said my father the moment we were out the door. He was hot, I could tell. “Everybody has their own game, understand? Lawyers got theirs. Doctors got theirs. Business people got theirs. Every bum on the street has his, too. Got it? And every game has two sets of rules, the one set that they tell people that they play by, but—listen closely—behind their closed doors, these same people always got another set of rules that they really play their game with. The Church, she does this beautifully, having people pray to Cristo, oh, so sweetly. Then they get all those young nuns and priests to work for free for them all their lives, and yet from behind those closed doors, that goodhearted, all-loving Church steals the best lands of Mexico, and the whole world, if she could! “Education, mijo, is another racket. Another con game! Don’t let nobody fool you! School wants to get people thinking all the same way like trained mice. Don’t you ever fall for nobody’s racket, mijito. Think, here in your head, feel, here in your heart, and trust your tanates, here between your legs a lo chingón! This is life in all her power and glory! Got it?” he said, gently putting his huge thick hand on my shoulder. “I got it, papa,” I said, wiping the tears out of my eyes. And I really did get it. I loved my father con todo mi corazón. He made so much sense, just like Ramón, and even Gus. All these guys made sense and they took no shit from nobody!

Suddenly, I wondered what the hell was going on. Ramón had been the smartest and most capable guy in our whole grade in “thinking” and “figuring” out things, and he’d been considered dumb, too. And now Gus, he was also the smartest guy of all of us during recess and he just said that he’d been flunked before. This didn’t make any damn—I mean, blessed—sense to me at all! The smartest kids I knew were all considered stupid.

"Mama's beautiful?" I asked. "Are you blind?" said my brother. "Don't you see how men and women are always looking at our mother everywhere she goes. Our mother is more beautiful than any movie star you'll ever see, and yet this isn't why papa chose her. He chose her, he's told us a thousand times, because when he first saw her, she was in line to go into the dance hall over in Carlos Malo with her brother and sister. And when a fight broke out, she didn't get excited and enjoy it like her sister and the other women. No, she and her brother moved away, wanting no part of it, and so, by seeing this, papa knew that she was a woman of high intelligence, respect, and responsibility; a person that he could trust with his life. And trust, remember, is the foundation of all love, papa says."