Fawning ambition so plainly expressed in the classroom was quite another matter. It wasn’t that I got A’s; other boys got A’s. It was that I wanted m… - Richard Rodriguez

When Cesar Chavez died in his sleep in 1993, not yet a very old man at sixty-six, he died—as he had so often portrayed himself in life—as a loser.

When I was a boy and refused to speak Spanish (because I spoke English), then could not speak Spanish from awkwardness, then guilt, Mexican relatives criticized my parents for letting me “lose it”—my culture, they said.

The Chicano student movement at UC Santa Barbara didn't want me there. These are the same people that sit on a multicultural committee. But they don't want me there because for them I represent a cultural perspective that they do not accept. Their version of multiculturalism is that it all be left wing, that it all be formed by a quasi-Marxist voodooism. And if anybody comes into their world that is any different from that, they can't deal with it. Because they are not multiculturalist at all. They're the most sectarian people I know.