By becoming a writer, you can rewrite history. ("Your Grandmother Might Have Been Mayor, or Why Write?", 1990) - Kathleen Alcalá

In a way, artists are messengers between worlds, bringing ideas and symbols from one to the other.

Once we lost the keys to our houses in Barcelona during The Plague, or the Inquisition or whatever other excuse was given for taking our properties, all the world was our temporary habitation. We saw each place through the eyes of the stranger seeking that pocket of refuge where we could set up shop until the next disaster turned people against us.

I got very obsessed with documenting nineteenth-century family life and our relationship to history because I meet so many people who feel we have no foundation in history. We had to reinvent history after the Mexican Revolution. We have sort of cobbled together a history out of what we know and our place in the United States, which included, from all of society that surrounded us and brought us up, this notion that you are not worth anything; you are at the bottom of society. And so I think it's important that we see that we have roots that go deep into the earth here, in the United States and Mexico and in Spain, and all of this is something we can claim as our own heritage. That's certainly how I take it. Rather than being confined to being a mall rat in Southern California, I claim all of this as my heritage. I guess I would like other people to see that as well.