She could drop her shyness the way she dropped it to recite a speech or a poem, then step back into it like a cloak. - Kathleen Alcalá

A good story works like a musical composition. An idea is presented, elaborated, debated and perhaps defeated, and finally, presented to the reader in a modified, more mature form that embodies the path that was traveled in order to reach that idea. By taking the reader on a journey, we, to a certain extent, can re-create in their experience the thought processes and emotions of our characters. This should be done with compassion, humor, and generosity. But again like music, we can provide a pattern, a symmetry and closure that one seldom encounters in life. That is why reading good writing is pleasurable and fulfilling. That is why listening to good music can induce ecstasy.

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.

He was now in country which he had never before explored, the land of the Tarahumara, the indígenes famous for running long distances over the rough and unforgiving terrain, often, it was said, for the pure joy of it. (p134)