many more people know more about El Quijote than about the Popol Vuh. Why? Because the Spaniards destroyed so much. - Claribel Alegría Vides

The art and the reality is very difficult sometimes to reconcile, but also I don’t think that the poet have to be in an ivory tower just thinking beautiful thoughts, you know, when there are so much horrible in — ‘mid you, you know, outside you. And then I think you have to go and look at that and feel it and suffer with the others and make that suffering useful.

Among my generation in Central America, women of the leisure class had the option of marrying or controlling their husband’s purse strings or of remaining chaste and virtuous, baking cakes for their nieces and nephews.

I hope we go back into our Indian roots in the next century, bring them to the surface, study them. There is only an elite that knows of the great richness and wisdom in the Popol Vuh (The Book of the Dawn of Life), we are going to get as much from this as we do from our Spanish heritage.