Quote

'Hispanic' is English for a person of Latino origin who wants to be accepted by the white status quo. 'Latino' is the word we have always used for ourselves.

Sandra Cisneros

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Sandra Cisneros
Age: 69
Born: 1954
Born: December 20
Arts Administrator
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
Short Story Writer
Teacher
Writer
Chicago
Illinois
English
Wants
Word
White
Hispanic
Used
Latino
Persons
Origin
Person
Status
Always
Accepted

More quotes by Sandra Cisneros

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I feel comfortable in Spanish, I chat like a parrot, but I don't have the confidence in Spanish that I do in English.
Sandra Cisneros
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I can't hang around with lots of people these days because I am hypersensitive. So when I am around a lot of people or a big roomful of people I get almost autistic. I get overwhelmed and really tired. So I don't like being around large groups.
Sandra Cisneros
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I live in a town that's two and a half hours from the border. I know people who have lived in San Antonio for generations, sometimes seven generations, their families are from there, and they are of Mexican descent, and they've never gone farther than the border.
Sandra Cisneros
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I was reading all these male writers who were doing wild and wonderful things. It gave me permission to experiment.
Sandra Cisneros
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Maybe all pain in the world requires poetry.
Sandra Cisneros
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I believe love is always eternal. Even if eternity is only five minutes.
Sandra Cisneros
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It's difficult for me to have a large story, a very large story - a novel is a large story. I'm used to writing and doing these little miniature paintings.
Sandra Cisneros
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I'm a witch woman--high on tobacco and holy water. I'm a woman delighted with her disasters. They give me something to do. A profession of sorts...I have the magic of words. The power to charm and kill at will.
Sandra Cisneros
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My Virgen de Guadalupe is not the mother of God. She is God. She is a face for a god without a face, an indigena for a god without ethnicity, a female deity for a god who is genderless, but I also understand that for her to approach me, for me to finally open the door and accept her, she had to be a woman like me.
Sandra Cisneros
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There are many Latino writers as talented as I am, but because we are published through small presses, our books don't count. We are still the illegal aliens of the literary world.
Sandra Cisneros
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I usually meditate and I call my spirit allies - anyone in the spirit world that I've got connections with. Even in the spirit world you need connections!
Sandra Cisneros
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You're next, after the feather dancers. And you had to get their attention, because otherwise people would go, Oh, a poet. You really have to learn.
Sandra Cisneros
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I want to thank you, especially those people who are agnostic or atheist. I don't mean any offense by the things I said of the spirit world. Thank you for allowing me to speak about the spiritual, because I can't talk about my life or writing without mentioning that.
Sandra Cisneros
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The Mexico - United States border was always porous. People have been going and coming back since before the Spaniards arrived. Now we're seeing communities who have family members on the other side very frightened. I feel saddened for those families divided by violence. The whole border area is under siege.
Sandra Cisneros
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I hope I'm not just looked as a writer that is popular but as a writer of literary value.
Sandra Cisneros
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I realize that when I moved out of my father’s house I shocked and frightened him because I needed a room of my own, a space of my own to reinvent myself.
Sandra Cisneros
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Post 9/11, we've seen such disastrous policies on the border. I live two and a half hours away from the border, and I've seen changes for the communities there. I feel like it's an occupied zone. We're losing our rights, and both sides of the border are terrified. The Mexican population and the U.S. population are united in fear.
Sandra Cisneros
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The comments you'll get from a filmmaker about your performance are going to be very different. My writing workshop is about mixing it up, cross-pollinating, not only in genres but in occupations.
Sandra Cisneros
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Believe it or not, Mexican cooking, for those of you who have not gone farther south than Taco Bell, uses a lot of vegetables. But those vegetables were not brought here, like corn mushrooms, huitlacoche, or squash blossoms.
Sandra Cisneros
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Catholicism believes in the Virgen de Guadalupe. The mother of God is worshipped, especially in Latin America. I find her very empowering. I find that the Virgen de Guadalupe allowed me to return to parts of my upbringing I had disregarded.
Sandra Cisneros