Alma Guillermoprieto Quotes (30 Quotes)

A left-wing guerrilla is somebody who belongs to an organization that by now is 30 or 40 years old. There are several guerrilla groups in Colombia, not just one. And they more or less adhere to a Maoist or a traditional Cuban approach to revolution.

So, you know, I always say that I'm a Mexican, but if I had to be a citizen of anywhere else, I'd be a citizen of Manhattan. I feel very much a New Yorker.

What I wonder is what would happen in California, say, if all the Mexicans left from one day to the next?

You know, one, two, three, four, five years go by and then Marcos gets a little boring.

I think that the temptation to feel that your entire life has been wasted must be very great for a lot of Cubans.

The left is being funded primarily by the drug traffickers who provide this tax money and that's why the guerrillas in Colombia, unlike the guerrillas anywhere else in Latin America, have been able to survive for 40 years because they have a hard, solid source of income.

An essential part of the magic involves turning everyone into an enemy, to ward off surprises.

I may not have a practical mind, but it's very fixated on concrete things. I like detail.

And in fact, I dream in whatever language I'm living in. So that, you know, after six months of being in the States, I started dreaming in English again. And when I moved back to Mexico, after a few months, I started dreaming in Spanish again.

One does, after all, take on many of the givens of a society when one takes on its language.

I read a lot. And both of my parents, I think, would have wanted to be writers. It's funny how one ends up doing the things that-that parents-perhaps, the dreams that parents couldn't fulfill. I know that my mother would have been beyond herself to have h

And, of course, millions of us cross the border to work in US homes and gardens and factories and carpentry shops and restaurants, and if you go to a restaurant pretty much anywhere in the United States, the chances are that the dishes will be washed by a Mexican.

But we all dream of, you know, the great novel that we will write some day when we have time. And it's probably not happening.

I tried to reconstruct just how and why I had stopped dancing years earlier. The turning point for that decision was a six-month sojourn teaching dance in Cuba back in 1970.

I'm an efficient, good, professional reporter. But I also write. And so what I try to do is write about places that I know that I care about intensely and write about them in a way that conveys the fact that I care.

Talking in one language and talking in another, I think inevitably, produce two different personalities, as far as I've seen in other people. I assume it does the same for me.

If you're going to be a myth or want to be a myth, you'd better die young.

Somebody will come from Village X and then they'll send for the brother and then they'll send for the sister and then they'll send for the brother-in-law and then they'll send for the wife of the brother-in-law. Everybody sharing a very small house or an apartment, working in shifts and sending money back to the family.

I think the great Mexican cuisine is dying because there are fast foods now competing, because there are supermarkets, and supermarkets can't afford to keep in stock a lot of these very perishable products that are used for fine Mexican cooking. Women are working and real Mexican cooking requires enormous amounts of time.

I realized that I had traveled to Havana during what now seems like the childhood of the Cuban Revolution, if you think that Fidel has now been in power for 44 extremely long years. I started looking at the revolution as history, and not as part of the daily news.

Translation is a notoriously thankless profession there is absolutely no money in it it involves a severe submersion of the self into another the hours are long and you get about as much recognition for your efforts as the telephone repairman.

The most that somebody in Mexico City will get paid for a job in construction is 100 pesos a day.

Peron had a wise saying. In politics, you can recover from anything except looking like a fool.

There is no point to samba if it doesn't make you smile.

The best translators slip into the glove of a text and then turn it inside out into another language, and the whole thing comes out looking like a brand-new glove again. I'm completely in awe of this skill, since I happen to be both bilingual and a writer, but nevertheless a lousy translator.

I think that one of the things that we can really all feel very happy about is that the human rights situation in Latin America has improved enormously over the last 10 years, enormously, enormously. But the level or horror that some of us had to cover as reporters working in Latin America was pretty hard to describe at points. And it has changed.

These kids who have no place in the world, who nobody has ever made room for, look at least for a place in time, in the present through fashion. It's vitally important to them to look right. When they get money from a job, they spend it immediately on something for their mothers and on clothes. Of course they're not going to have any respect for their fathers, in their shabby old backcountry suits

Well, one of the things I discovered in the course of looking back and writing about what I saw in my memory is that I was a closely observant person long before I became a reporter.

I love food and I love everything involved with food. I love the fun of it. I love restaurants. I love cooking, although I don't cook very much. I love kitchens.

Apologists for the drug trade often argue that the upper classes and the political establishment in Bogota would never have opposed the drug trade if it had not enabled former punks and small-time hoods to buy property in the posh neighborhoods, and they may be right.