The best way to help the Latino community is to give back. I love giving back; I'm quiet about God and what I do, but we do a lot in the Dominican Republic.
I don't believe in the so-called Latino explosion when it comes to movies. Jennifer Lopez doesn't have an accent. She grew up in New York speaking English, not Spanish. Her success is very important because she represents a different culture, but it doesn't help me.
I feel so much pride to represent my community and be Latino. No doubt about it, above my career and sales being a Latino comes first.
The Latino military fare badly when they stumble into war with the gringos. But in the torture, murder, and massacre of their own people, they have always performed with brilliance and elan.
Latinos are Republican. They just don't know it yet.
The only people that deserve to be called Americans are Native Americans, otherwise, I'm a Latino American, you know.... Anybody else... well where did you come from?
I just said let's get some poets on tv. And when they said that sounded unlikely, I made it worse. I said, no man, I want to put a bunch of black poets on stage, too. Some Latino poets who barely speak English and Asian poets who can't believe how discriminated against they are. It was luck nad being in the right place. I wasn't saying nothing somebody else wasn't saying but they wouldn't hear it from them.
Puerto Rican independence movement wasn't just rooted in some sort of personal intransigence or some passionate Latino temperament. It was rooted in economic and political reality at the time. It also made sense since the founding principles of the United States are supposedly based on government by the consent of the governed, and the sense that all men are created equal.
I believe in Mexico there's a big culture of moviegoing, both studio and indie. I think here in the US that's not the case because Latino communities don't have access to indie films. If you go into communities of color you will only find the big theater chains which only play the blockbuster genre films.
As for major obstacles keeping young Latinos from becoming filmmakers, I think our communities are still coming into their identities as storytellers. It's such an important identity to reclaim - it's how our ancestors kept our cultures alive. But a long history of silencing, invisibility, and marginalization has kept generations of Latinos from believing in themselves, from seeing themselves as agents of their own lives. I think there needs to be a focus on this aspect to help cultivate young Latinas to see themselves as cultural producers and defenders.
For me becoming a filmmaker was about taking back my voice - crafting stories that would move away from the problematic narratives that the studio system would put out about Latinos. I think this is why people like my films. They're refreshing. They feel more real.
Maybe it's the culture, maybe it's the cliché of Latino machismo, but the Mediterranean male character is more dull than the female character. Women are more surprising and they have fewer prejudices.
And I've always been very close to my friends and allies in the black community, the Latino community and organized labor.
All my life I've been involved with racial politics. I was a Freedom Rider in the South. I was the author of books on gang violence, I was a community organizer in Newark, New Jersey, and when I spoke to the Black Caucus, congressional and state, I realized they were going all the way for Hillary [Clinton] and so was the Latino caucus in Sacramento and I asked myself this question: "Do I really want to cast my vote against these people who have been central to my life and to the soul of the country?" And so I went with them. Period.
I wanted to get away from the Mexican vernacular and do more 'nuevo Latino.' Americans are starting to understand regionality in Mexican food. It is very regional in terms of ingredients.
Personal prejudice: Hispanic and Latino women with blond hair look like hookers to me, no matter how clean or cute they are. Somehow those skin tones that look so good with dark, dark hair just don't work for me with lighter shades.
The kind of love that these young men have and the respect that they have for their fathers, I don't see that as much in America as you see in the Latino community, and it's really something to behold.
A lot of people don't realize the roots of Batman are really Latino. They don't go back to the bat god, the ones the Mayans had - they had one that was a "bat man," they had sculptures of him, literally they had bats down there - but the other, more relatively recent inspiration for Batman was Zorro. But Zorro was based on the California bandits. Joaquin Murrieta and Tiburico Vásquez.
All my fans, especially my Latino fans and Nicaraguan fans, I promise you I will become world champion. After I become world champion Piccirillo can go back to Italy and make pizza or pasta or whatever it is he does over there.
Learning the craft as an actor in Los Angeles is a very hard thing to do, in my opinion. We all come from a certain world and when you start learning the craft, you need material to read/study that you can relate to. We do not have too many Latino writers on the West Coast that I was able to relate to (or at least, I didn't know at the time). I came from the streets, so the most published authors had no relation to my world. As soon as I picked up Pinero & Guirgis, it was all over. It was my world, just in a different location. They cracked me open inside and out.
I was surprised by how forces in the community could mobilize against a community changing. There were many examples of this. In St. George, members of the Latino community proposed having a "Dixie Fiesta." The resistance to that surprised me.
We [Latinos] must be proud. We have the same rights in the U.S. as anybody else. Instead of crying and getting upset about visa problems and having our families come join us, go fight for your rights. Make yourself a productive individual in the society.
I just don't understand how anyone would want to be a Republican. I just can't figure it. I don't understand. If you're poor, if you're any kind of minority - gay, black, Latino, anything. If you're not a rich born-again-Christian, I don't get it.
One of the funny things about the racism of the system, when I started 30 years ago, I'm in an area called Koreatown and most of the kids were Asian. And when the kids did well, people said, "Well, of course, they did well. They're Asians." But when we had this huge influx of Latino children from Central America, they said, "Oh, you're gonna have problems now."
I don't understand how they can call me anti-Latino, when I've made four movies in Mexico.
Follow AzQuotes on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. Every day we present the best quotes! Improve yourself, find your inspiration, share with friends
or simply: