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Victor Villaseñor
79 quotes
“The written word is holy…When we write our stories, it helps us bring understanding.”
Victor Villaseñor (born 1940) first seen 2008 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On the importance of gaining knowledge in “Author Victor Villaseñor talks 'Crazy Loco'” in LMT Online (2008 Dec 11)
“I'm showing people that indigenous people weren't stupid…At one time, we were all indigenous: the Irish, the English. We built a false premise that we're superior to the indigenous people. We've got to … show that we're in harmony with this planet.”
Victor Villaseñor (born 1940) first seen 2008 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On the main character in his novel Crazy Loco Love in “Author Victor Villaseñor talks 'Crazy Loco'” in LMT Online (2008 Dec 11)
“We're trained to become parrots. We're trained to learn information and give it back at test time. But we're not taught to think. We're not taught how to access the genius.”
Victor Villaseñor (born 1940) first seen 2004 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On his belief that the educational system does not promote our natural genius in “Finding the Genius Within” in The Washington Post (2004 Aug 22)
“And I realized: I've got to write the story about our people to anchor us to creation. And then no matter how much we get abused, we'll still feel special and we'll still feel good.”
Victor Villaseñor (born 1940) first seen 2004 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On his epiphany to become a writer in “Finding the Genius Within” in The Washington Post (2004 Aug 22)
“Then I was almost thirty years old when I wrote Macho!, and finally got published after 265 rejections. Immediately, I returned to this book you’re reading, thinking I could now pull it off, but I was wrong.”
Victor Villaseñor (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All I knew was that I’d flunked the third grade twice because I couldn’t learn to read, had a terrible time all through grammar school and high school. Then after ten years of writing, I was finally able to sell my first book to a leading mass-market paperback publisher in New York .”
Victor Villaseñor (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I was TORTURED by teachers! You hear me, TORTURED!” I yelled, jerking the whole podium off the floor. “Hell, I flunked the third grade twice because—BECAUSE—” I was crying so hard that I had to wipe the tears out of my eyes with the back of my hand, but this wasn’t going to stop me. I was all guts up front now. I was in that smooth-feeling, all-true place that I got into when I’d go to my room and start writing each morning before daybreak…with all my heart and soul.”
Victor Villaseñor (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My grandmother—God bless her soul—a Yaqui Indian from northern Mexico, was the greatest teacher I’d ever had! And do you know what she taught me, she taught me that each and every day is un milagro given to us by God, and that work, that planting corn and squash with our two hands is holy. She taught me all this with kindness and invitation. Not with ridicule and looking down her nose at me and making me feel like less than human when I didn’t get it at first.”
Victor Villaseñor (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A whole bunch of people towards the back of the room were now getting up to leave. But these teachers were not going to intimidate me. I wasn’t my father’s and mother’s son for nada-nothing. I wasn’t my two indigenous grandmothers’ grandson for nada-nothing either. I came from a long line of people…who’d lived through starvation, revolutions, and massacre. “AND YOU!” I yelled into the microphone. “Over there in the back…who are getting up to leave…I’M GLAD THAT YOU’RE LEAVING!”
Victor Villaseñor (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It was truly a good thing that I’d found writing as my outlet or I was sure I would have become a mass murderer, killing all those heartless, racist teachers who’d beat us Mexican kids down since kindergarten”
Victor Villaseñor (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“the Indians, were like the weeds. That roses you had to water and give fertilizer or they’d die. But weeds, indigenous plants, you gave them nada-nothing; hell, you even poisoned them and put concrete over them, and those weeds would still break the concrete, reaching for the sunlight of God. “That’s the power of our people,” my father would tell me, “we’re the weeds, LAS YERBAS DE TODO EL MUNDO!”
Victor Villaseñor (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I still wanted to tell our teacher about how the Indian people who’d worked on the ranch for us had explained to me that Shep, who’d always loved my brother more than life itself, had disappeared, because he’d run off to the highest hilltop to intercept my brother’s soul so he could lead my brother’s soul back to heaven.”
Victor Villaseñor (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Dog, cats, horses, all animals could do this at will much easier than us humans, Rosa and her husband Emilio, had explained to me, because animals were much closer to God than we humans were.”
Victor Villaseñor (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It was still very hard for me to sometimes know where my Catholic–Christian upbringing stopped and my grandmother’s Indian teachings began. For me it was all like one big river running together with all these different waters.”
Victor Villaseñor (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No, teaching could be done as fast as a lightning bolt. He’d cut across the valleys of my deepest doubts, giving light to the darkest crevices of my beaten-down, inhibited mind, accessing a natural storytelling ability within me that was utterly profound!”
Victor Villaseñor (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“So, keep your powder dry and dig in for a long, fruitful life of being a writer, that storyteller around the campfire of your people and your generation. Your trade is as old as time, and your main job is to uplift the human heart so that then we can go on with dignity and fair play. That’s it”
Victor Villaseñor (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Because the most important thing any man can do in all his life is pick the right woman to breed with—I mean, marry first, then breed, because from the woman comes the—” “—comes the instinct to survive,” I said, having heard this for as long as I could remember. “Good,” said mi papa,”
Victor Villaseñor (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Lo cortés no quita lo valiante, y lo valiante no quita lo cortés.” This I’d also heard for as long as I could remember, and it was one of our oldest Mexican dichos, sayings, and what it said was that manners didn’t take away bravery, and that bravery didn’t diminish manners.”
Victor Villaseñor (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I nodded. This was something that I really liked a lot about my mother and father. They were always thinking ahead so we didn’t make the same mistake twice.”
Victor Villaseñor (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No, my dad had well explained to me that a real man didn’t get offended if other men ridiculed him for staying close to the women of his familia. That a real hombre was proud of being close and loving with the women of his life.”
Victor Villaseñor (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Seeing my mother’s red shoes disappear, I almost leaped up screaming again, but then, the boy next to me said, “Calmate,” in Spanish, “we’re going to be okay, mano.” I turned and looked at this boy. My God, his Spanish sounded so soft and comforting, and he was the most darkly handsome boy that I’d ever seen. His eyes were as large and beautiful as a goat’s eyes. Looking at him, I stopped crying.”
Victor Villaseñor (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“His name was Howard, but by the way he said it, none of us were able to figure out what his name was for the first few days. Still, I liked him, so one day I tackled him out on the playground and we started wrestling on the grass.”
Victor Villaseñor (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The truth was that we still spoke Spanish every chance we got. And why, because, simply, it felt good to hear in the sound of the language with which our mothers had rocked us to sleep when we’d been little.”
Victor Villaseñor (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I liked him. He seemed a lot more animal to me than human, which was good, of course, because my grandmother, Doña Guadalupe, had always explained to me that all humans were born with an animal-spirit to help guide them through life, and so the humans who realized this would always seem more animal than human, and this was wonderful. It kept us closer to God.”
Victor Villaseñor (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Look,” said Jake, “last night, after you went to bed, we told your dad how we’d come across you running away from home.” “You did?” I said. “Yes, we did. It was the honest thing to do, son. And you should’ve seen the hurt look on your dad’s face, because, you see, Mexican kids don’t run away from home. White kids, gringo kids, like me and Luke, we’re the ones who run from home, but Mexicans, they ain’t never do that.”
Victor Villaseñor (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Later, I heard my brother ask our father why he’d been so generous. “A man can never be too generous,” said our dad, “when he’s generous to a good, hardworking honest hombre, because that man will then break his back to do all he can for you. But…you be generous to a relative or a lazy, no-good worker, and they then think you’re a fool, lose respect for you, and start thinking you owe them something.”
Victor Villaseñor (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It was the greatest learning summer of my whole life, but then came the fall, and I was told that I’d have to go back to school again. “NO WAY, JOSÉ!” I screamed, because I now knew that at school they were trying to “break” us, not “amanzar” us.”
Victor Villaseñor (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Mexican kids were now speaking quite a bit of English. Even Ramón. But he was a changed kid. There was a darkness in his eyes like a horse that had just been beaten one too many times.”
Victor Villaseñor (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Then I saw it. Oh, my Lord God, Ramón, he was like our very own Jesus Christ. I could now see this so clearly as he walked across the school ground. He had a glowing light all about him, because he, just like Jesus, was willing to carry the cross of crucifixion for all the rest of us lesser kids.”
Victor Villaseñor (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Papa always explained to me that there is no such thing as a kids’ game. That there are only games with which kids are learning the facts of life, but it’s the parents that are so tapados—so blind and constipated that they can’t see what these games are really all about.”
Victor Villaseñor (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Mundo, you start paying closer attention to our mama and papa. They didn’t get this far in life because their eyes are closed.” I nodded. I’d never had a conversation like this before with my brother Joseph”
Victor Villaseñor (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Suddenly, I wondered what the hell was going on. Ramón had been the smartest and most capable guy in our whole grade in “thinking” and “figuring” out things, and he’d been considered dumb, too. And now Gus, he was also the smartest guy of all of us during recess and he just said that he’d been flunked before. This didn’t make any damn—I mean, blessed—sense to me at all! The smartest kids I knew were all considered stupid.”
Victor Villaseñor (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Promise me,” he said, “that you’ll say nothing, and if something happens to me, you’ll always honor our parents.” I swallowed. He was scaring me. “Look,” he continued, “I’ve met a lot of rich kids and their parents at the Academy, and I’ll tell you, there are no parents that I’m prouder to have as my father and mother than ours. They rose up with nothing, Mundo, except guts and faith and love. Do you understand?” I shook my head. “No, I don’t,” I said. He licked his lips. He seemed to be licking his lips all the time now. “You will,” he said. “You just pay close attention, and you will.”
Victor Villaseñor (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You just remember, mijito, whenever your wife comes screaming at you that she’s going to kill you because you forgot her birthday, that what she’s really saying is ‘I love you, I depend on you for my life and love, and so this is why I hate you and want to kill you!’ It’s always with our wife, our best friends, and our relatives that we end up having most of our troubles in life, mijito.”
Victor Villaseñor (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My dad, he didn’t even have the eyes to see me after all of his tall, blue-eyed sons were dead. He started bellowing from the hilltop to hilltop like a madman, saying that God had forsaken him, and he had nothing more to live for, because all his sons were gone!” Tears streamed down my dad’s face. “I was about nine or ten, the same ag”
Victor Villaseñor (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“e as you, but he couldn’t see me, because I was dark and Indian-looking and didn’t have blue eyes like him. Your mother and me, we are not going to forget you and your sisters like my father forgot me. I swear it!”
Victor Villaseñor (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No, I wasn’t very smart, this I knew, but I was beginning to think that maybe, just maybe, I was some kind of crazy-loco genius, burro genius. I mean, to have been able to hold on to my Spirit for this long had to mean something.”
Victor Villaseñor (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Someone finally understood all the “hell” that I’d been through since a child when I’d first tried to understand language. And yet in other forms of communications, like painting, sculpture, music, math, problem-solving, and chess, I’d been very good. In fact, in high school, once I learned how to play chess, I’d play lightning-fast, intuitively seeing all these different possibilities at the same time, and I’d won well over a hundred chess games without losing a single game. And that included beating some of our faculty members who thought that they were very good at chess.”
Victor Villaseñor (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I laughed. I could see her point completely, because in Spanish you’d never say, “I think I love you,” especially after four years. That would be an insult. You’d say, “I feel love for you so deeply that when I just think of you, I start to tremble and feel my heart flutter.” Why? Because Spanish is a feeling-based language that comes first from the heart, just as English is a thinking-based language that comes first from the head.”
Victor Villaseñor (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You are a man now, and to be un hombre, a man must not only know right from wrong, he must also know who he is and who he isn’t. Because if a man doesn’t know who he is and who he isn’t, then no matter how much he knows about right and wrong, he will always be like a fish out of water.”
Victor Villaseñor (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My mother, a woman, told me this, and I’ll tell you, mijo, that you will learn who you are and who you aren’t in the next four or five years, because not to learn who you are and who you aren’t in the next few years, my mother said, is to be missing the most important part of your whole life.”
Victor Villaseñor (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Sex and love were driving the whole world and me crazyloco! I just couldn’t stand it anymore! I was going to have to kill myself.”
Victor Villaseñor (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Suddenly, I don’t know how to explain it, the chess pieces seemed to come alive for me. It was like I could now see the chess pieces moving on the board on their own. I started beating everybody. I, the slowest of the slow, had now gone something like a hundred games without losing. I could do no wrong. It was magical how the pieces spoke to me, showing me where to move.”
Victor Villaseñor (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He knocked the chess set off his desk, screaming at me, “You’re not a stupid Mexican! You’re just lazy! I’m one of the best chess players in all Carlsbad and you treat me with no respect!” I was shocked. All my life I’d been called stupid because I was Mexican, not because I was lazy. This was really good.”
Victor Villaseñor (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I now began to collect pubic hair, which I figured was a much safer way to go. I’d look for pubic hair in every bathroom after the girls showered, and in my mind’s eye, I’d try to match up each hair with each girl, all the while imaging her beautiful, luscious, wet, hairy, good-feeling bush. I mean, this was the summer that our pool area just seemed to be full of girls all the time. I was quickly becoming a pubic hair expert”
Victor Villaseñor (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In the last three months I hadn’t lost one single game of chess. It was crazyloco, but sometimes I thought that I was so brilliant because I could see what other people couldn’t see or understand even after I’d explain it to them. Playing chess wasn’t about making single moves. It was about seeing patterns, then backing up inside your mind and seeing the last five and six moves of your opponent, then flashing forward real fast. And bingo, the whole chessboard became alive in living patterns.”
Victor Villaseñor (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My father’s mother, a pure-blooded Indian from Oaxaca, had been a gifted fifteen-year-old when Benito Juárez won Mexico’s independence from France. They’d taken her to the Academy of blah-blah-blah in Mexico City, and she’d astonished her European professors by learning French in six weeks.”
Victor Villaseñor (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For the very first time, I understood what mi papá had been telling me all these years about his very own father, the great Don Juan, straight from Spain, and how he’d only liked and loved his blue-eyed children, the ones like himself, and had never even recognized his dark Indian-looking children like my dad.”
Victor Villaseñor (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“That night my parents told me what my cousin had suggested. I said no, absolutely not! I turned and walked away as fast as I could. My parents really had no idea how much it had hurt me all these years to go to school. I was done with all book learning.”
Victor Villaseñor (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“First of all,” said Dr. Nacozi to me, “I want you to know that I realize you have a brilliant mind.” “Me?” I said, feeling shocked. “Yes, you,” he said. “And maybe you haven’t done that well in school in the past, but this is all about to change very rapidly for you, because the further you go in university life, the more apt you are to find minds like your own. I never had many friends until I got into graduate school. Before that … well, I always felt confused and lost,” he said, laughing. “And not very capable with the girls and in my social life, either.”
Victor Villaseñor (born 1940) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source