Victor Villaseñor citations (89 citations, Page 3)

““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.””

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Victor Villaseñor

Burro Genius: A Memoir (2004)

“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!””

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Victor Villaseñor

Burro Genius: A Memoir (2004)

“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.”

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Victor Villaseñor

Burro Genius: A Memoir (2004)

“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.”

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Victor Villaseñor

Burro Genius: A Memoir (2004)

“My heart was beat, beat, beating. No one, except my mother, had ever looked at me or spoken to me like this. “You are the most sensitive and beautiful man I’ve ever met,” she said with tears coming to her eyes. I took a big, deep breath. This was just too much. I couldn’t believe it. I’d been called stupid and ugly for so long that this was really tough to hear. Once, I’ll never forget, two seniors at the Academy had stopped me and ordered me to attention, and I’d snapped to, as we underclassmen were supposed to do. They’d walked around me, carefully inspecting my uniform, and one of them then said, “Is this the cadet?””

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Victor Villaseñor

“Yes,” said the other one. “I agree with you; you’re right,” said the first one. “This is the ugliest cadet in the school!”
Crazy Loco Love: A Memoir (2008)

“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.”

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Victor Villaseñor

Burro Genius: A Memoir (2004)

“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.”

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Victor Villaseñor

Burro Genius: A Memoir (2004)

“Oh, I loved Mr. Moffet! He was WONDERFUL! He’d given me hope! I felt fearless once again, and I could clearly see it had always been fear that had kept me dammed up all these years. Fear of sin, fear of hell, fear of what people might think of me, fear of … of … I didn’t quite know how to say or even think all these thoughts I was having, and yet… it was like I was now so excited with all these thoughts racing around inside my brain that I was on fire. Maybe I wasn’t really stupid after all. Maybe I’d just been misled all these years from the very beginning. OH, A FIRE FOR WANTING TO LEARN ALL I COULD LEARN WAS NOW BURNING INSIDE ME!”

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Victor Villaseñor

Crazy Loco Love: A Memoir (2008)

““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”

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Victor Villaseñor

Burro Genius: A Memoir (2004)

“The written word is holy…When we write our stories, it helps us bring understanding.”

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Victor Villaseñor

On the importance of gaining knowledge in “Author Victor Villaseñor talks 'Crazy Loco'” https://www.lmtonline.com/que_pasa/article/Author-Victor-Villase-or-talks-Crazy-Loco-10268363.php in LMT Online (2008 Dec 11)

“The years passed, and sometimes just before I … I awoke, I’d hear music going on inside my head. I’d lie perfectly still, not moving, not waking, and the music would spread all through my body, just as it had done at the pyramids outside Mexico City. Finally I’d leap out of bed and start writing like a madman. Ten, twelve, fifteen hours a day. It was just pouring out of me. It was limitless!”

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Victor Villaseñor

Crazy Loco Love: A Memoir (2008)

“We were starving when we got to the Texas border! And we thought that once we got across all our troubles were over. But we were wrong! A new kind of war started for us of racism and prejudice. They treated us Mexicans worse than dogs! In Douglas, Arizona, I stole six dollars worth of copper ore from the Copper Queen Mining Company to feed my starving mother and sisters, and they put me in the penitentiary. I was only thirteen years old! They wouldn’t have done that to a gringo kid, but they did this to a Mexican kid to teach an example!”

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Victor Villaseñor

Tears came to his eyes. “In prison those monsters tried to rape me, but I fought back so hard that they cut my stomach open from rib to rib,” he yelled, tearing his shirt open and showing me the huge scar that ran across his whole abdomen, going from his upper right side to his lower left side. “My intestines came out, and they left me for dead, but the guards found me and took me to the hospital. After a week I awoke, and, at the end of that month, I escaped with two Yaqui who’d gotten twenty years for eating an Army mule. Their familias had been starving! And they’d stolen the mule to feed them! “YOU’VE GOT NO RAGE COMPARED TO THAT, PENDEJO! There aren’t enough bullets for me to kill all the racist no-good sons of bitches I’ve met in the United States! But—and this is a big but— anybody can go around killing people! Any damn group of kids can get together and kill! That takes no guts! What takes guts is to have that rage, here inside,” he said, pounding his chest, “and decide to do something good with that rage. My revenge against this racist two-faced country of the United States is that I got rich and became a Republican! So now you come back to the United States, and you do something worthwhile, AND YOU DO IT RIGHT NOW, PENDEJO!
Crazy Loco Love: A Memoir (2008)

“Marina toured the country for Underwood and was given a full scholarship to the University of California at Berkeley—the first Latina ever to have such a scholarship—and she’d graduated with honors.”

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Victor Villaseñor

Crazy Loco Love: A Memoir (2008)

“When my brother, Joseph, was sick and in the hospital, you got in bed with me when I was asleep and you kept trying to touch me! All these years I’d thought that maybe it was all a dream, but it wasn’t! You son of a bitch. I was eight years old, crazy with grief for my brother, Joseph, and you—how could you?!”

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Victor Villaseñor

Crazy Loco Love: A Memoir (2008)

“What in the hell—I mean, in heaven—had I just done? This was crazyloco! I’d just made a deal with God to become as great a writer as Homer or better, and I didn’t even know how to read. This was totally, absolutely insane!”

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Victor Villaseñor

Crazy Loco Love: A Memoir (2008)

“And besides, now that I’d finished high school, all I wanted to do was to stay on the ranch and work with our workers from Mexico. These were my people. This was where I belonged and felt at home.”

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Victor Villaseñor

Crazy Loco Love: A Memoir (2008)

“A few months back Major Terry and his pet student, Drosen, had brought in a guy from San Diego to play chess with me. I’d had no idea that he was rated and was really good, so I’d beaten his ass real fast. He’d gotten all mad at Major Terry and Drosen for not telling him that I was as good as I was. He’d accused them of setting him up to publicly embarrass him. I’d had no idea what the big fuss was all about. I hadn’t even realized that there was such a thing as tournaments and championships for chess just like we had in wrestling. I’d quit playing chess at school after that incident. Now I only played at home with my dad’s older friends, Roberto and Salvador Montoya, who’d both been very good chess players in Mexico City. I beat Roberto almost all the time, but his older brother Salvador beat me pretty regularly. And I’d recently been told that Salvador had been so good that he’d once gone to Cuba to play and that he’d come in third among some of the best international players in the world.”

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Victor Villaseñor

Crazy Loco Love: A Memoir (2008)

“Then the next morning Captain Moffet, my English teacher, gave me the test. I got such a headache, just trying to think carefully so I wouldn’t make any mistakes, that my test score dropped to 96. I couldn’t breathe. This meant that I was mentally slow, that I’d been lucky to even get into high school. My eyes filled with tears. I didn’t know what to do. I asked Captain Moffet if my parents needed to know this. I felt so ashamed. I should’ve been the one to die, not my brother, Joseph. He’d been smart, just like my little sister Linda, who at six years old could read better than me.”

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Victor Villaseñor

Crazy Loco Love: A Memoir (2008)

“I began to worship pubic hair, to touch it, to smell it, to lick it. This was when I came to realize that pubic hair wasn’t at all like the hair we had on our heads. No, pubic hair was tougher, coarse, and sharp. You could cut your tongue on it if you licked it too hard. The hair on our heads wasn’t just finer but also round, and our pubic hair was thicker and flat, and so this was why it could cut you if you weren’t careful.”

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Victor Villaseñor

Crazy Loco Love: A Memoir (2008)

“But I’d tried! I really had. I was SHOCKED! Tears came to my eyes and I think Rochín and Hillam saw me, but I didn’t care. This was it. My life was over. I was done, finished. I had no future.”

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Victor Villaseñor

Crazy Loco Love: A Memoir (2008)

“And no one would interfere with me because of the loaded gun in my hand. Also, a part of me didn’t give a shit anymore if I was caught or not. I could now see that my objective wasn’t just to kill Moses and all these other teachers who had abused us, but for everyone in all the whole world to know why. This wasn’t going to be a surprise attack. This had to be a cold, premeditated act, completely well planned, just as it had been premeditated and well thought out to torture and beat us Mexican kids, starting in kindergarten, so we’d be a people, a gente, with our heads bowed down to authority forever, thinking we were inferior and worthless. I now realized that this was how you enslaved a people. You didn’t just bring them over in chains from Africa. No, you convinced them that they were inferior, not evolved, subhuman, and then when you took off their shackles, so they could go to work, you’d still have them enslaved and shackled inside of their minds for hundreds of years. And this system of teaching was fine with most Anglo teachers, because in the act of convincing us, los Mexicanos and the Blacks, we were subhuman, they’d also convinced themselves that they were superior!”

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Victor Villaseñor

Burro Genius: A Memoir (2004)

“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!”

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Victor Villaseñor

Tears streamed down my dad’s face. “I was about nine or ten, the same ag
Burro Genius: A Memoir (2004)

“Then, I’ll never forget, I came closer to the board, carefully going down the list. There were sixty-some juniors and seniors in our two classes, and then there I was, the third name from the bottom.”

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Victor Villaseñor

Crazy Loco Love: A Memoir (2008)

“Generosity is a good investment when you know who to be generous with, and also, who not to be generous with.”

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Victor Villaseñor

Burro Genius: A Memoir (2004)

“And each day, things at school got meaner and more terrifying than the day before. They were crucifying Ramón. They were really hitting him and hitting him, because he was the only kid among us who wouldn’t break.”

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Victor Villaseñor

Burro Genius: A Memoir (2004)

“And she slapped him across the face, once, twice, three times, but still Ramón continued speaking in Spanish, telling us not to fear, that we were Mexicanos, and that we weren’t their slaves! I quit crying, just like that. My God, I couldn’t believe it, this boy Ramón had to be the bravest human being I’d ever seen. And the huge teacher, she just kept right on slapping him until his face was covered with blood.”

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Victor Villaseñor

Burro Genius: A Memoir (2004)

“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.”

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Victor Villaseñor

Lo cortés no quita lo valiante, y lo valiante no quita lo cortés.”
Burro Genius: A Memoir (2004)

“I was TORTURED by teachers! You hear me, TORTURED!”

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Victor Villaseñor

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.
Burro Genius: A Memoir (2004)