“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!”

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)