Quotes from Gustavo Arellano

Your life depends on a random stranger who could kill you, will probably disrespect you, and will most likely pay you much less than you deserve. But even those prospects are better than the ones you used to have. This is the life of los jornaleros – the day laborers.

It was a mission of celebration: never had two Mexican-Americans flown up in space on the same mission, and never did burritos shine so brightly.

El Torito rescued the meals from the mythologizing amnesia of Southern California and introduced them to areas where customers didn't know how to pronounce the meals they waited for in hour-long lines.

The wide and strange land shaped and reshaped human institutions to its own purposes, and one either learned to live with the blazing sun, the scarcity of water, the dust and interminable distances, and the whispering quiet of empty canyons and mesas, or he admitted failure and moved elsewhere.

I've eaten it since I was wee high to a snail's butt, and ah, it has not only counteracted the destructive elements that I have imposed upon my beautiful God-given brain, but given me a genius that I cannot account for except for the chile seed." says Jimmy Santiago Baca, New Mexico's most famous Chicano poet.

But a smart Mexican comes into this country with the understanding gabachos will always dismiss them as idiots. To get ahead, then, many Mexicans pretend not to recognize English so their gabacho bosses can entrust them with all the company secrets—codes, financial figures, and the all-important personal telephone number of the secretary.

Tacos originally migrated to California and Texas in the 1920s, and only made it into scattered Mexican cookbooks written by Americans in about the 1930s. They

It's like a taco aspired to become a sope mixed with a quesadilla but got scared by the grease bath and quit halfway.

The first generation of immigrants commit themselves to a lifetime of labor, not assimilation—that's the job of the children.

The American taco can boast of two birthplaces: Los Angeles and San Bernardino, California. But its baptismal font is the pan angrily bubbling with oil at Cielito Lindo, a tiny stand in downtown Los Angeles named after a classic ranchera song meaning "Beautiful Little Heaven." From here come taquitos filled with shredded beef, grabbed fresh from that roiling pan, then anointed in a creamy salsa, more pureed avocado than chile.

And if your neighborhood still suffers under the tyranny of Taco Bell and combo plates? Fear not -- Mexican food is coming to wow you, to save you from a bland life, as it did for your parents and grandparents and great-grandparents. Again. Like last time -- and the time before that.

Similarly, the Mexican Bueno greeting opens a window into our politeness. It originates from our daily salutations—buenos dias, buenas tarde, and buenas noche (good morning, afternoon, and evening, respectively), and thus the phone greeting Bueno is just a shortened version of the others. And remember that Mexicans are some of the happiest people on earth—and nothing radiates positive vibes like saying Bueno.

gasps a little, blinks his eyes three or four times and indulges in a convulsive shiver

Speak Spanish, get accused of separatism. Speak English, get laughed at for thick accents and limited vocabularies. Many Mexicans speak English to Mexican workers out of gratitude—the fast-food counter is the only place Mexicans can feel like Americans by speaking the shared language of haggling with Mexican workers over the cost of fries.

Ho didn't know how prescient those words were, as they fundamentally changed the course of Mexican food in the United States for like the thirtieth time ever.

the old Warner Bros. cartoons, that studio can go to la chingada. It's this studio's fault that gabachos always try to imitate Mexicans with accents more refried than a Taco Bell special.

But I can divine one thing: in Mexican food's rumble through this country, in the trail behind and the road ahead, I see us -- always evolving, never stagnant, continually striving for something better, constantly delicious. The American spirit manifested as a combo plate, heavy on the salsa.

In Mexico, we usually go by three names—first name, father's surname, and mother's surname. We shorten that to first and last name in los Estados Unidos.

We Mexican-Americans in Orange County created wab to describe our wabby brothers and sisters, and all you Central Valley wabs could come up with to insult your unassimilated paisanos is chunti?! Chunti is shorthand for chúntaro, what Mexicans in Mexico call the poorer, rural Mexicans—

where cholos skulk behind bumpers ready to pounce on the first available coche—just to knock on your friend's door? Or would you punch out "The Mexican Hat Dance" on your pito?

Virgin of Guadalupe—a syncretism of the Aztec mother goddess Tonantzin and Mary of Bethlehem—that's the focus of veneration in Mexican Catholicism.

Examples of elision in Mexican Spanish abound—pa' instead of para (for), apá instead of papá (father), SanTana instead of Santa Ana, pos instead of pues (well), and my supposed gaffe.

Cabrón: Literally, a castrated goat. Mexicans understand it better as "asshole," or badass.

Chicano: The poorer, stupider, more assimilated cousins of Mexicans. Otherwise known as a Mexican-American. George López is such a Chicano with his unfunny jokes.