Quotes from Ilan Stavans

Latinos are learning English. That doesn't mean that they should sacrifice their original language or that they should give up this in-betweeness that is Spanglish.

'Hispanic' was the term adopted by the government - by the Nixon government in particular - and that made the community feel it was being branded.

I am an immigrant from Mexico. I came to the United States looking for a landscape where I could explore ideas freely and to test my entrepreneurial spirit.

Cervantes married in 1584, when he was thirty-seven and Catalina was nineteen. The marriage lasted thirty years, but Cervantes may have spent only about half of them with his wife.

How many different works of art have been inspired by 'Don Quixote?' Thousands. Most people enter the novel, for better or worse, through the musical the 'Man Of La Mancha.'

Disinterring famous people has become a kind of sport in the Hispanic world. Before Cervantes, it happened to Evita, Che Guevara, Federico Garcia Lorca, and Pablo Neruda.

My hope is that 'The New World Haggadah' will open a new world for readers who will see our heritage through a multilingual prism. I wanted to feature medieval and renaissance authors, resistance in World War II, crypto-Jews and activists during the Dirty War in Latin America, songs of protest, and songs of hope.

Spanglish is a creative way also of saying, 'I am an American, and I have my own style, my own taste, my own tongue.'

'Don Quixote' is a very political book that has been used by diplomats, politicians, guerrilla fighters, to inspire people, to convince them that they themselves can become quixotic. George Washington had a copy of the book on his desk when signing the U.S. Constitution.

The mandate we have as Jews is for the story of the Exodus from Egypt to be retold every generation.

Yiddish, originally, in Eastern Europe was considered the language of children, of the illiterate, of women. And 500 years later, by the 19th century, by the 18th century, writers realized that, in order to communicate with the masses, they could no longer write in Hebrew. They needed to write in Yiddish, the language of the population.

I have always considered it a beautiful metaphor that Cervantes had no fixed address in Spain. He is thus everywhere and nowhere. There are a number of sites connected with his life, but none attract hordes of travellers the way Stratford-upon-Avon and the Globe Theatre in London draw Shakespeare aficionados.

Many historians emphasize the catastrophic breaks, ruptures, turning points, as the true stuff of history, but the field would be incomplete without a look into the continuities.

This pandemic seems to me not unlike my mother's cancer: a threat, a warning, a reminder for society. Whether, like my mother, we ignore its import, is up to each one of

The irony is that people are surviving lockdown thanks to the arts. For centuries, the task of washing clothes has been made more bearable by singing.

We have recorded the sound the wind makes on Mars, but we cannot listen to one another.…

The developed countries will struggle through the world economic crisis at the cost of huge sacrifices, but those of middling development—the rest of the world—will slide steeply into bottomless darkness.

Genghis Khan said the hand Is the first thing one man gives To another. Not in this war. A gesture of limited distance Now suffices, a nod, A minor smile or a hand Slightly raised, Not in search of its counterpart, Just a warning within The acknowledgment to stand back.

Latino history is like a river dividing the United States and Mexico. It is shared by several different cultures and called by many different names. In other words there isn't a single Latino history but many.

Language belongs, not to the academics, but those who use it

To be racially mixed is to represent unity, to synthesize, to integrate.

American Jews are no longer a homogenous minority; we come in all colors and from all corners of the world.

Historically, the 19th century is defined by annexations and internal turmoil. For instance, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 gave more than half of Mexican territory to the United States.

'Hispanic' is a reference to Hispania, the name by which Spain was known in the Roman period, and there has always been strong ambivalence toward Spain in its former colonies.