Quotes About Culture

if you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves.

Don't panic. Say, Hey, no problem. Run a hand through your hair like the whiteboys do even though the only thing that runs easily through your hair is Africa.

La Inca shook her head. She was looking at her favorite picture of his mother on her first day at private school, one of those typical serious DR shots. What always happens. Un maldito hombre.

Don't tell her that your moms knew right away what it was, that she recognized its smell from the year the United States invaded your island.

No matter what the fuck he pulled-and my brother pulled a lot of shit-she was always a hundred percent on his side, as only a Latin mom can be with her querido oldest hijo. If he'd come home one day an said, Hey, Ma, I exterminated half the planet, I´m sure she would have defended his ass: Well, hijo, we were overpopulated.

The next day at breakfast he asked his mother: Am I ugly? She sighed. Well, hijo, you certainly don't take after me. Dominican parents! You got to love them!

But no matter what the truth, remember: Dominicans are Caribbean and therefore have an extraordinary tolerance for extreme phenomena

She was one of those golden mulatas that French-speaking Caribbeans call chabines, that my boys call chicas de oro; she had snarled, apocalyptic hair, copper eyes, and was one whiteskinned relative away from jaba.

The fact that I am writing to you in English already falsifies what I wanted to tell you. My subject: how to explain to you that I don't belong to English though I belong nowhere else Gustavo Pérez Firmat

How much English do you know? None, Papi said after a moment. Eulalio shook his head. Papi met Eulalio last and liked him least.

If this is the United States, mail me home.

Hail, Dog of God, was how he welcomed me my first day in Demarest. Took a week before I figured out what the hell he meant. God. Domini. Dog. Canis. Hail, Dominicanis.

Our hero was not one of those Dominican cats everybody's always going on about—he wasn't no home-runner hitter or fly bachetero, not a playboy with a million hots on his jock.

She was my Old World Dominican mother and I was her only daughter

That's the kind of culture I belong to: people took their child's black complexion as an ill omen.

That's white people for you. They lose a cat and it's an all-points bulletin, but we Dominicans, we lose a daughter and we might not even cancel our appointment at the salon.

That night Ana Iris and I go to a movie. We cannot understand the English but we both like the new theater's clean rugs.

I've always believed that the universe invented the color red solely for Latinas.

I've always believed that the universe invented the color red solely for Latinas.

To be called boycrazy in a country like Santo Domingo is a singular distinction; it means that you can sustain infatuations that would reduce your average northamericana to cinders.)

You, Yunior, have a girlfriend named Alma, who has a long tender neck and a big Dominican ass that seems to exist in a fourth dimension beyond jeans. An ass that could drag the moon out of orbit. An ass she never liked until she met you.

Mami might have been skinny, a bad thing on the Island, but she was smart and funny and that's hard to find anywhere.

dude never had much luck with the females (how very un-Dominican of him).

The next day at breakfast he asked his mother: Am I ugly? She sighed. Well, hijo, you certainly don't take after me. Dominican