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Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina Quotes
Sometimes opposites attract, or so they say, but Paloma and Rocío were like arroz and mangú: they didn’t really mix well.
— Raquel Cepeda, Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina
Listen kid, it’s just you and me now, so let’s help each other out. Always be honest with me, and show me how to be the mother and father I never had. I’ll make a mess of things sometimes, and I’m sorry in advance, but I’ll try. My word is bond.
— Raquel Cepeda, Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina
I wish she’d said something different, but patriarchy is as prevalent around the world as racism and xenophobia are. We can’t hide from it, not even here.
— Raquel Cepeda, Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina
…being Latino means being from everywhere, and that is exactly what America is supposed to be about.
— Raquel Cepeda, Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina
This is what I know about my parents. They spent the next several years trying to forget each other, and me.
— Raquel Cepeda, Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina
I have never bought into the idea that blood is thicker than water. Love and respect are meant to be earned from our children, our spouses, our families, and our friends.
— Raquel Cepeda, Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina
More than anything, this place feels familiar. I bury my hands in the hot sand and think about the embodiment of memory or, more specifically, our natural ability to carry the past in our bodies and minds. Individually, every grain of sand brushing against my hands represents a story, an experience, and a block for me to build upon for the next generation. I quietly thank this ancestor of mine for surviving the trip so that I could one day return.
— Raquel Cepeda, Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina
Individually, every grain of sand brushing against my hands represents a story, an experience, and a block for me to build upon for the next generation.
— Raquel Cepeda, Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina
While America will always, I think, feel foreign to me, New York City is my home. This is where I can construct my own identity freely and reject labels imposed on me.
— Raquel Cepeda, Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina
To me, travel is more valuable than any stupid piece of bling money can buy.
— Raquel Cepeda, Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina
Lately, Mami’s eyes have been so dark, I don’t like looking into them because I’m afraid I’ll fall in.
— Raquel Cepeda, Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina
Globalization by the way of McDonald’s and KFC has captured the hearts, the minds, and from what I can see through the window, the growing bellies of the folks here.
— Raquel Cepeda, Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina
I guess it all depends on whom you ask and when you ask. Race, I’ve learned, is in the eye of the beholder.
— Raquel Cepeda, Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina
We aren’t encouraged to think for ourselves and ask questions. We are expected to accept what they teach us as infallible truths.
— Raquel Cepeda, Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina
If Aphrodite chills at home in Cyprus for most of the year, then Fez must be the goddess’s playground.
— Raquel Cepeda, Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina
I remember feeling that pieces of me were scattered around the world; I belonged to her, Mother Earth.
— Raquel Cepeda, Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina
I think Dad wanted to feel the pain, to feel his body cry, an urgent reminder that he was still alive. I pretended not to notice.
— Raquel Cepeda, Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina
Perhaps finding out that we carry New World history in our genes will transcend racial checkboxes altogether and enable Latino-Americans to rethink what America is supposed to look like.
— Raquel Cepeda, Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina
If it weren’t for her setting me free, I may still be a caged bird today, holding my own daughter captive on a shit-laden perch.
— Raquel Cepeda, Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina
This thing I am feeling, I’m almost certain, is the closest I’ll ever come to standing somewhere in between truth and reconciliation.
— Raquel Cepeda, Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina
For some, excavating the past isn’t an adventure, it’s more akin to tearing a Band-Aid off an open wound.
— Raquel Cepeda, Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina
She looks like an empty shell of a woman with her soul hovering above her. We believe in spiritual guías in Santo Domingo. Hers is her own self. I can see Mami’s soul desperately trying to find its way back into her small body.
— Raquel Cepeda, Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina
Are Latino-Americans white? Black? Other? Illegal aliens from Mars? Or are we the very face of America?
— Raquel Cepeda, Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina
The truth is usually left for us to hunt and gather independently, if we are so inclined.
— Raquel Cepeda, Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina
Shakespeare had it right all along: Love will kill you in the end.
— Raquel Cepeda, Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina
The past is buried deep within the ground in Rabat, although the ancient walls in the old city are still standing, painted in electrifying variations of royal blue that make the winding roads look like streamlets or shallow ocean water.
— Raquel Cepeda, Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina
I fall in love with Paraíso. It’s like a giant playground where I’m never scolded for running around recklessly, where I’m almost overwhelmed with the amount of attention and love I receive from Mami’s family. In New York, I’m invisible.
— Raquel Cepeda, Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina
Paradise is a state of being, more than just the name of a suburb or a home.
— Raquel Cepeda, Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina
When we illuminate the road back to our ancestors, they have a way of reaching out, of manifesting themselves…sometimes even physically.
— Raquel Cepeda, Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina
Come to think of it, maybe God is a He after all, because only a cruel force would create something this beautiful and make it inaccessible to most people.
— Raquel Cepeda, Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina
The hospital room was as cold as dead skin, the hallway crowded with lost souls and reeking of illness.
— Raquel Cepeda, Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina
Nobody, she felt, understood her–not her mother, not her father, not her sister or brother, none of the girls or boys at school, nadie–except her man.
— Raquel Cepeda, Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina
You are meant to be, despite how you got here; you’ll see someday.
— Raquel Cepeda, Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina
Hip-hop, this thing we love that loves us back, is our lingua franca.
— Raquel Cepeda, Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina
The things that come to us easily, our propensities, are carried on a deep subconscious level into our next life. There are no coincidences.
— Raquel Cepeda, Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina
Women destroy me. I allow them to.
— Raquel Cepeda, Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina
Alice’s razor-thin blond hair is what people in Santo Domingo call bueno, but I don’t understand how that kind of hair can be good. It doesn’t move at all, or ripple like the water in Boca Chica when I throw shells at it.
— Raquel Cepeda, Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina
Foisting an identity on people rather than allowing them the freedom and space to create their own is shady.
— Raquel Cepeda, Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina
Even the juncture in history and the zeitgeist we live in is something we choose, setting the scene for the spiritual fodder we need to grow and achieve deeper elevation of our souls.
— Raquel Cepeda, Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina
Hip-hop is storytelling.
— Raquel Cepeda, Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina
The tension between people is palpable, and the ideal of what it means to be and look American becomes a preoccupation to folks around the country, including me.
— Raquel Cepeda, Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina
Hip-hop…has been the proverbial key that’s opened the door for me to roam this breathtaking planet.
— Raquel Cepeda, Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina
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