Marie Arana > Quotes

“Sometimes God knocks us back a bit to remind us we're not as big and mighty as we thing.”
― Marie Arana, American Chica: Two Worlds, One Childhood

“In the long history of male and female relations all the way back to the Garden, I can't think of one in which a woman's anger ever won over a man.”
― Marie Arana, Lima Nights

“Life is better when we imagine it”
― Marie Arana

“The art of victory is learned in failures. —Simón Bolívar”
― Marie Arana, Bolivar: American Liberator

“Indeed, although we arrived long before the pilgrims—and although we account for more than half of the US population growth over the last decade and are projected to lead population growth for the next thirty-five years—it seems as if the rest of the country is perpetually in the act of discovering us.”
― Marie Arana, LatinoLand: A Portrait of America's Largest and Least Understood Minority

“I don’t want to be like trees that put down roots in one place,” he wrote. “I’d rather be like the wind, the water, the sun—like all those things that are forever in perpetual motion.”
― Marie Arana, Bolivar: American Liberator

“I am ashamed to admit it, but independence is the only thing we have won, at the cost of everything else.”
― Marie Arana, Bolivar: American Liberator

“By 1902, when Abuelito, my grandfather, was twenty years old and moving the tassel from one side of his graduation cap to the other at the University of Notre Dame, Julio César had thousands of rain-forest Indians making him rich. They were the Huitoto, the Bora, the Andoke, the Ocaina: from fierce headhunters to doe-eyed forest folk.”
― Marie Arana, American Chica: Two Worlds, One Childhood

“If any one man were indispensable to a state’s survival, that state should not and will not exist. . .”
― Marie Arana, Bolivar: American Liberator

“All murderers shall be punished, unless of course they kill in large numbers, to the sound of trumpets. —Voltaire”
― Marie Arana, Bolivar: American Liberator

“EVEN HERE, IN THESE FIRST glimmers of liberty, we begin to see the character of a continent. The American-born were hungry for liberties, yet unaccustomed to freedom; resourceful, yet unacquainted with self-rule; racially mixed, yet mistrustful of whatever race they were not. For three hundred years of authoritarian reign, Spain had carefully instilled these qualities. “Divide and subjugate” had been the rule. Education had been discouraged, in many cases outlawed, and so ignorance was endemic. Colonies were forbidden from communicating with each other, and so—like spokes of a wheel—they were capable only of reporting directly to a king. There was no collaborative spirit, no model for organization, no notion of hierarchy. It was why the people of Coro or Maracaibo or Guayana refused to obey their newly independent brothers in Caracas; given the choice, they preferred the crown. And even though Americans had been inclined to mix across racial lines from the beginning, Spain had worked hard to keep the races apart, feed their suspicions. Add to this a church that was thoroughly opposed to independence, and a picture emerges unlike any other in that age of revolutions. If Spanish America now found itself strong enough to rise up against Spain, it would never quite rid itself of the divisions that the Council of the Indies had carefully installed in the first place.”
― Marie Arana, Bolivar: American Liberator

“Count Aranda, an advisor to the Spanish throne, who—long before, in the year of Bolívar’s birth—had said of the United States, “There will come a time when she is a giant, a colossus even, much to be feared in those vast regions. Then, she will forget the benefits she received from others and think only of aggrandizing herself.”
― Marie Arana, Bolivar: American Liberator

“Nigger—as if the black blood rumored to course in his veins explained all his harebrained ideals about equality.”
― Marie Arana, Bolivar: American Liberator

“For even as indigenous women were forced to breed with Spaniards, indigenous men were denied the ability to propagate their race.”
― Marie Arana, LatinoLand: A Portrait of America's Largest and Least Understood Minority

“Outside Caracas patriots hardly fared better. The “Legions of Hell”—hordes of wild and truculent plainsmen—rode out of the barren llanos to punish anyone who dared call himself a rebel. Leading these colored troops was the fearsome José Tomás Boves. A Spanish sailor from Asturias, Boves had been arested at sea for smuggling, sent to the dungeons of Puerto Cabello, then exiled to the Venezuelan prairie, where he fell in with marauding cowboys. He was fair-haired, strong-shouldered, with an enormous head, piercing blue eyes, and a pronounced sadistic streak. Loved by his feral cohort with a passion verging on worship, he led them to unimaginable violence. As Bolívar’s aide Daniel O’Leary later wrote, “Of all the monsters produced by the revolution . . . Boves was the worst.” He was a barbarian of epic proportions, an Attila for the Americas. Recruited by Monteverde but beholden to no one, Boves raised a formidable army of black, pardo, and mestizo llaneros by promising them open plunder, rich booty, and a chance to exterminate the Creole class. The llaneros were accomplished horsemen, well trained in the art of warfare. They needed few worldly goods, rode bareback, covered their nakedness with loincloths. They consumed only meat, which they strapped to their horses’ flanks and cured by the sweat of the racing animals. They made tents from hides, slept on earth, reveled in hardship. They lived on the open prairie, which was parched by heat, impassable in the rains. Their weapon of choice was a long lance of alvarico palm, hardened to a sharp point in the campfire. They were accustomed to making rapid raids, swimming on horseback through rampant floods, the sum of their earthly possessions in leather pouches balanced on their heads or clenched between their teeth. They could ride at a gallop, like the armies of Genghis Khan, dangling from the side of a horse, so that their bodies were rendered invisible, untouchable, their killing lances straight and sure against a baffled enemy. In war, they had little to lose or gain, no allegiance to politics. They were rustlers and hated the ruling class, which to them meant the Creoles; they fought for the abolition of laws against their kind, which the Spaniards had promised; and they believed in the principles of harsh justice, in which a calculus of bloodshed prevailed.”
― Marie Arana, Bolivar: American Liberator

“America is ungovernable; 2. he who serves a revolution ploughs the sea; 3. all one can do in America is leave it; 4. the country is bound to fall into unimaginable chaos, after which it will pass into the hands of an undistinguishable string of tyrants of every color; 5. once we are devoured by all manner of crime and reduced to a frenzy of violence, no one—not even the Europeans—will want to subjugate us; 6. and, finally, if mankind could revert to its primitive state, it would be here in America, in her final hour. He”
― Marie Arana, Bolivar: American Liberator

“Why couldn't latinos be a race? Just as the others are arbitrarily designated races in the census, the effect of diluting us to an ethnicity complicating the process of self identification and forcing the population to define itself under other labels has very real societal effects. Any statistics involving law enforcement, police brutality, the criminal justice system, educational attainment, instances of discrimination, economic success or peril, and many others are not tracked for latinos.”
― Marie Arana, LatinoLand: A Portrait of America's Largest and Least Understood Minority

“In 500 years of race mixing as a consequence Latin Americans, and we their US Latino descendants, have come to represent every possible skin color. Nearly 2/3 of us are mixed race. Nowhere else on earth has a people of such ethnic complexity been wrought in such a short span of time. We are as one philosopher called us la raza cósmica, the cosmetic race.”
― Marie Arana, LatinoLand: A Portrait of America's Largest and Least Understood Minority

“Casi de inmediato Bolívar recibió una agitada carta de Páez[66], en la que le informaba sobre el miserable estado de cosas en Venezuela. “No se imagina lo ruinosas que han resultado las intrigas en este país[67] —le decía Páez—. Morillo tenía razón al decirle que le había hecho un favor al matar a todos los abogados”. Pero según Páez, los españoles no habían matado a los suficientes. Eran los hombres de leyes, insistía, quienes estaban paralizando la república.”
― Marie Arana, Bolívar: Libertador de América

“A veces parece que el camino más arduo de la guerra es el que conduce a la paz.”
― Marie Arana, Bolívar: Libertador de América

“You can’t change skin, can’t fix tongues, can’t brighten eyes, but power is for the taking. Steal it, lie for it, kill if you have to. You can win the girl with the interesting eyes. Looking”
― Marie Arana, American Chica: Two Worlds, One Childhood

“No sorprende que a lo largo de los años los latinoamericanos hayan aprendido a aceptar las imperfecciones humanas de sus líderes. Bolívar se lo enseñó.”
― Marie Arana, Bolívar: Libertador de América

“...the shattering abuses that unaccompanied migrant children suffer in the United States today. A full quarter million Hispanic child laborers, mostly from the northern triangle... Entered this country from 2020 to 2022 and toil today in field and factory work. What The New York Times calls 'America's new economy of exploitation.' These minors are the product of a heartless patently dysfunctional immigration system that has not understood this country's history and hasn't faced its injustices in almost 40 years. Their suffering is in plain sight with no real legislation to stop it.”
― Marie Arana, LatinoLand: A Portrait of America's Largest and Least Understood Minority

“offered him a scholarship to the graduate school at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston, all expenses paid by the U.S. Department of State. The war in Europe was devouring gringos; American schools had been drained of young men.”
― Marie Arana, American Chica: Two Worlds, One Childhood

“A reverse one drop rule had long operated among Mexicans and would eventually operate among Mexican Americans. If they had any Spanish blood at all from a distant ancestor they considered themselves classifiably and justifiably white. To be anything else in the United States, to be black mulatto or Asian was to have no votes. No access to property, no rights at all. By demanding citizenship, they were demanding whiteness.”
― Marie Arana, LatinoLand: A Portrait of America's Largest and Least Understood Minority

“By 1600, a mere 100 years after Columbus's arrival, a combination of war disease and a failure to multiply had slashed the indigenous population by as much as 90%. The vibrant race of 60 million that once inhabited, this hemisphere had been reduced to a scant 6 million. It was a genocide of historic proportion. Contemporary scientists call that period from 1492 to 1620, the great dying, an eradication so vast that the airs' carbon dioxide levels fell markedly lowering global temperatures by .15°C.”
― Marie Arana, LatinoLand: A Portrait of America's Largest and Least Understood Minority

“They tried to bury us. They did not know we were seeds.”
― Marie Arana, LatinoLand: A Portrait of America's Largest and Least Understood Minority

“En Bolívar veía al único líder que podía librar a la nación de la nauseabunda corrupción política, la insurgencia armada y la rampante ignorancia que la corroían[”
― Marie Arana, Bolívar: Libertador de América

“El hombre, al perder su libertad —había dicho Homero, y ahora lo citaba Bolívar—, pierde la mitad de su espíritu”.”
― Marie Arana, Bolívar: Libertador de América

“So what is the moral of this story? The answer out of Cajamarca is: Do what you can. You can’t change skin, can’t fix tongues, can’t brighten eyes, but power is for the taking. Steal it, lie for it, kill if you have to. You can win the girl with the interesting eyes. Looking”
― Marie Arana, American Chica: Two Worlds, One Childhood