Héctor Tobar > Quotes

“You defend your humanity with patience and determination, by making your voice heard to those who judge you a lesser being for your timeworn clothes, your callused hands, and your sunburned skin.”
― Héctor Tobar, Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine, and the Miracle That Set Them Free

“Maybe innocence is a skin you must shed to build layers more resistant to the caustic truths of the world.”
― Héctor Tobar, The Barbarian Nurseries

“She would speak her story in Spanish and la señora Maureen would tell hers in English; it was obvious to her that the two languages did not carry equal weight.”
― Héctor Tobar, The Barbarian Nurseries

“In the class structure of this country, the role of Latino people is to build the movie set of white perfection again and again.”
― Héctor Tobar, Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino”

“It seems silly to Franklin for his fellow miners to think of themselves as national heroes when all they’ve done is gotten themselves trapped in a place where only the desperate and the hard up for cash go to suffer and toil. They are famous now, yes, but that heady sense of fullness that fame gives you, that sense of being at the center of everything, will disappear quicker than they could possibly imagine. Franklin tries to speak this truth to his fellow miners, but he does so halfheartedly, because he knows the only way to learn it is to live it.”
― Héctor Tobar, Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine, and the Miracle That Set Them Free

“We aren’t the best men, but Lord, have pity on us,” Henríquez begins. It’s a simple statement, but it strikes several of the men hard.”
― Héctor Tobar, Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine, and the Miracle That Set Them Free

“Chile was the last country in the Western Hemisphere to legalize divorce,”
― Héctor Tobar, Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine, and the Miracle That Set Them Free

“If you make a man a symbol of things that are bigger than any one person can possibly be, you risk stripping that man of his sense of who he really is.”
― Héctor Tobar, Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine, and the Miracle That Set Them Free

“In books there were limitless worlds, there was truth, sometimes brutal and ugly, and sometimes happy and soothing.”
― Héctor Tobar, The Barbarian Nurseries

“If you’re working, it’s the best therapy for posttraumatic stress,” Juan says. Studies have shown that the gravity of posttraumatic stress is directly proportional to the length of time one lives with the threat of death, and Juan slowly unwinds the trauma of the sixty-nine days he lived inside a thundering mountain by going to work, fixing machines, then going back home, and then returning to work again.”
― Héctor Tobar, Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine, and the Miracle That Set Them Free

“The desert around the mine was covered with flowers, after a rare shower a few days earlier. The Vegas remember the songs they sang that night, including the one that Roberto wrote about “El Pato” Alex and his seventy-year-old father entering the mountain to search for him.”
― Héctor Tobar, Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine, and the Miracle That Set Them Free

“Omar realizes that the improbable fact of their survival also carries a hint of the divine. To be alive in this hole, against all odds, speaks to Omar of the existence of a higher power with some sort of plan for these still-living men.”
― Héctor Tobar, Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine, and the Miracle That Set Them Free

“If you can sit here and talk to a person you don’t know very well, and talk about all these things you’ve been through—that’s something. That’s courage. It’s knowing yourself.”
― Héctor Tobar, Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine, and the Miracle That Set Them Free

“You see, Francisco, a warrior isn’t just someone who slays dragons—or Englishmen, like Mel Gibson does in our favorite movie, Braveheart. A warrior can also be a man who takes apart an engine to make soup and then serves it to his brothers, keeping up their spirits with the rising inflections of his voice.”
― Héctor Tobar, Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine, and the Miracle That Set Them Free

“We have to recognize that we’re nothing, the Pastor says. In the surface world, when they returned from the mine and showered and entered their homes, they were princes, kings, spoiled sons, well-fed fathers, Romeos. They believed their private worlds of home and family spun thanks to their labor, and that as workingmen and breadwinners they had every right to expect their world to revolve around their needs. Now the heart of the mountain has collapsed on top of them, and they are trapped by a block of stone, an object whose newness and perfection suggest, to some, a divine judgment.”
― Héctor Tobar, Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine, and the Miracle That Set Them Free

“camanchaca”
― Héctor Tobar, Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine, and the Miracle That Set Them Free

“He is trapped underground, suddenly and unexpectedly close to death, but still in control of his fate. "At that moment I put death in my head and decided I would live with it," he says later.”
― Héctor Tobar, Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine, and the Miracle That Set Them Free

“is one plank short of a bridge” (le falta un palo para el puente”
― Héctor Tobar, Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine, and the Miracle That Set Them Free

“Their good vibes.” Su buena vibra”
― Héctor Tobar, Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine, and the Miracle That Set Them Free

“ESTAMOS BIEN EN EL REFUGIO. LOS 33.”
― Héctor Tobar, Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine, and the Miracle That Set Them Free

“All of us, "Black," "white," "Hispanic," "Asian," and "Native American," live in the quagmire and the prison house of a society built on the deceptions and theft of empire and exploitation. We need to see what young, queer eyes see with clarity: the hypocrisy of the order that aims to contain our free and flamboyant souls, and how we can never be our true selves inside that order.”
― Héctor Tobar, Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino”

“la lleva?”
― Héctor Tobar, Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine, and the Miracle That Set Them Free

“huasos”
― Héctor Tobar, Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine, and the Miracle That Set Them Free

“That was horrible. That was like a second death,” one of the miners says. The idea that they’ve been doomed, again, by the mine’s owners becomes a real possibility: The San Esteban Mining Company’s blueprints are so unreliable that the driller-rescuers up on the surface will never find them. “The mine’s blueprints are shit,” they shout. La planificación de la mina es una hueva. The thirty-three men now sit in the dark, wondering if they’ll die suffering this final assault on their dignity: trapped here, starving, with other mining men working to reach them, their efforts betrayed by a company too cheap to even know, with certainty, where its own tunnels are.”
― Héctor Tobar, Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine, and the Miracle That Set Them Free

“I think that sometimes the only thing that can make you laugh is accepting the idea that there’s no way out.”
― Héctor Tobar, Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine, and the Miracle That Set Them Free

“Golborne is up to this point in his career a Stanford and Northwestern alumnus with a stellar corporate résumé, but he’s never been someone who’s had to think of himself as a man of the people. He’s never had to make the concerns of the poor his own, and he’s never known what it’s like to be the public servant of people who want him to be strong and who are deeply suspicious of him at the same time.”
― Héctor Tobar, Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine, and the Miracle That Set Them Free

“artisan miners whose culture shaped the childhood and family life of several of the thirty-three men.”
― Héctor Tobar, Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine, and the Miracle That Set Them Free

“Te espero por siempre”
― Héctor Tobar, Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine, and the Miracle That Set Them Free

“We broke through.”
― Héctor Tobar, Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine, and the Miracle That Set Them Free

“Yo lo único que hago es vivir,” he says. The only thing I do is live.”
― Héctor Tobar, Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine, and the Miracle That Set Them Free