Juan Herrera, Notebooks of a Chile Verde Smuggler
Pg. 32

“And yet things and moments seem pliable, transformative, we move out into the open mix of coffee houses, homeless tenements, beaten down chartreuse movimiento rooms, past the old Victoria Restaurant, Gomez-Pena’s loft on Cesar Chavez Boulevard with velvet O.J. Simpson paintings on the walls, New Age gargoyle trilingual low riders, swamp art spaces, Kulingtan workshops & Pinay poetics, verse-riffs and performero doo-wop, mercados featuring papaya and jitomate sales, gentrified Victorians cutting through the old Irish, Mexicano, and Latino neighborhoods; things appear new, our poesy missions appear refurbished, then the fog from the Pacific rolls in again, homicide stats pile up on the curb, more death, then light, rain, more rain.”

This quote stood out for the fact that it explains from his prospective what the foreigners had when they came to America. In Mexico they would think of America as a better life a place where they can start over, but in reality when they came it was not like that at all they were the lower class had horrible jobs lived in the dumps, they did not have a good life style at all.

Pg. 50

“A writer must deal with big questions, big deepness, big heart, big fist. Big mind, how do we do it?

This quote brings up a good point, that to be a writer you must go big or don’t go at all. A writer has to compete with many different things; other books, movies, games etc. when writing a book you have to be careful that you don’t write the same thing as someone else and not to write a book that there are to many of. A book needs to grab some ones attention, be different from the rest, be bigger.