Juan Herrera, Notebooks of a Chile Verde Smuggler
Pg. 142

“How many make it out, brother? Out of the tile hallways, the paste-up rooms, into full meditations, into the upward mobile soul chew ladder of apocalypse or down into the plantation brown girl boy Spanish – speaking tunnel. So you gotta fight like the taxi driver from Poland, five years said you gotta make a little room.”

He had just came back form an elementary school where there were mixed races, Mexican, Italian, Latin Etc. there was going to be a name change but it was over ruled for there were different view from the different parents. He was asking which one of these children are actually going to make it out of that place alive and with their head on straight. Those children in order to get what they need they need to learn how to fight to get what is needed.

Pg. 144

“ I am that paper, I am those words now, the ink burns in every cell. When I look out to the trees, the long winding streets of Tortilla Flats, as they shoot to the hills and cut the electric rails of the Muni buses to the towers and Twin peaks, the fog and into the sky haze, I see your signs, I read your voice, now yes I do. Oyeme, Mamita, Oyeme- not that you are gone into the deep and silent luminous fallen side of the night. Oyeme.

He is more connected to his mother even though she has died he is feeling like she really is there for him and gives him more support. He now knows that she was also a writer and that even though she didn’t like him writing he thinks that could be because she wanted a better life for him than that. Even thought she is gone he can still feel her presence in different places such as the nature around him. He sees her hidden signs and becomes more connected with her.