Karla Souza Quotes

The story of my life is the Chicano experience personified.

I feel I have a responsibility to carry out the immigrant story, since it's one that I hold very dear to my heart, since my story is similar in a lot of ways.

I lived there [ in New York City] as an artist, but never as a Chinese artist.

I feel like my life experience is that of an outsider. Let me explain: my parents are from Panama, and they moved to the United States the year after I was born. They moved into an all-white neighborhood, where the previous black family had a cross burned on their lawn.

I was 30 when 9/11 happened and I had lived exactly 15 years of life in America, so I was half American. I was a full-fledged New Yorker.

Most people who came here came for economic reasons or sometimes for religious or political reasons. I didn't have any of this. I came here, I liked it, I stayed. So I'm a pure American - even more than people who are born here - because I did it by choice as an adult.

Nostalgia is a particular affliction of immigrant fiction, and it's led to a kind of sclerosis of the form. I hate nostalgia, and I feel it's good to be aware of the politics of these genres.

When I was young I was one of the second generation of black people in Holland. My father was the first. My mother was white, and living with a black man at that time and having a how-you-say half-caste boy is not easy.

I have a sense that many Americans, especially those like me with European or foreign parents, feel they have to invent their families just as they have to invent themselves.

My grandfather worked in a shoe factory - he was an Italian immigrant. My father was the first to go to college in the family.

I come from a family of working people. My parents were Guatemalan immigrants who spent most of their lives in the service industry.

In Trinidad, where as new arrivals we were a disadvantaged community, that excluding idea was a kind of protection; it enabled us - for the time being, and only for the time being - to live in our own way and according to our own rules, to live in our own fading India.

I'm an immigrant and I've always wanted to write something about America.

I knew I had to write about Canada. I just could not find in literature any examples of the immigrant experience that I've had.

I haven't written about an immigrant experience because I haven't experienced that before and am focused on existential themes.

My own grandparents came to the United States as immigrants in 1912, and they lived for some years in Italian ghettos in New York. Most immigrant groups start in ghettos somewhere, and many of them never get out.

There is nothing less to our credit than our neglect of the foreigner and his children, unless it be the arrogance most of us betray when we set out to "Americanize" him.

They say that immigrants don’t speak English. So? Who cares. Even the Irish learned English after a while.

We are Martians who have come to earth to change everything—and we are afraid we will not be so well received. So we try to keep it a secret, try to appear as Americans…But that we could not do because of our accent. So we settled in a country nobody ever has heard about and now we are claiming to be Hungarians.

Historically, postwar black immigrants to Britain were concerned less with preserving their cultural differences than in achieving political equality. The political elite, on the other hand, has been obsessed by the question of cultural difference.

My father and his brothers never mentioned to their English wives and children that they were Jewish. Being Hungarian was exotic and foreign enough to begin with, and so long as they were not asked, they found it easier, from 1919 on, to let the matter drop.

I remember when I first came to America, nobody had a clue what a black Englishman was. I was either South African or Australian to them.

They've lived here now for more than half of their lives, and they raised a family here and now have grandchildren here... It has become their home, but at the same time, for my parents, I don't think either of them will ever consciously think, 'I am an American.'

I always feel like people misunderstand the difference between an Asian story and an Asian-American story. That's completely different, too. I have friends who grew up in Asia, and our experiences are so different. Even though we might look the same, I feel like being Asian and then being Asian-American is completely different.

As little boys, my brother and I used to spend hours with my grandmother, asking her about the details of how she came to America. She could only give us a smattering of details, but they all found their way into our collective imagination, eventually becoming a part of our own cultural identity and connection to the past.