Edward Burnett Tylor Quotes

We twentieth-century Mexicans, even those of pure Indian descent, look on the pre-Columbian world as a world on the other side, not only distant in time but across the cultural divide.

I have never denied my background or my culture. I have taught my child to embrace her Mexican heritage, to love my first language, Spanish, to learn about Mexican history, music, folk art, food, and even the Mexican candy I grew up with.

There is a heavy Mexican Catholic streak in my movies, and a huge Mexican sense of melodrama. Everything is overwrought, and there's a sense of acceptance of the fantastic in my films, which is innately Mexican. So when people ask, 'How can you define the Mexican-ness of your films?' I go, 'How can I not?' It's all I am.

Are we really so far from the Victorians? Much of what our society holds important was shaped in the 19th century.

Tijuana is a baby compared to pre-Hispanic cities like Puebla or Oaxaca, the birthplace of mole.

The Philippine races, like all the Malays, do not succumb before the foreigner, like the Australians, the Polynesians and the Indians of the New World.

When I was living in Mexico and writing a book called 'Aztec,' I had to make a deliberate effort to ignore a lot of the 'typically Mexican landscape' around me - banana and citrus groves, roses and carnations, burros and toros - because they did not exist in Mexico in the 15th century, the time of my book.

You have an absolute freedom in Mexican writing today in which you don't necessarily have to deal with the Mexican identity. You know why? Because we have an identity... We know who we are. We know what it means to be a Mexican.

Everyone who's born in the Western Hemisphere is a Native American. We are all Native Americans.

I think for a lot of so-called post-colonial peoples, there's a feeling of not being quite legitimate, of not being pure enough.

The past could liberate or imprison - it creates a nation's character, provides the nourishment or the poison a people imbibe in their very marrow.

My parents gave me a Mexican name. In our culture, we are named after the events of the day.

Philippine history has been far too long defined by the countries that controlled the country.

Spain today, rather than a nation, is a cloud of dust remaining after a great people have galloped down the highway of history.

A people without a history is like the wind over buffalo grass.

The Iraqis have a country that inherited cultures thousands of years old while the Americans have a culture only two hundred years old. Two hundred years will teach thousands of years? Oh Americans, leave Iraq for its people.

It was the tribes of the Lenni Lenape!... It was but yesterday that the children of the Lenape were masters of the world.

Our history is responsible for the differences in the South African way of life.

Mexican Spaniards sought to deny their Spanish origins by identifying themselves with an idealized Indian past and creating the myth of “Our Lady of Guadalupe” as an independent source of religious authority for the Mexican Church.

For Africa to me... is more than a glamorous fact. It is a historical truth. No man can know where he is going unless he knows exactly where he has been and exactly how he arrived at his present place.

The understanding that the political and intellectual class of the United States has of Mexico is a country whose position is that of a back yard.

Obviously, my Indigenous culture is very special to me.

What colonialism does is cause an identity crisis about one's own culture.

I wanted to infuse my music with Mexican character.

You can't understand America without understanding the Puritans. In many ways, we're still living out their legacy in ways that are good and bad.