Carlos Mencia Quotes

I am half Cuban American.

India is still flinching from a cultural insult, still looking for its identity.

I am of Russian-Jewish distraction.

When I was growing up, I despised Irishness. I felt our music, our television and our books were just poor imitations of what came out of Britain and America. I was all set to abandon it entirely.

Sometimes, growing up, I tried to be very Latina; I would change my voice... experiment with my hair a lot, trying to figure out who I was in a primarily white school.

I should not have to prove my ethnicity to anyone. I know who I am.

As a boy, I felt ashamed of being Mexican. I'd say I was Hawaiian.

I never fit in. Everyone knew my dad was Indian. I was half-Indian.

Am I Latin? Am I American? What the hell am I? I love my culture and I'm very proud of my culture.

There are some Chicanos who don't want to be Chicanos - they want to be Mexican-American, Hispanic, or even Spanish.

Somebody told me once I wasn't Latin enough, and that made me laugh.

For 'American Born Chinese,' my first graphic novel with First Second Books, I did mostly 'memory' research. It's fiction, but I pulled heavily from my own childhood.

Having uncritically accepted [Western] culture in everything, we now find we have lost our hold on the autonomous ideals of the Japanese race.

If we deny our culture and become nothing and everything, that weakens us.

You're trying to grow up, and you don't want to be like your parents, and that gets mixed up with being Korean... They brought their values from Korea, and I accepted them because I didn't know anything more. But as I grow older, I feel more Korean every year; it's very strange.

I'm American; I was born and raised in America, and I don't want to fake who I am to fit a stereotype.

I happen to be half West Indian, but I don't know that side of my family.

I was torn between the Americanness my mom wanted for me and the Mexicanness my father wanted - they were wrestling for cultural influence over me.

More than anything, I'm an American kid, and my music reflects that more so than being an Asian-American. I think it's important but also something that can detrimental to your career if celebrated too much.

I've lived 16, 17 years of my life in Asia, and that's most of my life. I was born in Asia - I've lived cultures that are synonymous with Asian culture - but it's still not Asian enough for some people.

Growing up in the U.S. as an Indian wasn't easy.

Weirdly, when I was in drama school my accent probably got stronger because of that sense of identity when you leave home and go to somewhere where there are loads of people from different places. Holding on to being Welsh and where I was from was a real crutch for me.

But there were years when, in search of what I thought was better, nobler things I denied these, my people, and my family. I forgot the songs they sung - and most of those songs are now dead; I erased their dialect from my tongue; I was ashamed of them and their ways of life. But now - yes, I love them; they are a part of my blood; they, with all their virtues and their faults, played a great part in forming my way of looking at life.

I never even realized I was Jewish until I was practically grown up. Or rather, I used to feel that everybody in the world was Jewish, which amounts to the same thing.

I'm three quarters Scottish, but I sound English. I don't really see British as a race.