Border Experience Quotes

I spent two months in a jail once. In a Mexican border town.

When you're out of your own cultural context you have conversations with yourself that you just don't have at any other point in your life. When you're in a hotel room on the border between India and Nepal you can really discover things about yourself.

I was blessed to be able to be born here. My dad crossed. My dad illegally went through the border and was living under a bridge; he was homeless. People are making fun of him, beating him up. All kinds of things. After he kind of figured out the situation, he brought my mom over.

Part of the job for me and others from El Paso who live along the border is to dispel the myths about how supposedly dangerous the border is.

Growing up, I didn't realize how unique it was to live on the border of the United States and Mexico. It wasn't until I started doing interviews with the press that I actually began to appreciate just how cool it was that I would cross the international border every single day from Tijuana into San Diego to go to school.

There's a particular quality that those of us who live on the border share; we can switch from being Mexican to being American in an instant just by scanning our surroundings. Not everybody has this superpower; it takes a very specific kind of upbringing to instill a deep pride in two very different cultures.

A writer has a difficult fate, but a Jewish writer has an especially difficult fate. His soul is torn; he lives on two streets with three languages. It is a misfortune to live on this sort of 'border,' and that is what I have experienced.

We're living in what used to be Mexico, and there's this very fluid border feeling. You go a little bit south of Tijuana, for instance, into Ensenada, and it still seems kind of borderlike. And you go much farther, suddenly the prices are lower, the prostitution is different, the commerce is different, everything feels more "Mexican."

I think the most interesting parts of human experience might be the sparks that come from that sort of chipping flint of cultures rubbing against each other. And living on the border between Mexico and the U.S. for so many years gave me a lot of insight into that.

I was born in Monterrey, Mexico, and I would go to school in Texas. I lived on the border, so I was very fortunate to grow up between two worlds and both cultures and both languages and traditions.