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1 " She is a karateka," La Osa replied. "Nayeli could karate-kick you to death where you sit.""That's hardly feminine." He sniffed."Perhaps," Nayeli suggested, "it is time for a new kind of femininity. "
― Luis Alberto Urrea , Into the Beautiful North
2 " No wonder Americans seemed crazy to everybody else--they were utterly alone in the vastness of this ridiculously immense land. They all skittered about, alighting and flying off again like frantic butterflies. Looking for--what? What were they looking for? "
3 " Progress might be inevitable, but there was no reason they should knuckle under without a fight. "
4 " The sky peeled back for a moment, and a weak ray of sunset spilled over the scene like the diseased eye of some forgetful god -- the light bearing with it cold in place of heat. "
5 " The world looked to them like a great roll of butcher paper unfurled on a table. "
6 " Fat green frogs, the eternally grinning type destined to be shellacked into bizarre poses while wearing mariachi hats and holding toy trumpets and guitars and then sold in tourist traps all over Mexico, jostled lazily in the dappled shadows. "
7 " Don Pepe was a Mexican man: a fatalist. He meant to impart much more than comfort. He meant that all good things would also end. All joy would crumble. And death would visit each and every one of them. He meant that regimes and ancient orders and cultures would all collapse. The world as we know it becomes a new world overnight. "
8 " Brown birds lined up on telephone wires like beads on a cheap Tijuana necklace. "
9 " They signed in as Mr. P. Villa and Mrs. S. Hayek. "
10 " The government knew a secret that the American public didn’t: the numbers of border crossers were down, across the board. Maybe the fence, maybe the harsh new atmosphere "
11 " The armored creatures wrestled one another, and when one seemed about to climb out of the basket and make its escape, the others would grab it and haul it back down into the endless battle. "
12 " Some of the women, it must be said, had not yet accepted the idea that a woman could be Municipal President. They had been told that they were moody and flighty and illogical and incapable for so long that they believed these things. "
13 " shook her, this place. It was awful. Tragic. Yet… yet it moved her. The sorrow she felt. It was profound. It was moving, somehow. The sorrow of the terrible abandoned garbage dump and the sad graves and the lonesome shacks made her feel something so far inside herself that she could not define it or place it. She was so disturbed that it gave her the strangest comfort, as though something she had suspected about life all along was being confirmed, and the sorrow she felt in her bed at night was reflected by this soil. "
