Talk:Oscar Zeta Acosta

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• The truth of it was they both conspired to make men out of two innocent Mexican boys. It seemed that the sole purpose of childhood was to train boys how to be men. Not men of the future, but now. We had to get up early, run home from school, work on weekends, holidays and during vacations, all for the purpose of being men. We were supposed to talk like un hombre, walk like a man, act like a man and think like a man.

• And they all are speaking in that language of my youth; that language which I had stopped speaking at the age of seven when the captain insisted we wouldn’t learn English unless we stopped speaking Spanish; a language of soft vowels and resilient consonants, always with the fast rolling r’s to threaten or to cajole; a language for moonlit nights under tropical storms, for starry nights in brown deserts and for making declarations of war on top of snow-capped mountains; a language perfect in every detail for people who are serious about life and preoccupied with death only as it refers to that last day of one’s sojourn on this particular spot.