Quotable

Send LALA quotable comments about language from recent media clips.

"There's not a lot of truly multilingual theater going on. We'll learn about the viability of a truly bilingual experience."

–Michael John Garces, Cornerstone Theater’s new artistic director and writer of “Los Illegals” a play that treats justice and the illegal immigrant experience, playing at the Pasadena’s Armory Northwest, May 27, 2007, quoted in The Los Angeles Times

"Latinos displacing young blacks has created a great deal of frustration in the community and is the root of many of the challenges that find their ways into the street. Numerous youth have told me that businesses indicate that they prefer someone who is bilingual."

–Pasadena NAACP Chapter President Joe Brown on shootings in Northwest Pasadena, May 26, 2007, quoted in The Whittier Daily News

"When I first started writing the book, friends and colleagues said to me, 'You're going to have to choose to write either in all English or Spanish. Who are you going to sell to?' To me, it wasn’t about selling books. The choice not to translate was an aesthetic and ideological one. This is the way I talk when I'm around any interlocutor who has the slightest inkling of Spanish."

–Pomona College professor and Los Angeles native Susana Chavez-Silverman on the use of a structured Spanish-English hybrid in her book of essays, “Killer Cronicas: Bilingual Memories”, May 17, 2007, quoted in The Sacramento Bee

"My identity is L.A. I don’t feel American necessarily, and I don’t feel Japanese necessarily, but I do feel Angeleno…This is all I know, and everything else is learned."

–Ichiro Irie, a trilingual artist and founder of bilingual arts magazine Rim who grew up on the Westside, May 10, 2007, quoted in LA Weekly

Send your own Quotables, with sources and dates, to lalamag@international.ucla.edu.

Date Posted: 6/12/2007

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Quotable

"There's not a lot of truly multilingual theater going on. We'll learn about the viability of a truly bilingual experience."

"Latinos displacing young blacks has created a great deal of frustration in the community and is the root of many of the challenges that find their ways into the street. Numerous youth have told me that businesses indicate that they prefer someone who is bilingual."

"My identity is L.A. I don’t feel American necessarily, and I don’t feel Japanese necessarily, but I do feel Angeleno…This is all I know, and everything else is learned."

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