I felt like exploring Mexico was a way of exploring my father, myself, — Jean Guerrero

"there is a very strong feeling thats attached to saying my name the way that its meant to be said. You know, like, I feel embodied. I feel, like, deeply rooted in my ancestors and my mothers sacrifices for me, my abuelita. My grandmother, you know I feel them inside of me. Like, I feel different when I say my name."

"I think that what needs to change is just this idea that we have of someone, you know, when somebody teaches us how to say their name, we shouldnt see it as a burden. And I think we often do see it as a burden, but we should see it as a gift. I think its a beautiful gift to learn how to say somebodys name."

"The stories that always interested me were about people and how people were being affected by industry. So like human rights violations at the hands of U.S. and Canadian mining companies, things like that I found myself not being able to explore as much as I wanted to."

"I feel like like this whole notion of crossing borders appeals to me because curiosity is basically, no one is curious unless they admit that they don’t know something. You will not explore beyond your world unless your recognize that there lies more beyond your world worth exploring."

"when I was a kid. I grew up in San Diego, on the border with Tijuana, with a Mexican dad and a Puerto Rican mom. Spanish was my first language. But I went to a private Episcopalian elementary school, where it was against the rules to speak Spanish. You know, the teachers referred to me as Jean Guerrero. And if we were caught speaking Spanish, we had to stay in detention and we had to write, I will not speak Spanish, I will not speak Spanish a hundred times. This was during a period of intense anti-Mexican and anti-immigrant hate in California. And, you know, I wanted to please the teachers. I knew how much my mom was sacrificing for me to go to that school. She - at that point, my parents had split up. And she was a single mom. There was a struggle for her. And I just - I wanted to do well in school. And so I internalized, you know, the teachers disdain for Spanish. I internalized this idea of my language, my parents language as being delinquent. And I mostly renounced Spanish. And I adopted that identity as Jean Guerrero."

"This internalized English language supremacy, like, what it did was like it created, like, a real - I dont know - like, this almost, like, self-hatred, where I didnt understand what had happened until many years later, when I was reading the Mexican author Reyna Granda, who writes about subtractive bilingualism and how, you know, this practice of forcing children to stop speaking their native language and to see it as something bad also causes children to internalize this disdain, you know, the dominant white cultures disdain for their own culture and their own selves. And for me, what that did is it created a lot of self-destructive behavior where I was, you know, cutting my wrists as a teenager. I was, you know, binge drinking, drug abuse, a lot of self-destructive behavior. And then also, my mother, when she would make mistakes in English, you know, I would correct her. And I would say really, you know, monstrous things like learn English. And this is something that, you know, I look back on with, like, an immense amount of pain. And it wasnt something that I was able to fully confront until I saw Reyna Grande talking about this - internalizing this disdain for her mother."