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Other authors named Alma:
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Author's popularity: 1
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Popularity: 1
Vote: | A left-wing guerrilla is somebody who belongs to an organization that by now is 30 or 40 years old. There are several guerrilla groups in Colombia, not just one. And they more or less adhere to a Maoist or a traditional Cuban approach to revolution. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | And in fact, I dream in whatever language I'm living in. So that, you know, after six months of being in the States, I started dreaming in English again. And when I moved back to Mexico, after a few months, I started dreaming in Spanish again. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | And, of course, millions of us cross the border to work in US homes and gardens and factories and carpentry shops and restaurants, and if you go to a restaurant pretty much anywhere in the United States, the chances are that the dishes will be washed by a Mexican. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | But we all dream of, you know, the great novel that we will write some day when we have time. And it's probably not happening. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Hotel rooms, for example, are good places for me to write because they're so free of associations. I have to get myself into my sort of tattyest sweatpants and T-shirt and I do it on a computer now, amazingly enough. I never could use a typewriter because the noise... drove me crazy, but I used to use a notebook. Now I use a computer because it doesn't make that much noise. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I love food and I love everything involved with food. I love the fun of it. I love restaurants. I love cooking, although I don't cook very much. I love kitchens. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | I may not have a practical mind, but it's very fixated on concrete things. I like detail. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I read a lot. And both of my parents, I think, would have wanted to be writers. It's funny how one ends up doing the things that-that parents-perhaps, the dreams that parents couldn't fulfill. I know that my mother would have been beyond herself to have had a story published in The New Yorker. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | I realized that I had traveled to Havana during what now seems like the childhood of the Cuban Revolution, if you think that Fidel has now been in power for 44 extremely long years. I started looking at the revolution as history, and not as part of the daily news. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | I think that one of the things that we can really all feel very happy about is that the human rights situation in Latin America has improved enormously over the last 10 years, enormously, enormously. But the level or horror that some of us had to cover as reporters working in Latin America was pretty hard to describe at points. And it has changed. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I think that the temptation to feel that your entire life has been wasted must be very great for a lot of Cubans. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I think the great Mexican cuisine is dying because there are fast foods now competing, because there are supermarkets, and supermarkets can't afford to keep in stock a lot of these very perishable products that are used for fine Mexican cooking. Women are working and real Mexican cooking requires enormous amounts of time. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I tried to reconstruct just how and why I had stopped dancing years earlier. The turning point for that decision was a six-month sojourn teaching dance in Cuba back in 1970. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | I went to school at a school that doesn't exist anymore. It was called the Walden School, so you can guess a lot of things from it by the name, right? We were allowed to smoke in the classroom. We all wore blue jeans and sandals. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | I'm an efficient, good, professional reporter. But I also write. And so what I try to do is write about places that I know that I care about intensely and write about them in a way that conveys the fact that I care. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | If you're going to be a myth or want to be a myth, you'd better die young. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | Juan Peron, I think in the end, had become a little resentful of Eva. She was so popular. She was so much more loved than he was. And he never wanted to be buried in the same tomb with her. So she was buried in her family crypt; he was buried in his own crypt. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | My great-great-great-I may be missing a great there-grandfather was called Guillermo Prieto, and he was a very popular poet in his day, and a journalist and a member of President Juarez's Cabinet. |
Popularity: -3
Vote: | One does, after all, take on many of the givens of a society when one takes on its language. |
Popularity: -3
Vote: | So, you know, I always say that I'm a Mexican, but if I had to be a citizen of anywhere else, I'd be a citizen of Manhattan. I-I feel very much a New Yorker. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Somebody will come from Village X and then they'll send for the brother and then they'll send for the sister and then they'll send for the brother-in-law and then they'll send for the wife of the brother-in-law. Everybody sharing a very small house or an apartment, working in shifts and sending money back to the family. |
Popularity: -3
Vote: | Talking in one language and talking in another, I think inevitably, produce two different personalities, as far as I've seen in other people. I assume it does the same for me. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | The best translators slip into the glove of a text and then turn it inside out into another language, and the whole thing comes out looking like a brand-new glove again. I'm completely in awe of this skill, since I happen to be both bilingual and a writer, but nevertheless a lousy translator. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | The fact that I am temperamentally so unsuited to understand that country made my time there infinitely more difficult, but I think it made for a better book; any number of people have gone all swoony about Cuba, and I couldn't. But I tried so hard! So I think I learned a lot, in the course of all that effort, and I observed a lot, and it may be that the text has some edge as a result. That's what I hoped for, at any rate. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | The left is being funded primarily by the drug traffickers who provide this tax money and that's why the guerrillas in Colombia, unlike the guerrillas anywhere else in Latin America, have been able to survive for 40 years because they have a hard, solid source of income. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | The most that somebody in Mexico City will get paid for a job in construction is 100 pesos a day. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | There is no point to samba if it doesn't make you smile. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Translation is a notoriously thankless profession: there is absolutely no money in it; it involves a severe submersion of the self into another; the hours are long and you get about as much recognition for your efforts as the telephone repairman. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Well, one of the things I discovered in the course of looking back and writing about what I saw in my memory is that I was a closely observant person long before I became a reporter. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | What I wonder is what would happen in California, say, if all the Mexicans left from one day to the next? |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | When all hell broke loose in Nicaragua, nobody knew where Nicaragua was, nobody knew how to pronounce that, nobody knew how to spell that. And I happened to speak English, and I happened to know John Retty, who was the editor of Latin American Newsletters, and he said would I go. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | You kno, writers are ruthless. My passionate interest in a given subject, or country, generally extends to about one week after the galleys come out, and then I'm on to something else. My one abiding passion has been for Colombia, for reasons that are completely unclear to me - which is probably just as well. As for Cuba, what can I say? It's tropical, and I'm not. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | You know, one, two, three, four, five years go by and then Marcos gets a little boring. |
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Biography
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Alma Guillermoprieto (born May 27, 1949) is a Mexican journalist who has written extensively about Latin America for the British and American press. Her writings have also been widely disseminated within the Spanish-speaking world.
Guillermoprieto was born and grew up in Mexico City. In her teens, she moved to New York City with her mother where she studied modern dance for several years. From 1962 until 1973, she was a professional dancer.
In the mid-1970s, she started her career as a journalist for The Guardian, moving later to the Washington Post.
In January, 1982, Guillermoprieto, then based in Mexico City, was one of two journalists (the other was Raymond Bonner of The New York Times) who broke the story of the El Mozote massacre in which some 900 villagers at El Mozote, El Salvador, were slaughtered by the Salvadoran army in December, 1991.
With great hardship and at great personal risk, she was smuggled by FMLN rebels to visit the site approximately a month after the massacre took place.
When the story broke simultaneously in the Post and Times on January 27, 1982, it was dismissed as propaganda by the Reagan administration, as it seriously undermined efforts by the US government to bolster the human rights image of the Salvadoran government, which the US was supporting with large amounts of military aid.
Subsequently, however, the details of the massacre as first reported by Guillermoprieto and Bonner were verified, with widespread repercussions.
During much of the subsequent decade, Guillermoprieto was a South America bureau chief for Newsweek .
Her first book, Samba (1990), was an account of a season studying at a samba school in Rio de Janeiro.
During the 1990s, she came into her own as a freelance writer, producing long, extensively researched articles on Latin American culture and politics for The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, including outstanding pieces on the Colombian civil war, the Shining Path rebel movement in Peru, the aftermath of the "Dirty War" in Argentina, and post-Sandinista Nicaragua.
These were bundled in the book The Heart That Bleeds (1994), now considered a classical portrait of the politics and culture of Latin America during the "lost decade" (it was published in Spanish as Al pie de un volcán te escribo — Crónicas latinoamericanas in 1995).
In April 1995, at the request of Gabriel García Márquez, Guillermoprieto taught the inaugural workshop at the Fundación para un Nuevo Periodismo Iberoamericano, an institute for promoting journalism that was established by García Márquez in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia. She has since held seven workshops for young journalists throughtout the continent.
That same year, Guillermoprieto also received a MacArthur Fellowship.
A second anthology of articles, Looking for History, was published in 2001. Guillermoprieto also published a collection of articles in Spanish on the Mexican crisis, El año en que no fuimos felices.
In 2004, Guillermoprieto published a memoir, Dancing with Cuba (ISBN 0375420932), which revolved on the year she spent living in Cuba in her early twenties. An excerpt of it was published in 2003 in The New Yorker
...(more on Wikipedia)
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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Alma Guillermoprieto".
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