A Quote by Lindi Ortega

There were so many different influences in my life: being half Mexican and half Irish, growing up an only child of immigrant parents, being bullied in school, feeling alienated and lonely, this undertone of darkness. All that culminated and came out in my music and made it different.
I got bullied so much growing up for being a different color in a majority white school.
Puerto Rican culture is very different from Mexican culture. Part of the Mexican psychology is the idea of being an immigrant or being illegal or being confused with that. That doesn't happen with Puerto Ricans, because you're a commonwealth.
I feel like I have so many amazing opportunities because of my immigrant mother, my immigrant grandparents. There are so many of us who do come from immigrants - even some people who support Trump's travel ban. I think we need to take a step back and realize what the real issues are - it's not being from different places or being different.
Me and my sisters were taught that if our eyes worked and our legs worked, we were beautiful. We had so many kids in our family that if we all got in front of the mirror and were ashamed of browns and golds and yellows and whites, and we believed what society told us - that the darker people were less attractive and the lighter ones were prettier - we would have had sibling murders. My family, being half-rural and half-military, just came from a different place.
I mean, I wasn't the best student in school. It would be different if I were to pursue music while I was already in school and doing things for my parents to be proud of and music was a side thing. Being that I dropped everything to do music, they was not with it.
Growing up, I naturally embraced who I was, but I was always battling with myself. So I spent half my time being proud of being a woman and the other half completely hating it.
I think oldest children have a different mentality or know that there were different expectations of them, and I was not only the oldest child - I was the oldest grandchild of 18 grandchildren. I definitely grew up feeling like there were a lot of people who expected me to do something. But it was a very conservative family, very conservative neighborhood. I'm talking mid- to late '60s when I was growing up there, and so if I had stayed in the Boston area, I think my life would have been radically different.
Being an MP is quite a strange job, because you do it in two different places. Half the time I'm in Westminster and the other half I'm in my constituency and the job is different in both of them.
At different points, I applied to graduate school. I got into medical school. I thought about being a writer. I thought about being an investment banker. I just didn't know what I wanted to do with myself. I think the thing that best suits me about being a C.E.O. is that you get to exercise many different talents and wear many different hats.
In our country, being from immigrant parents, growing up black in the South, coming out at 16 years old, being a teen parent... you would assume that my life would amount to nothing. And here I stand today. So, if I can do it... you can, too!
When everyone at school is speaking one language, and a lot of your classmates' parents also speak it, and you go home and see that your community is different -there is a sense of shame attached to that. It really takes growing up to treasure the specialness of being different.
As a child, I grew up the son of German immigrant parents, so I grew up being teased and called 'Fritz' at school. When I married my wife and went to live in Vienna, I was teased for being a Brit.
I was a different sort of child, as half the children are. I was in that category of being free-spirited.
Sometimes, being different feels a lot like being alone. But with that being said, being true to that and being true to my standards and my way of doing things in my art and my music, everything that has made me feel very different... in the end, it has made me the happiest.
My half-breed culture informs everything I do but I'm not thinking about it. I'm just doing it. Not until very late in my career did I realize that I was so fortunate to just live with this profound pride in being half Mexican without being attacked for it.
Identity is made up of lots of different things now. Different colors and patterns stand out at different times. Different instruments in the symphony of being are more distinct than others at different times.
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