Parenting & Family Quote by Gilbert Hernandez

There is no melodrama in Hernandez's phrasing, which is exactly why it lands. "Two worlds" is the immigrant-kid cliche he refuses to romanticize: one world is named by intimacy (relatives, cousins, neighborhood kids), the other by institution (school). The Mexican world isn't an identity statement so much as an ecosystem, held together by proximity and shared routines. The school world is described with the bureaucratic chill of a demographic label: "ethnically mixed". Not hostile, not welcoming either. Just different, and therefore instructive.

The subtext is about code-switching before the term became mainstream, and about how American life teaches you to compartmentalize early. Home is where you are unmarked; school is where you are sorted. The quote also hints at an asymmetry: he doesn't say he lived in "the American world". He says "school". America, for many children of immigrants, first arrives not as a nation but as a system of rules, accents, lunch tables, and curriculum - a place where difference becomes legible and therefore negotiable.

Coming from Gilbert Hernandez, co-creator of Love and Rockets, the line reads like an origin story for a whole artistic sensibility: the ability to render a Chicano neighborhood with granular affection while also observing it with a wider, mixed-audience gaze. It's less about being torn than being doubled - a narrative engine that turns everyday social borders into character, humor, and tension.