Richard Rodriguez
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Brown: The Last Discovery of America
Richard Rodriguez
America is browning. As politicians, schoolteachers, and grandparents attempt to decipher what that might mean, Richard Rodriguez argues America has been brown from its inception, as he himself is.
As a brown man, I think . . .
(But do we really think that color colors thought?)
In his two previous memoirs, Hunger of Memory and Days of Obligation, Rodriguez wrote about the intersection of his private life with public issues of class and ethnicity. With Brown, his consideration of race, Rodriguez completes his “trilogy on American public life.”
For Rodriguez, brown is not a singular color. Brown is evidence of mixture. Brown is a shade created by desire-an emblem of the erotic history of America, which began the moment the African and the European met within the Indian eye. Rodriguez reflects on various cultural associations of the color brown-toil, decay, impurity, time-arranging dazzling juxtapositions for which he is justly famous: Alexis de Tocqueville, Malcolm X, minstrel shows, Broadway musicals, Puritanism, the Sistine Chapel, Cubism,…
Days of Obligation: An Argument With My Mexican Father
Richard Rodriguez
When I was fourteen and my father was fifty, we toyed with the argument that had once torn Europe, South from North, Catholic from Protestant, as we polished the blue DeSoto. “Life is harder than you think, boy.” “You’re thinking of Mexico Papa.” “You’ll see.”
A fragment of dialogue can summarize the “argument” of Richard Rodriguez’s new book, though the book contains five centuries, beginning with the conquest of Mexico by Hernan Cortes; ending in 1992, in San Francisco—an American Asian city, during the years of plague. In Days of Obligation, Mexico and the United States are portrayed as moral rivals upon the landscape of Mr. Rodriguez’s beloved California. Mexico wears the mask of tragedy, the United States wears the mask of comedy. By the end of the book the reader recognizes an historical irony: The United States is becoming a culture of tragedy; Mexico, meanwhile, revels in youthful optimism. Mexico and the United States have exchanged roles.
These ferocious essays cannot be dismissed as regional. They are not—or only insofar as Montaigne’s essays…
