Richard Rodriguez

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Information about the author.

Works

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…

 

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…

 
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