Richard Rodriguez
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by Philip Gambone

Consider this:
"The whitest dinner party I ever attended was a Mexico City dinner party where a Mexican squire of exquisite manner, mustache, and flán-like jowl, expressed himself surprised, so surprised, to learn that I am a writer. One thought he would never get over it. Un escritor… ¿Un escritor …? Turning the word on a lathe of tooth and tongue, until: 'You know, in Mexico, I think we do not have writers who look like you,' he said. He meant dark skin, thick lips, Indian nose, bugger your mother."

Or this:
"Ethnic separateness: I couldn't do it. The problem with being labeled 'Hispanic' is that it wasn't like being Asian or white. It wasn't a racial designation; it was a cultural designation. The cues I gave—my knowledge of English literature, of eighteenth-century London, of Shakespeare—didn't belong to the Hispanic revival. It was a real violation of the caricature."

Or this:
"Mexico City is the capital of modernity, for in the sixteenth century, under the tutelage of a curious Indian whore, under the patronage of the Queen of Heaven, Mexico initiated the task of the twenty-first century—the renewal of the old, the known world, through miscegenation. Mexico carries the idea of a round world to its biological conclusion."

These are but three of the many trenchant, provocative and often breathtaking paragraphs that make up a trilogy of memoirs by Mexican American writer, lecturer, teacher, and Pulitzer Prize nominee Richard Rodriguez. I have just finished revisiting these fascinating, complex (and sometimes exasperating) books, and what strikes me is how almost any paragraph by Rodriguez contains enough rich ore for an entire essay. As he once told me in an interview, "I don't sit still on the page." I'll say!

Rodriguez (photo Timothy Archibald)
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The three memoirs—Hunger for Memory (1982); Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father (1992); and Brown: The Last Discovery of America (2002)—focus on what Rodriguez calls "three isolations": class, ethnicity and race. In all three books, he proclaims a larger definition of himself, one that transcends the facile moniker "Latino": "I defy anyone who tries to unblend me or to say what is appropriate to my voice," he writes.

Several years ago, I had the opportunity to spend three hours with Rodriguez, interviewing him for a book of profiles I was writing. During that conversation, Rodriguez—who calls himself "a queer Catholic Indian Spaniard at home in a temperate Chinese city in a fading blond state in a post-Protestant nation"—brought up, in rapid succession, topics that included Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps, the Catholic Church, his impatience with today's gay movement, the latest novel by André Aciman, affirmative action, the personal affronts and slights he has suffered, Medici Florence. And, of course, his books.

Rodriguez flashed onto the literary scene with Hunger of Memory, the story of his intellectual odyssey from Mexican-American scholarship boy to Yale-courted scholar of Renaissance literature. In that book, he recounted how, keenly convinced of the injustice of affirmative action, he withdrew his name from consideration for prestigious university professorships. It was a courageous insistence on freedom—"the freedom," he writes, "so crucial to adulthood, to become a person very different in public from the person I am at home."

Since his 1975 exodus from the Academy, Rodriguez's views on affirmative action, Catholicism, and bilingual education have made him "notorious among certain leaders of America's Ethnic Left." He's been called a "brown Uncle Tom." He hasn't fared much better with the gay establishment. In "Late Victorians," an essay in Days of Obligation, he wrote about his own skepticism toward the gay pursuit of an earthly paradise. In response, he received "a lot of letters saying how dare I write such an essay, that it was a regression to the guilt-ridden fifties. I knew at that point that I would never be a 'gay writer.'" A further example of how he has always eschewed categorization and simple labels.

Days of Obligation
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Richard Rodriguez was born in 1944 in San Francisco to parents who were immigrants from Mexico. The family settled in Sacramento. His father did factory and janitorial work, eventually becoming a dental technician. Pride ran in the family: "I remember my young Mexican mother saying to her children, in Spanish, 'We are not minorities,' in the same voice she would use decades later to refuse the term 'senior citizen.'"

It was "a busy white time" in the Sacramento of his childhood. Rodriguez became acutely aware of his Indigenous features: "No one in my family had a face as dark or as Indian as mine. My face could not portray the ambition I brought to it…. Mestizo in Mexican Spanish means mixed, confused." He dragged a razor blade across his arm "to see if I could get the brown out."

"Brown was like the skinny or fat kids left over after the team captains chose sides. 'You take the rest'—my cue to wander away to the sidelines." Those sidelines included the public library, a cosmopolitan place where there was "no segregated shelf." Books gave Rodriguez "permission to take any society, any language, any experience as mine."

He became a voracious reader and, by his own admission, intellectually arrogant. At his all-boy high school, he "blatantly" sought A's and studied his Anglo classmates "like specimens—the china, the silver, the linen, how they decorated the living room, their Sinatra records. I knew that conversation was very important to those people. If you could talk, if you could say amusing, interesting things, you'd be invited back."

Rodriguez speaks glowingly of the Irish nuns who were his teachers. "They were not sentimental about education. They knew the path to inclusion: learn English, don't be Irish, participate in the American experience, build St. Patrick's Cathedral. And show the bastards. Paint the green line down Fifth Avenue and make them stand at attention. … I was a Mexican teenager in America who had become an Irish Catholic."

Having embraced Catholicism without question—"It was the air; it was the light"—Rodriguez has remained a devote and, many would say, very conservative Catholic. The tension between Protestant optimism and the "tragic culture" of Catholicism has pretty much defined his entire outlook. It is one of the fundamental tensions that comprises what he means when he says "brown."

By the time he left high school, Rodriguez felt that he had "betrayed my very being by exchanging my private Mexicanness for an American identity. Nevertheless, he chose to attend Stanford, not only for its academic reputation but also because "it was the school rich people went to."

"Minority student," Rodriguez writes in Hunger of Memory, "that was the label I bore in college at Stanford, then in graduate school at Columbia and Berkeley: a nonwhite reader of Spenser and Milton and Austen." At first, he accepted the label. Later, it slowly became a source of unease: "My brown advantage became a kind of embarrassment. For I never had an adversarial relationship to American culture. I was never at war with the tongue… I trusted white literature, because I was able to attribute universality to white literature."

Hunger of Memory
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On the day I interviewed him, he elaborated, saying that he is "horrified that the price of my inclusion in America is my segregation. As a writer, in order to gain entrance into Barnes and Noble, I have to enter at the segregated counter called 'Latino Studies.' We have tolerated a liberal agenda that has segregated the mind according to these crude categories of membership. When I was a boy, James Baldwin was not found in the Black section. He was Literature. Literature trumped everything."

From 1975 to 1979, Rodriguez lived in Los Angeles, a period he calls the "lost years." In L.A., he tried out a more public gay life. "I was suddenly catapulted into a very glamorous existence. All the lessons that I had learned in grammar school about going to big houses, they flowered there. I was taken on vacations, into worlds that were more glamorous, more wealthy." In this rarefied gay world—he calls it "pagan and glorious"—Rodriguez soon learned that his linguistic skills "were best put aside. It was a different game. A Nautilus body spoke more. It was not the world of Cole Porter."

In 1979, he moved back to San Francisco to pursue a career as a public intellectual, in order "not to be distracted by the ambitions or, for that matter, the pleasures of others." By then the AIDS epidemic had surfaced. "I saw beautiful men die, youth die. I was paralyzed by their deaths. I saw death everywhere. I helped a lot of men die. If I were to write a sexual coming-of-age novel, it would be with a bed pan."

While he does feel a responsibility to address gay issues, Rodriguez says that he is "never brought within the circle." Nor, he told me, does he "take membership within a gay family. That's not the way it plays with me. I don't live that life. Most of my literary friends are not gay. And most of my literary friends who are gay have usually been censorious of me in print at some point. Where do they get permission to evaluate the level of my sexual candor? Where is there some tolerance for aspects or varieties of experience? Why is it that we all have to be on the same float in the Gay Day parade?"

"The American 'I' is predicated upon an astonishing 'pursuit of happiness,' truly an American invention. But what if one 'I' is Roman Catholic and one 'I' is gay? Down which path is happiness pursued?" Rodriguez tends to sidestep an answer. It's the ambiguity that he has come to depend upon. "That is what I mean by brown. The answer is that I cannot reconcile."

Rodriguez's third book, Brown: The Last Discovery of America, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Award. In it, he declares that the "future is brown." By brown he means the "complication" of an identity that refuses simple categorization; he means living beyond the assurances of neatly defined borders. He means mestizaje, biological and cultural mixing. He means embracing an authenticity that does not pay lip service to pre-packaged definitions of who he, a Mexican American, is supposed to be.

Brown - The Last Discovery of America
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"Those of us who are 'complicated,' like gay Catholics, find ourselves in a real quandary. The absolute inability of intellectuals to understand how you could believe in God! The new atheism is childish. I'm old enough to remember when the civil rights movement was animated by Black Protestantism, when the Left was able to tolerate [religious] belief, when the finest rhetoric of the Left was inspired by Biblical cadence. To separate ourselves from that realm of experience is death."

Since his three memoirs, Rodriguez has gone on to write another book, Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography (2013), about his love for the world's three "desert religions"—Judaism, Christianity and Islam—the monotheistic religions that have, because of his sexuality, historically excluded him. In that book, he asks, Why do I stay in the Catholic Church? His answer: "I stay in the church because the church is more than its ignorance; the church gives me more than it denies me. I stay in the church because it is mine."

Is this a "brown" answer? It is certainly an answer typical of the complicated, provocative, trenchant and, yes, maddening writer than is Richard Rodriguez. When my book of profiles, Travels in a Gay Nation, came out, Rodriguez wrote to me in anger, alleging that I had pigeonholed him as a gay writer. I don't think I did that—not to a greater extent than his own answers to my questions led me to believe. But there it was: anger at another well-meaning white guy trying to get to the essence of a cultural complexity—a personal cultural complexity—that insists on its own right to self-definition. Amen.

Travels in a Gay Nation
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Philip Gambone, a retired high school English teacher, also taught creative and expository writing at Harvard for twenty-eight years. He is the author of five books, most recently As Far As I Can Tell: Finding My Father in World War II, which was named one of the Best Books of 2020 by the Boston Globe. It is available through Amazon, at the Biblioteca bookshop, and at Aurora Books off the Calzada de la Aurora.

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