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Anticipation - Interview with Richard Rodriguez

Richard Rodriguez pins hopes on a charismatic Hispanic leader in America

Message from author, philosopher and concerned abuelito-figure Richard Rodriguez to Mexican street gangs in Phoenix and Tucson: If you’re going to pursue the clan life, and you’re going to be ignorant, and you’re going waste your young lives in vengeful minutiae, then please have the courtesy not to invoke the spirit of Aztlán or any other symbols of the greatness of Mexico.

It’s disrespectful - and inaccurate.

"At the very age when these kids should be out exploring their world," laments Rodriguez, "they’re retreating, diminishing their world, clenching and clinging to one another in gangs, occupying a few blocks of their turf, blabbing about watching one another’s back and boasting about how ‘My blood is protecting me.’ Please. The Mexican in them, the greatness of that Indian, should be pushing them to move on, not a few more blocks but throughout the land, to explore, to make something of themselves.

Look at the real revolutionary in Mexican society today. It’s the undocumented worker who left for El Norte - Chicago, Raleigh or New York - and made it, sent back money, then sent for his family."

In a strange way, Rodriguez, 62, who will be speaking at an annual lecture series in Tucson this month, strives to do in daily life what journalists profess (but rarely accomplish) every day in comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable.

Only Rodriguez, who knows what it’s like to be member of a genuine minority (Mexican American intellectual, openly homosexual, pro-American, anti-bilingual education, pro-cultural integration) saves his greatest wrath and yet his greatest optimism for those of his ilk.

"I am just horrified by the Mexican habit of sticking to clans," says Rodriguez, who makes his home in San Francisco but travels widely. "We are too tribal."

(He spoke to Latino Perspectives by phone before leaving for the Middle East, where he is working on a project that examines formation of monotheism and its relation to water and desert.)

But, like any good doctor, Rodriguez posits a cure to this malady. "The United States," he said, "is the Great Flattener."

Great Flattener?

The Great Flattener is a society that, ignoring religious, racial and cultural taboos elsewhere, allows -- even encourages -- its flock to meet and mate. Racial or cultural purity is passe, if it ever existed, said Rodriguez, who celebrates his Indian and Spanish heritage but speaks glowingly of his own Irish education and the appreciation -- no, reverence -- he has for the culture of his own partner.

The author revels in correspondence he receives from "Brown" readers who, by the way, are not necessarily Latino but hybrids of Persians, Vietnamese ("Chinese girls are my greatest fans"), Swedes, Koreans and Native Americans.

"We are creating children of mixture," Rodriguez says. "They do not know prejudice. They belong to no continent; they belong to the world. That is my optimism."

SENDING A BROADER MESSAGE

The lecture, part of the Arizona Humanities Council’s celebration of National Humanities Month, honors Lorraine W Frank, the Council’s first executive director who retired in 1990 and died last year.

Tentatively, Rodriguez is to speak on "A Cup of Sugar: What the Humanities Borrow from Neighbors," but he has free reign to speak on whatever he likes, organizers said.

What is so compelling about Rodriguez is that his message is not geared to a single niche. He may be a nagging and critical voice when it comes to chastising disenfranchised or insolent adolescents, but his aim is far greater.

Take this, affluent Arizonans: "Success is a terrible dilemma for Mexican Americans, like being denied some soul-sustaining sacrament. Without the myth of victimization, who are we? We are no longer Mexicans. We are professional Mexicans. We hire Mexicans. After so many years spent vainly thinking of ourselves as exempt from some common myth of America, we might as well be Italians."

This passage, from Days of Obligation: an Argument with My Mexican Father (Viking Penguin, New York, 1992), messes with the identity as few - of any race - can do.

And Rodriguez does this regularly.

If he’s not doing it from a perch at PBS’s News Hour with Jim Lehrer, then he’s on a cable station. Or National Public Radio. Or at a book reading. A recipient of the George Peabody Award for commentary, Rodriguez has worked for more than two decades for the Pacific News Service in San Francisco. His best known work, Hunger of Memory, published in 1982, is now a staple at universities throughout North America. He more recently published Brown: The Last Discovery of America, in 2002.

In Brown, as in his previous essays, Rodriguez has argued that Hispanics are becoming "Americanized" and Americans are being "Latinized" - all to the enrichment of society. Insular, clan-behavior must be curtailed, even eliminated, if mankind is to flourish. Race should be celebrated, never made the subject of scorn and stigma.

But conflict has been - and will be - inevitable.

Take the anti-Latino sentiments in the United States today, for example.

"I am really quite optimistic about the country’s future," he says. "On one hand, I am shocked by the ugliness of the argument against Latinos, particularly as applied to the working poor, the people that are picking our cauliflower, cleaning our toilets, picking up our kids, going up on our roofs and sitting with our dying,"

Yet, he adds, "the great marriages take place in times of the greatest acrimony and greatest tension. We are mixing in bewildering ways. The skinhead’s favorite food is …Mexican."

For all his reach into America’s living rooms, however, Rodriguez does not classify himself a leader - and there is a critical need for a leader to reach out to Latinos in the U.S. and throughout the continent.

"I’m too diffident," says Rodriguez, who attended Stanford University, religious programs at Columbia University and Warburg Institute (London) before earning his Ph. D. at the University of California, Berkeley. "Too gay, too effeminate. What America has given me is the ability to express myself, to speak publicly as a Mexican and a gay man. America is for individual statements, for those who risk disapproval of the crowd by being true to themselves."

What Latinos need to fill the vacuum is "a breakthrough figure, someone who can teach something to both sides - a Mexican American Elvis, maybe a Brown Jesse Jackson, someone who makes you cry. I talked with Henry Cisneros about this years ago and we agreed that a charismatic Hispanic would arise who would unite the dreams of Latinos. He thought it would be athlete or singer, someone in the popular realm too big and overwhelming to ignore. But it hasn’t happened yet."

Among Rodriguez’ perspectives:

• Mexico looks north for inspiration. Geographical borders aren’t going to hold for long when "half your population dreams of being elsewhere (the U.S.)," he said, citing a Pew Hispanic Center survey.

• It is "astonishing that neither Minutemen nor Congress understands that the United States has already taken over the imagination of Mexico."

• "Insofar as homosexuality is concerned, all of Mexico is, ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell,’ " he says.

• "Latinos’ most important relationship is with Black America," he said. "Most urban Mexican neighborhoods border on African American communities and there are tensions. African Americans feel threatened by this invasion - and with good reason. Illegal immigration has taken its greatest toll on Black, Brown, and working-class communities."

• Americans will recognize the role of Brown (Indian) cultures in the history of the United States and Chapter 1 of textbooks will no longer begin with stories about refugees from England.

When Rodriguez speaks, however, he doesn’t believe that Latinos are the ones listening. The larger audience, rather, is Anglo America. "I believe I am in a greater dialog with White America about the Browning of the culture," he said.

In fact, such is his lack of penetration in Latino America that, Rodriguez says, when he dies, no one will remember the son of Sacramento, a boy who grew up sensing no discrimination, a man happy to have been a victim of "the great flattener" and an interpreter of culture.

"They’ll see the headlines of the obituary and lament the death of the actor, the mass-murderer, the baseball player or some other Richard Rodriguez. There are many of us."

LORRAINE W. FRANK LECTURE

Author Richard Rodriguez, sponsored by the Arizona Humanities Council (www.azhumanities.org), is scheduled to speak at the Hilton El Conquistador Hotel, 1000 N. Oracle Road, at 4 p.m. Oct. 29. The lecture will be followed by a question-and-answer session. Admission is free, but reservations are mandatory. To reserve a seat, call (602) 257-0335.