The Loneliness of the Long Distance Scholarship Boy
An Angry Young Man Grows Older

By Michael Depp

Richard Rodriguez, reluctant iconoclast, meets the reader on the cover of his book.

Twenty years ago, readers were forced to confront his haunted, melancholic face before entering the gates of Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez. The cover photo presaged much of the anger and solipsism found within his autobiography: A prodigious scholar on the cusp of finishing a Ph.D. at Berkeley, a long garland of faculty positions dangling before him, Rodriguez walks away, unable to reconcile his own life against the mantle of “minority student” placed upon his shoulders, the ducats of affirmative action bulging uncomfortably in his purse.

Today, Rodriguez again stares at the reader from behind his latest title, Brown: The Last Discovery of America, the final installment of a self-described trilogy of memoirs. Only now, the portrait on Brown’s cover is different, the deeper lines of Rodriguez’s sepia-toned visage offering more of an invitation, a glint of intellectual seduction in his eyes. A Whitmanesque gesture of generosity from the older face of the angry young man.

For Rodriguez, who has spent his career playing havoc with the politics of identity, Brown is both a departure from his earlier work and the culmination of its most potent arguments. Until now, he has stubbornly resisted easy categorization: a Mexican-American best known for his arguments against bilingual education and affirmative action; an open homosexual professing devout, traditional Catholicism; a writer whose public identity has been cemented at the expense of excavating the most intimate nuances of his private life.

But while his first two books, Hunger of Memory and Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father, seemed to make him unembraceable in terms of his conflicting identity positions, a writer too fragmented to be compartmentalized, Brown throws its arms around the irreconcilable. In so doing, Rodriguez defines both himself and the nation as an irrepressibly miscegenated amalgam of multiple faces and hues.

“Brown bleeds through the straight line, unstaunchable – the line separating black from white, for example,” he writes. “Brown confuses. Brown forms at the border of contradiction (the ability of language to express two or several things at once, the ability of bodies to experience two or several things at once).”

Brown is not for the reader wedded to a single subject position (“You may not want paradox in a book,” Rodriguez warns in the preface. “In which case, you had better seek a pure author.”). It rejects absolutism in racial, ethnic and gender identity. It’s a gesture likely to endear him more to cultural studies scholars who’ve been grappling with such unclear boundaries within the self for years.

For Rodriguez, Brown is ultimately his most personally and politically liberating work to date. In his recasting, brown becomes more than pigmentation or a mid-hue between the louder American racial politics of black and white. Rather, it is the ambiguous, the ineluctable combination of identities which mark us. Brown is complexity, the result of our erotic desires. It is the blurring of distinctions within the self.

America is brown, he argues, “a Gordian knot with a wagging tail,” too commingled to be separated according to classifications which he finds increasingly irrelevant. One such category (which is likely to raise critics’ hackles) is Hispanic, to which he devotes an essay in Brown. Charting the birth of “Hispanic” to Richard Nixon’s administration (the former president is dubbed “the dark father of Hispanicity”), Rodriguez wonders what the Mexican Indian shares with the Colombian, the Nicaraguan. He concludes that the Hispanic, a U.S. political invention, is nowhere to be found in Latin America. Nor is the Asian, for that matter, locatable in Asia. To meet either, Rodriguez says, one would need to come to the U.S.

Nor are black and white simply received distinctions in Rodriguez’s new paradigm. White in America, he posits, has traditionally been “the freedom of being nothing,” “the freedom to imagine oneself free.” Whereas to be black was to be fated, marked. “Under the one-drop theorem, it was possible for a white mother to give birth to a black child in America, but no black mother ever gave birth to a white child,” he writes. “A New World paradox.”

In a culture where Hispanics are also pacing to become the nation’s largest minority (surpassing African-Americans), Rodriguez is taken by the absurdity of the statistical shift, pushing for a more playful notion of race that admits black to brown, acknowledging the multiplicity of identities many carry within them.

For a writer whose career-long engagement has been with his own idiosyncratic identity, it is an unusually inclusive argument. But it’s also a new answer to questions that have dogged him for two decades: How can you be gay and Catholic?, for instance.

“I’m using this term deliberately to undercut compartmentalizations,” he says from his home in San Francisco at the end of a book tour that has taken him across the nation for the past several months. “I’m using brown to describe all the color mixing. And in some way, what I want to do with this book is to allow myself to be many things.”

And so Brown’s subtitle reflects this last ideological frontier. “I see the first discovery of America – the Indian discovery of the Spaniard and he or she – as being a discovery of otherness,” he says. “But the last discovery is that he is she and that I am Chinese and Irish and they are within me.”

Of course, it has been a long journey to that last discovery for Rodriguez, who has never been one to fit in with the group. It seems almost absurd to use the sports metaphor when describing him, and yet here is the archetypal long distance runner (he has been devoted to the sport since his teens). “I have always objected to team sports because I have no athletic grace,” he says with the self-deprecation that marks both his conversational and his writer’s voice. “I run like a farm animal without any grace, but I have enormous strength and I can run literally for hours, plodding along.”

His first lap around the literary track, Hunger of Memory, made it clear he was running solo. The scholar ascendent, bookish and awkward but unflappable in his work, he suddenly finds himself the beneficiary of late 1960s affirmative action policies, rechristened a minority student. “It is a term that should never have been foisted on me,” he writes. “One I was wrong to accept.”

In a series of essays which cumulated in the writing of Hunger of Memory, Rodriguez begins his break from the pack. He argues against affirmative action as blind to class; rails against the middle-class university as misguided in its attempts to fix educational inequities (The truly disadvantaged didn’t need easier admission to college, he argued. “They need good early schooling!”); keeps a wary distance from the Chicano student groups eager to add an articulate Mexican-American voice to their cause.

He condemns bilingual education, the call to use the child’s family language in the classroom. “Well, what is a child’s family language?” he asks, ruminating on the intimacy of his family’s Spanish as irreconcilable with the public forum of the classroom (“The billingualists simplistically scorn the value and necessity of assimilation,” he writes in Hunger of Memory. “So they do not realize that while one suffers a diminished sense of private individuality by becoming assimilated into public society, such assimilation makes possible the achievement of public individuality.”).

Rodriguez refused the categorizations being placed upon him by liberal politics, offering only one designation as accurate to himself: scholarship boy. But this, too, was an uncomely distinction in his self-assessment: “I became the prized student – anxious and eager to learn,” he writes. “Too anxious – an imitative and unoriginal pupil.”

Rodriguez aroused hatred, controversy, the uncourted advances of conservative politicians eager for the Mexican-American to take to the dais, exhorting, “Tell us what’s wrong with bilingual education!”

And yet twenty years later, Hunger of Memory is a book with which few liberal arts undergraduates are unacquainted. “I can only say that a lot of teachers have told me over the years that the book has some success because it connects students to their own experience,” he says. “And however much they might object to the book and find it wanting, it nonetheless legitimizes students’ own experiences because everyone has been a student.”

Perhaps for that reason, Hunger of Memory has become a canonical addition to the multicultural curriculum. For as much as Rodriguez protests to his idiosyncratic predicament, students from many backgrounds have come to identify with his tension. They may take issue with his politics, but they can’t deny his honest and powerful dramatization of education’s alienating effects on private, family life. And so despite its rancorous reception, Hunger of Memory endures as a deeply empathetic and sensitive memoir of pedagogy, one with few rivals to this day.

His next book, Days of Obligation, did little to win the love of critics who had pelted him with accusations of denying his Mexican face, running from his heritage and the shadow of his past.

“My second book was really an attempt to deal with Mexico, to figure out how Mexico enters my life now,” he says (both of Rodriguez’s parents immigrated to the U.S. from Mexico before he was born – he was raised in Sacramento). “I decided it was through a culture of tragedy – mainly through Catholicism – and it was very powerful in my life.”

Days of Obligation was also written in the midst of the AIDS epidemic and marked the first time Rodriguez engaged the subject of his own homosexuality. Yet it remains a comparatively oblique subject in otherwise very personal prose.

But many critics weren’t having Rodriguez’s visit with Mexico, leaving him chaffed. “Here was a serious attempt by a Mexican-American to come to terms with the cultural inheritance of Mexico living in a Protestant culture in the U.S. and feeling the tension between the two countries that way,” he says. “But I don’t think that book was seriously analyzed by my critics, even to the point of being rejected at the level at which it’s arguing.”

A cooling of campus radicalism has settled in, a slow abatement of hatred towards the author. And with Brown, he may finally reach a reconciliation with his critics.

Brown’s open-armed sense of America strongly evokes Walt Whitman, whose spirit Rodriguez cleaves to throughout the text. Not coincidentally, he says, “It is the most dynamically gay book that I’ve written.” Looking at American life (and his own) through a brown lens has been remarkably liberating, he finds, leaving him with a sense of peace that none of his other work has. It has been equally liberating for his writing, which conveys a lyricism and texture beyond his other books. (Is there any browner form, after all, than the essay?)

And yet, this is also precisely the source of Rodriguez’s anxiety about the book’s reception. “I don’t know what it is, but I have this profound sense that no one understands what I’m saying,” he says. “It is the source of my deepest loneliness that I cannot be understood or that there are not readers for this book or that I’m writing in a style that is inappropriate for my time.”

He describes lectures after which readers have approached him with concerned expressions, those who know him from his television essays on PBS’s “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer,” or his op-ed pieces and commentaries in the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times and Pacific News Service, for which he is an editor. “I find your TV work so lucid and clear,” he recalls their concerns. “But I don’t understand what you’re saying tonight.”

Rodriguez says he takes more comfort now in the notion that he is not only writing for the reader today, but for the dead, those who helped shape and inform his own literary sensibilities as the scholarship boy that he, in many senses, remains.

And although he plans no return to the university life he forsook more than 20 years ago (“Normally, I hit and run,” he says of his college speaking engagements), he is contemplating taking his work to a more mainstream level. He has been offered the possibility of a regular column by a major national news outlet, one which would dramatically increase his profile and his platform. Characteristically, he is hesitating over taking it. “I am tempted in the direction of becoming less hidden and eccentric,” he says. “I never imagined myself in that world.”

Not that he sees his work has having been embraced by the literary community either, seeing himself as outside the realm of The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books and their ilk. “Their notion of literature has nothing to do with me; I come and go,” he says. “I belong to some other realm. I belong to Hispanic Week.”

His place, as he sees it, is exemplified by an incident when he happened to be staying in the same London hotel as the pop star Madonna. As he read a review of one of his books in the Observer, written, he noted, by a gay Colombian poet (“the doppleganger theory of literary criticism,” he moans), the cries of the Madonna’s fans could be heard wafting though his window.

“I would always be this small writer listening to this rock star’s fans outside the window, belong to a world where she was the queen of brown and I had to be relegated to brown the singular color,” he muses. “I want to write essays that catch that particular modernity, even if I play the fool.”

BIO NOTE: Michael Depp writes for Reuters news service, numerous periodicals and the Dictionary of Literary Biography (Gale). He teaches in the Media Arts program at Tulane University.