A Work in Progress : At 48, Richard Rodriguez Is Still Struggling With Questions About His Heritage

Such a long face--such a long nose--sculpted by indifferent, blunt thumbs, and of such common clay. 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.

--Richard Rodriguez, From “Days of Obligation”

Richard Rodriguez still hasn’t come to grips.

Forty-eight years and he still ponders daily the puzzle of how he looks versus who he is.

The mirror has not changed: Since his childhood, it has reflected the same brown skin, slight build, strong features--the portrait of a million sons of Mexico.

But that is too static a description for such a complicated, still-evolving man.

What Rodriguez also sees in his reflection nowadays, he says, is the rape of continents, the marriage of cultures--and the future of America.

It is the stuff of which his books are made.

“Hunger of Memory,” published 10 years ago, earned him rave reviews, literary permanence--and the enmity of fellow Mexican-Americans, who called him pocho (traitor) and accused him of selling out.

Rodriguez’s second book, “Days of Obligation: An Argument With My Mexican Father,” promises to erase hostility while polishing the author’s luster even more.

An upcoming Times book review calls Rodriguez “a lyrical essayist who can match . . . Albert Camus for sheer talent.”

But his book is not easy to read. Even the jacket quote warns that you will have to “crawl through it on your knees.”

Rodriguez smiles at such faint praise; he is used to it. He is a controversial man. An assimilated man. An acclaimed author, journalist, TV essayist (on the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour), a guru of the intellectual elite and winner of dozens of literary prizes, including the 1992 Charles Frankel award given by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

He is also a traitorous “coconut” to some Latinos, who say that because Rodriguez opposes bilingual education and affirmative action, he is brown on the outside and white within.

Los Angeles poet Max Benavidez says the writing in Rodriguez’s first book is so good that he uses it when he teaches college classes.

But he thinks Rodriguez’s politics stink: “He seems to me of the Clarence Thomas school. He took advantage of affirmative action and then he turned his back on it.”

“Days of Obligation” may change his and other critics’ minds.

It is about life viewed by Rodriguez from both sides of the Mexican border and from opposite ends of the social scale.

It is about Mexican culture and about the self-defeating things immigrants do in fear of losing it.

And it is about the Indian--a superhero whose mixed blood and rich skin color elevate los pobres (the poor ones) to the stature of kings.

It is about comedy versus tragedy, with the city of Tijuana cast as a promising young clown and San Diego as the sad old maid next door who knows her end is near.

Above all, “it is about this business of heritage,” Rodriguez says during a recent interview in Los Angeles.

He says he wrote the book “for those who live in a cloud of fear that by learning English, they are being untrue to themselves. I tell them it is fraudulent to pretend that by preserving the language, they are preserving the culture.

“By the very fact that they live here, in America, they and the culture are automatically changed. You cannot send your children to school to just learn the facts, nothing else, and expect them to come home unchanged. You can’t take what you want from America and leave the rest alone. It doesn’t work that way.”

And it is not just Mexican-Americans he is addressing, he says. Anyone from anywhere can tap right in.

“We enter this country and are afraid of its enormity. So we start holding on to our German or Chinese. We keep our children away from the gringos, or the goyim, or whoever the strangers happen to be. It is a typical grandmother’s response to the new world.

“What I’m saying to those who decry assimilation is that they are proving the inevitability of it. Theirs is a typically American response. If they were truly Hispanic, truly Mexican, they would realize that assimilation is part of their cultural heritage.”

To some, that might sound like Rodriguez’s old line. But it’s not.

Poet and essayist Ruben Martinez, senior editor at the L.A. Weekly, has followed Rodriguez’s career and written about him extensively.

“Rodriguez’s first book was his assimilationist manifesto; full of self-loathing and disdain for anything ethnic,” Martinez says. In that context, he was not the author’s fan.

“But I have always considered him one of the most talented, insightful, masterful and lyrical essayists we have in this country. And now, having read his second book, I believe he has come full circle” in appreciating his ethnicity. “In the new book, he goes back to Mexico, takes a ‘Roots’-like trip, as if he were a young Chicano activist. The result is a manifesto of a different kind.”

To this day, Rodriguez claims his first book is not exactly what his critics say it was.

“Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez,” now in its 14th printing, is a standard on university reading lists and something of a classic.

It is a haunting memoir of the author’s youth--filled with pain and guilt. A tale of poorly educated Mexican immigrant parents who settle in Sacramento and scrimp to send their son to Catholic schools, where he learns so much and so fast that he becomes alienated from their cozy but narrow world.

He sails through Stanford on a scholarship--and through postgraduate work at Columbia, Berkeley and the Warburg Institute in London--feeling all the while that he has betrayed his parents and their homeland by learning English (and everything else) so well.

At the end of it all, Rodriguez no longer considers himself a member of a minority.

The 6-year-old who once used his father’s razor to try to scrape the brown off his skin now thinks of himself as wholly American. One of the majority.

“I was totally convinced that I belonged in society and had equal access to all its institutions,” Rodriguez says. And he believed that his skin color and ethnic heritage need never be taken into account, whether for good reasons or bad.

Nice thinking. But not true.

It was the 1970s, the dawn of affirmative action in America. Rodriguez, aching to start a career teaching English literature, won a plum position at Yale that many of his friends were also trying for.

They were white and had American surnames. He was brown and Rodriguez.

He didn’t take the Yale job, nor would he take any others because he suddenly realized that they were “coming to me because of my skin color or my surname.” He began to write “Hunger of Memory” as an act of protest against affirmative action, he says, in anger at the professors and universities who “seemed oblivious that there was a real moral issue at stake.”

Those moral issues are still not resolved in his mind, he adds, although he understands why so many Mexican-Americans who read that first book remain enraged at him.

“They thought the book was about self-hate and shame at being Mexican. I thought it was about social class: What does it mean to have parents who are unable to read the books you are reading in high school, who are unable to share your thoughts?

“What does it mean to be first in your family to go off to college? To come from a working-class family in America and to enter, without them, into the middle class?”

He says his cues for the book came from British literature. Writers like D.H. Lawrence, he says, understood the dilemma of those who speak the private language of the lower class in a society where one must speak the public language of the upper class to participate.

“In America, we tend to discuss such issues in bureaucratic terms, in statistics about race or ethnicity. By doing that, we totally ignore the whole drama of social class that’s implied by the educational journey.”

Rodriguez believes he is “most Mexican” in his willingness to assimilate not only with Americans but also with Chinese, Germans and all others who stream into San Francisco, where he lives alone in a Castro District apartment.

“To students at my lectures, who call me a traitor, I say: ‘Be unafraid. Learn German, French, English--anything and everything. You can never lose your culture. It is not a static thing , like a suitcase, that you can leave at the bus station and accidentally forget.’

“I cite to you the little immigrant Chinese boy in San Francisco, whose teacher tells him to stand up straight, talk in a firm voice and look her in the eye when he speaks to her.

“The boy goes home that night and his father says sternly: ‘Since when have you started shouting and looking your father in the eye?’ ”