In One Color, He Sees Many Shades

Pacific Heights is about as white a residential area as you can find anywhere. Perched above the glorious San Francisco Bay, the neighborhood is a place from which you can only look down. If you see a brown face, chances are it belongs to someone trimming a hedge or painting a Victorian home--or to Richard Rodriguez, the writer and social critic, whose caramel skin and Indian features bespeak his Mexican American origins but whose jazz-like prose, propulsive and discursive, defies such easy characterization.

Yet if Rodriguez is something of an anomaly in this rather pale environment, it’s unlikely that he would blend in exactly anywhere. Being different seems to be the pigment of his consciousness.

“I’m powerfully Catholic and at war with the church at the same time,” he says, sitting in his book-crammed Pacific Heights apartment, across the street from a hilly park. “I’m Catholic and I’m equally homosexual. One part of me is sex. One part of me is sin. It shapes my heart, my soul, my mouth, everything. It’s impurity. I’m brown.”

“Brown” is also the name of Rodriguez’s latest book, the conclusion of an inadvertent trilogy (all from Viking) that started with the celebrated “Hunger of Memory” and continued with “Days of Obligation.”

The first book dealt with class, specifically the writer’s unease with his own rise in the world via affirmative action scholarships. The second traced the influence of ethnicity on his life. The third addresses race, what race means to Rodriguez and what race means to America. All the volumes walk a tightrope between the personal and the public, between the potentialities of assimilation and the pitfalls of alienation. “There’s an anger in all of my books,” he says.

To Rodriguez, brown is not necessarily Latino; it’s any admixture of hues available in a multicultural society. Rodriguez mentions a letter he received from a woman whose grandparents were Korean and African American. She called herself a Baptist Buddhist. Brown is adulteration, whether by accident or design. Think Tiger Woods--or even Madonna, who continually reinvents herself with a fluidity that could be called brown.

“We’re facing an extraordinarily brown moment in America,” Rodriguez says. “I’ve come as a prophet of brown to tell you that your grandchildren will be brown.”

Brown, Rodriguez likes to say, is what happens when you mix all the other colors on the palate. “Clean your paintbrush and you get brown,” he says.

“I write of a color that is not a singular color,” his book begins, “not a strict recipe, not an expected result, but a color produced by careless desire, even by accident; by two or several. I write of blood that is blended. I write of brown as complete freedom of substance and narrative. I extol impurity.”

Like its predecessors, “Brown” has been greeted with acclaim.

“One of the most eloquent and probing public intellectuals in the country,” wrote Marie Arana in the Washington Post. “ ... There are few writers in America as unpredictable and fearless as this.”

“This was a Horatio Alger story,” noted Anthony Walton in the New York Times, “but unlike any that had previously been written; both the starting point and the place of arrival were rigorously analyzed and nothing put under more scathing scrutiny than the writer himself--his own ambitions, embarrassments, dreams and shame.”

Rodriguez’s expressive struggle with his own identity has clearly touched the zeitgeist. Recently, for example, the Quad Cities along the Iowa-Illinois border picked “Hunger of Memory” as a community book to read and Rodriguez appeared at several events. At one high school, a student rose to say how affected he was by the book. “Before I read this book,” he said, “I was nothing. Now, I am something.”

Rodriguez was born in 1944 in San Francisco, the son of working-class Mexican immigrant parents (his folks were married at St. Dominic’s, the church Rodriguez attends just down the street from where he now lives). He grew up in Sacramento, learning English at Catholic school from Irish nuns. His father had two years of formal education and Rodriguez soon found himself straddling two very different worlds.

“Education is like going to a foreign country every day,” he says. “It overturns the traditional authority structure because the child knows more than the parent; it’s very upsetting to some children.”

He learned to write by reading the works of African American novelists such as James Baldwin, the descendants of slaves who took the language of their masters and made it their own.

“There are a lot of forces at work in my life,” Rodriguez says. “My brown is of many hues. I become browner by living. In some ways I’ve become Protestant just by breathing the air. I’ve meditated with Buddhists, I’ve studied with a rabbi. I take my wisdom from many sources.”

Richard Nixon, for example, whom Rodriguez refers to as his godfather, since the former president made “Hispanic” a census term and launched the affirmative action programs that helped Rodriguez go to Stanford and Columbia.

“Because of Nixon, several million Americans were baptized Hispanic,” Rodriguez writes. “It was Nixon who arranged for me to bypass the old rules. Through the agency of affirmative action, akin to those pivotal narrative devices in Victorian fictions, I had suddenly a powerful father in America, like Old Man Kennedy. I had, in short, found a way to cheat.”

At the same time, Rodriguez is also a fierce critic of race-based affirmative action, believing that class is a more just way of redressing inequality. “The middle class has no right to affirmative action,” he says. “I know the deepest scar in me was class.”

Rodriguez first exposed his scars to the world in “Hunger of Memory,” which was rejected by nine publishers before finally being published in 1983. “A necessary betrayal” he calls the book because of the pain it caused his family.

“My parents didn’t want it to be published,” he adds. “They had a working-class sense of privacy. They never completely reconciled themselves to the book. I don’t think they read the second.”

Last year, his father died at the age of 96. Rodriguez was impressed by the nobility with which his father approached his demise. “There was a kind of brilliance,” he says. “I’ve never felt so light. Joy is the closest feeling I can describe it. He was releasing me to life by showing me how to die. I want to live intensively. I want to live heroically.”

Although Rodriguez has written some of the seminal texts of ethnic studies, he has never reconciled himself to having his books stuck in the Hispanic section of stores, the literary barrio, instead of among the authors who inspired him. “The price of being a published brown author is that one cannot be shelved near those one has loved,” he writes. “The price is segregation.”

The paradox is that while Rodriguez writes about the differences that divide contemporary America he is also writing about the essential qualities that define what it means to be an American in the 21st century.

“We don’t speak English,” he says. “We speak American. I think of myself as an American writer.”