"I Don't Think I Exist": Interview with Richard Rodriguez

I conducted this interview with Richard Rodriguez in February of 2000 in his San Francisco Victorian home. Born in 1944, Rodriguez has crafted a career encompassing the production of literary as well as journalistic discourse. Rodriguez first came to national prominence with the publication of Hunger of Memory in 1982, a work which would become part of a triptych alongside Days of Obligations: An Argument with my Mexican Father and, most recently, Brown: The Last Discovery of America. This interview anticipates the publication of Brown. It is well-known that the first work did not endear him to the Chicano and Chicana intelligentsia. Rodriguez's conservative stance toward affirmative action and bilingual education spelled a major breach with the ideology that the Chicano Civil Rights movement constructed through its political activism in the 1960s. Critiques had already been leveled at the Chicano movement for its patriarchy, but Rodriguez's text exposes a further breach. Rodriguez writes in bold language his opposition to those gains of the movimiento and in so doing exposed huge differences in class position among the Chicano and Chicana, Mexican American, Hispano population of the US. The ten-year interval it took for Days of Obligation to appear saw some revisionism of this initial hostile reception, this second work receiving a friendlier, even conciliatory, reception. Rodriguez's stylistic finesse seems to have won him a more sympathetic audience. The friendlier reception is all the more significant in light of the fact that his controversial views on bilingualism and affirmative action have not substantially changed with the passage of time. Side by side, the triptych solidifies Rodriguez's place in American literature. Today, Rodriguez's essay "Aria" stands shoulder to shoulder with America's finest writers in The Best American Essays of the Century, edited by Joyce Carol Oates. Rodriguez's work in the field of broadcast journalism also comprises a complex body of work. As an editor for Pacific News Service, Rodriguez scripts broadcasts for the Jim Lehrer NewsHour. In 1997 Rodriguez won television's highest honor, the George Foster Peabody Award, for his NewsHour "Essays on American Life." His work in broadcast journalism includes "A Dialogue on Race with President Clinton" and the recent "Danger and Grace--September 11 and America's Religious Movement." Having won the Frankel Medal from the National Endowment for the Humanities as well as the International Journalism Award from the World Affairs Council of California, Rodriguez occupies the position of a public intellectual in American life and letters. Langue(s) HT: Richard, can we begin by talking about when and where you were born? RR: I was born in San Francisco, about a mile from where we are sitting now, in a place called St. Joseph's Hospital. My mother and father lived over on O'Farrell Street, which was only about five blocks from where we are. They were married in a church, which is also about four or five blocks away. But I grew up in Sacramento. I came to San Francisco and live in this neighborhood quite coincidentally, but my sense of hometown is Sacramento, and that's where all my childhood memory resides. I was a child of the 1940s and 50s; my conscious life begins in the 1950s, within Spanish, the Spanish language, within working class Spanish. Both of my parents come from western Mexico. My father is from the state of Colima--a small village within the state of Colima. He was in Mexico during the revolution, and his disgust with Mexico came out of that revolution and the way he saw Mexican kill Mexican. Viva Mexico! My mother, on the other hand, is a great Mexican patriot to this day. She grew up in the state of Jalisco and she's always been the patriot in the family, and that side of my conscience which always calls me to the past. My father is completely unconcerned with Mexico, has no emotional tie to it, has no interest in it, but in some way his darkness is very Mexican and I grew up within these two polarities: my very Mexican-loving mother, my Mexican-hating father. …