Hispanics and non-Hispanics of mixed ancestry have so damned much in common, but academia and the media are determined to ignore the obvious.
“I don’t think I exist”: interview with Richard Rodriguez
MELUS
Summer, 2003
by Hector A. Torres
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.