Richard Rodríguez: Trending quotes (page 6)

“Americans are so individualistic, they do not realize their individualism is a communally derived value.”

Richard Rodríguez

Brown : The Last Discovery of America (2003)
Context: Americans are so individualistic, they do not realize their individualism is a communally derived value. The American I is deconstructed for me by Paolo, an architect who was raised in Bologna: "You Americans are not truly individualistic, you merely are lonely. In order to be individualistic, one must have a strong sense of oneself within a group." (The "we" is a precondition for saying "I.") Americans spend all their lives looking for a community: a chatroom, a church, a support group, a fetish magazine, a book club, a class action suit... illusions become real when we think they are real and act accordingly. Because Americans thought themselves free of plural pronouns, they began to act as free agents, thus to recreate history. Individuals drifted away from tribe or color or 'hood or hometown or card of explanation, where everyone knew who they were... Americans thus extended the American community by acting so individualistically, so anonymously.

Communication

“The Chicano student movement at UC Santa Barbara didn't want me there. These are the same people that sit on a multicultural committee. But they don't want me there because for them I represent a cultural perspective that they do not accept. Their version of multiculturalism is that it all be left wing, that it all be formed by a quasi-Marxist voodooism. And if anybody comes into their world that is any different from that, they can't deal with it. Because they are not multiculturalist at all. They're the most sectarian people I know.”

Richard Rodríguez

Violating the Boundaries: An Interview with Richard Rodriguez (1999)

People , World

“In Sacramento, my brown was not halfway between black and white. On the leafy streets, on the east side of town, where my family lived, where Asians did not live, where Negroes did not live, my family's Mexican shades passed as various.”

Richard Rodríguez

Brown : The Last Discovery of America (2003)

Family

“But middle-class Americans, friends of mine, composites of friends of mine, of a liberal bent, nice people, OK people, see nothing wrong with bilingual education. In fact, they wish their own children to be bilingual. In fact, they send their kids to French schools. In fact, they ask if I know of a housekeeper who might inadvertently teach their children Spanish while she dusts under the piano. Nope.”

Richard Rodríguez

Brown : The Last Discovery of America (2003)

Children , People , Education , School

“Rodriguez: When my mother read Hunger of Memory, she was horrified by it and she asked me, as an accusation, "Why did you hold these things in all of your years against me, why didn't you tell me? If I offended you by talking about how dark you were in the summer why didn't you tell me that? And tell me to stop? Why do you hold that for another 25 years and then spill it all out?"”

Richard Rodríguez

Good question, Mama. Good question.
Violating the Boundaries: An Interview with Richard Rodriguez (1999)

Hunger , Question , Memory , Reading

“A primary reason for my success in the classroom was that I couldn’t forget that schooling was changing me and separating me from the life I enjoyed before becoming a student.”

Richard Rodríguez

Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (1982)

Life , School , Change , Success

“When I was a boy and refused to speak Spanish (because I spoke English), then could not speak Spanish from awkwardness, then guilt, Mexican relatives criticized my parents for letting me “lose it”—my culture, they said.”

Richard Rodríguez

Brown : The Last Discovery of America (2003)

Boy , Parent

“Of all the institutions in their lives, only the Catholic Church has seemed aware of the fact that my mother and father are thinkers—persons aware of the experience of their lives. Other institutions—the nation’s political parties, the industries of mass entertainment and communications, the companies that employed them—have all treated my parents with condescension.”

Richard Rodríguez

Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (1982)

Communication , Parent , Personality

“The boy who dreamed his escape on a train whistle floating east, ended up in a gated New Jersey suburb redrawing the map of the world. The world was his last invention. Odd that this self-made man who spent so much time with his long nose to the grindstone would evolve into the global seer, scholar of the world, statesman, not least a politician who wrote his own books. In a late interview, Frank Gannon asked Nixon if he believed he had lived a “good life.” Nixon replied, “I don’t get into that kind of crap.””

Richard Rodríguez

But what did he truly think in the end? His fall was as precipitous as any in American history.
Brown : The Last Discovery of America (2003)

Life , Books , World , Dreams

“But not in my family. My mother and father (with immigrant pragmatism) assumed the American tongue would reinvent their children. Just so did several immigrant Hispanic mothers in Southern California recently remark their children’s reluctance to join America. These mothers feared their children were not swimming in the American current—not in the swifts and not in the depths; not even in the pop. They blamed “bilingual education,” a leaky boat theorem ostensibly designed to sink into the American current. (In fact, the theorem became a bureacracy preoccupied with prolonging itself.) These few mothers organized an opposition to bilingual education and eventually they sank the Armada in California. Theirs was an American impulse: to engage the American flow directly and to let their children be taken by it.”

Richard Rodríguez

Brown : The Last Discovery of America (2003)

Children , Education , Fear , Family

“Maybe knowledge doesn't accrue, maybe it doesn't happen sequentially. Maybe I need to go back and read Hunger of Memory again. Maybe there's a wisdom that I had in those years that I need to learn from now. And maybe there will be a year when I will have the courage to read that book. When I think about it or when I hear other people talk about it, it strikes me as very naked prose, and I'm embarrassed by it. I'm embarrassed by how much I told you. And people say, "Well you didn't tell us you were gay." Or "You didn't tell us you had all these friends or that you were student body president. You never said that."”

Richard Rodríguez

I think to myself, "My God, but what I told you I've never told anybody. And I'll never tell anybody again."
Violating the Boundaries: An Interview with Richard Rodriguez (1999)

Wisdom , Hunger , God , People

“Somehow the inclination to write about my private life in public is related to the ability to do so. It is not enough to say that my mother and father do not want to write their autobiographies. It needs also to be said that they are unable to write to a public reader. They lack the skill. Though both of them can write in Spanish and English, they write in a hesitant manner. Their syntax is uncertain. Their vocabulary limited. The man who sits in his chair so many hours, and the woman at the ironing board—‘keeping busy because I don’t want to get old’—will never be able to believe that any description of their personal lives could be understood by a stranger far from home.”

Richard Rodríguez

Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (1982)

Life , Home , Business , Personality

“I am speaking of those years before the middle class took professional wrestling away from the working class and made of our morality play a mockery of ambition.”

Richard Rodríguez

Brown : The Last Discovery of America (2003)