Brown: The Last Discovery Of America (2003) - Plot & Excerpts
It's somewhat surprising to me that I actually own all three volumes of Richard Rodriguez's essays/memoirs/rants, because when I think about it the guy gets on my last nerve. He's Latino, born in San Francisco of Mexican parents, but grew up in Sacramento. He's also Catholic and gay. Which apparently allows him to claim the trifecta of identity politics, that rare triple minority status.To give him credit, Rodriguez gained a certain notoriety as a young academic for his principled refusal to take advantage of the benefits that affirmative action policies offered him. Unfortunately, he does not seem to have been able to avoid the trap of allowing himself to be defined by his ethnicity, and to a lesser extent, his homosexuality. Disappointingly, Rodriguez's writing career consists almost exclusively of endless public rumination about the status of gays, Catholics, and Latinos in general, and his own life in particular. Though he can write a mean essay when he exercises a little self-discipline, far too often he descends into a kind of maudlin, whining, self-pity. One wonders how he survived adolescence at all, given the enormous size of the chip on his shoulder. Life is so unfair, and why couldn't he have been born as a popular straight white jock?Well, excuse me, but donnez-moi un break!. There are plenty of worse places than Sacramento to grow up, and he wasn't exactly raised in poverty. At what point did he decide that the alienation of the immigrant experience was going to be his lifelong shtick? At age 3? 6? 12? To date he has published three books, each of a more or less autobiographical nature, at roughly ten-year intervals (1982, 1992, 2002). Each contains some biographical sketches and copious ruminations on the status of minorities in the U.S. Of the three, the first is by far the best, and probably the only one worth reading - it's crisply written and avoids the deficiencies of the later books. I would characterize the main defects of the later books as (a) meandering, undisciplined navel-gazing and tail-chasing, worrying the whole ethnic identity question to death with ever-diminishing returns (b) a tone that is predominantly whinily self-pitying (c) a creeping pomposity of tone prompting my reaction(a) you could just get over it already(b) oh, for christ's sake, try counting your blessings, which are multiple(c) if you want to write about the widespread use of cell phones in Finland, don't write "Everyone in the flaxen-haired capital of despair is on the phone, one hears". For that matter, I'm sure the Finns might object to the glib "Finland, a nation famous for sardines and suicide and short winter days.."Rodriguez didn't always write like a pathetic hack. But somehow he still walks around with that monumental stick up his ass and a pronounced sense of "otherness". Much to the detriment of his later writing.If he keeps to his schedule, we can expect the next volume of essays in 2012. Though you may hope that the Mayans have got it right and that we will all be spared a fourth volume.
What do You think about Brown: The Last Discovery Of America (2003)?
Simply the best book by Richard R. Again, more of a meditation on identity and impurity than any type of biography. This collection of essays looks at the the idea of mestizaje as it pertains not just to race and identity but also of ideas, cultures and religion. Through a variety of literary and cultural references we are invited to the continuously evolving mind of one of the most controversial figures in literature today. He is the post-identity American, really much more interested in larger values than the color of his skin.
—Cris
Refreshing insights into that American bugaboo, that American obsession -- race, written with verve, wonderful humor, a depth of understanding that presents as offhand comment, and profound intelligence. Rodriguez writes so easily, so beautifully, with constant surprises of expression that absolutely delight, and still brings this difficult subject to us with no apologies but much wisdom. "Brown" -- the man in the middle, the third man, the invisible other -- Rodriguez finds so many ways to explain his feelings about race, his race -- or "not race," and that of others and how they identify themselves, that the whole of the race questions are opened up and laid bare for us to consider. Reading this book as a "Swedish-American" -- even better, a 'Vikiing' (now why didn't Nixon go further with his new race designations in 1973 -- I would have been happy about that, enjoying my Viking heritage), but certainly not "White," (a qualifier I find insipid and even ruthless) naturally brought so many questions to my mind about my own place in this. Do I do the wrong things in thinking I am relating fairly and openly with 'race?' With 'otherness?' And I hate those words and I don't like the quotation marks!This is a great book to read. It's smooth, easy to stay with, but I found myself on the pages and I cringed. This is a book to read for clarity, to clear the cobwebs of our own ignorance from our minds. This is a book to read for vision, to see more clearly what is before us everyday.
—Shari
My pity for Rodriguez continues.Brown is a meditation on the color of liminality in the black/white dynamic of American self-conception. At times, Rodriguez seems willing to tarry there in the in-between, in the almost-but-not-quite, but then he moves self-consciously away into that zone beyond doubt, seemingly aware of the dangers of certainty, but preferring it cold comfort.As he does in Hunger of Memory, Rodriguez seems to want to embrace his occasional white-privilege allowed him by his social position as an academic and a writer as something he has unmitigated and uninterrupted access to. It seems to me to be the way he deals with his guilt that he has it at all as compared to those who by dint of color and/or other social disadvantage have less frequent access to it, or no access at all.For example, he makes the point to mock a young woman he calls a "white Latina" for referring to herself as a person of color, as if "color" were only complexion. His attitude on these issues actually seems inconsistent and frustrating, because he also talks of "colored" thoughts and "colored" language - he includes a long discussion with a black/brown friend on the socially constructed nature of race and estimations of color that are founded on positional power dynamics - but then continues to display shame any benefit he may have gained from affirmative action. It is never clear to me why he feels so undeserving. It is never clear to me why he never uses his rich evocative (also overwritten and florid) language to reflect on situations where the brownness of his skin and his name have been obstacles to the everyday exercise of the privilege he claims to have. Could it be that he has never had that experience? I doubt it. I would be more willing to believe that he simply myopic, always interpreting such experiences through his unassuaged guilt. And yet, he seems too self aware and intelligent for that. I don't know. Rodriguez's meditations do come upon some interesting questions. For example, how the progressive assertion of racial representation actually lead to increased forms of segregation, bemoaning the fact that his books are found among "Latino" writers regardless of form or content and not among the writers of the western canon he so admires. He snickers at the fact that a newspaper chooses a gay Columbian writer of magical realist fiction to review his work, when nothing but broad conceptions of "latino" and "gay" gives them anything in common.At the same time, he seems to be suggesting that acting as if race does not exist (as it certainly does not as a scientific category) would undo the experience of race in America.Ultimately, I grew tired of Rodriguez's writing style and his psychological limitations, but that doesn't mean I walked away from the book without any ideas to chew on, but I am more likely to spit them back out than swallow them.
—Osvaldo
