Richard Rodgriguez Confronts the Browning of America
By Melinda Palacio
-- April 17, 2002
Brown. What's in a color? Richard Rodriguez describes brown as impure and messy, made up of several different colors.
In his latest book, "BROWN: The Last Discovery of America," Rodriguez set out to write a book about Latinos and race. Instead, he delivers a poetic book of essays that figures himself within the "browning" of America. He dotes on the word brown because, no matter how many different colors Latinos come in, America sees Latinos as brown. The book completes the trilogy of his autobiography, his life observations and theories. His writing cannot escape a muddying of genres. Is it autobiography? Social commentary? History? "BROWN" is a dance of all genres.
Rodriguez said, from his home in San Francisco, "It's a dangerous thing to spend as many years as I have thinking about a color. The whole world turned brown. I try to find my brown prose to match the subject."
In his beautifully written book, Rodriguez does indeed find his own brown prose. His prose channels ancient Aztec poets and mixes it with his American language and doctoral command of the English language and literary theory. The result is a brown prose to match his brown voice. Although Brown is a complicated book, Rodriguez's message is clear, especially in chapter two, "In the Brown Study," where he taunts his detractors and gives us a taste of his rich just desserts and sweet revenge of his critics.
The fourth chapter, "Poor Richard" follows a black suit to Rodriguez's "baptism" as a Hispanic--and the beginning of his browness.
"But it was not until Richard Nixon's administration that I became brown. A government document of dulling prose, Statistical Directive 15, would redefine America as an idea in five colors: White. Black.Yellow. Red. Brown."
As he traces Nixon's strengths and weaknesses and gives up the black suit he wears in imitation of hard-working federal figures, like Nixon, Rodriguez stands firm on his original position from, "Hunger of Memory," against Affirmative Action.
"The saddest part of the story is that Nixon was willing to disown his own myth for political expediency. It would be the working-class white kid-the sort he had been-who would end up paying the price of affirmative action, not Kennedys. Affirmative action defined a "minority" in a numerical rather than a cultural sense. And since white males were already numerically "represented" in the boardroom, as at Harvard, the Appalachian white kid could not qualify as a minority. And since brown and black faces were "underrepresented," those least disadvantaged brown and black Americans, like me, were able to claim the prize of admission and no one questioned our progress."
Rodriguez has been thinking about his color for over a decade. Yet, in the next chapter "Hispanic," Rodriguez reconfigures his brown essence and "discovers" that not only is he brown, but so is America. Rodriguez is no longer a brown man in a black and white world, he's a brown man in a browning America that's forced to redefine her east-west configuration to a north-south paradigm. He holds up for inspection the browning of the American tongue as a prime example. The Spanish language continues to move northward and melts into English as Mexicans continue to seek "el norte."
"But I marvel at the middle-class American willingness to take Spanish up. Standing in the burrito line in a Chinese neighborhood, I notice how many customers know the chopsticks of Spanish: "carnitas" and "guacamole" and "sí," gracias," "refritos," and "caliente," and all the rest of what they need to know. And, it occurs to me that the Chinese-American couple in front of me, by speaking Spanish, may actually be speaking American English."
In America's case, the "last" brown discovery is also her first. Rodriguez points to early examples of the muddying of the English language that began when we borrowed necessary words from Indians and tonal inflections from Africans. These words slipped in during hushed unions and the mixing of races, early examples of relationships that veer off the page of history books. As a Mexican, Rodriguez is the product of the union of a Spaniard and an Indian. The last chapter, "Peter's Avocado" talks about the browning of his own family and how the blond woman married to his Hindu uncle makes him, and America, a deeper shade of brown.
"I want to speak of such unpursued scenes and lives constituting brown history. Brown, not in the essence of pigment, necessarily, but brown because mixed, confused, lumped, impure, unpasteurized, as motives are mixed, and the fluids of generation are mixed and emotions are unclear, and the tally of human progress and failure in every generation is mixed, and unaccounted for."
America's "last" discovery is a dangerous discovery of love; a desire that Puritan America would rather not discuss. And, Rodriguez's deepest secret is a sexual secret. His secret, that's he a gay Catholic, is what really makes him brown in America.