Learning From Mexico Richard Rodriguez’s vision of racial mixing as New World destiny.

[xchrom]

http://www.thenation.com/article/179609/learning-mexico



To those of a certain age who remember when Richard Rodriguez debuted on the public stage in the early 1980s, he will probably always be “the Latino who opposes affirmative action.” The American-born son of Mexican immigrants, whose mother was a bilingual secretary in the California governor’s office, Rodriguez charted a course from his local Catholic school in Sacramento to studies at Stanford, Columbia and Berkeley, and then a fellowship at the British Library. Finishing grad school just as university English departments were scrambling to diversify, Rodriguez spent the 1970s being asked to apply for junior faculty positions that appeared unseemly in their cushiness. He even won $1,000 from an essay contest he’d never entered.

Being affirmative action’s anointed one did not please him. The new America then emerging, with a mixed-race elite in place of an all-white one, appeared to Rodriguez as a funhouse-mirror image of social progress. The order of the day was not the truly “revolutionary demand” of ensuring quality primary and secondary schooling for all the kids in the ghettos and barrios and trailer parks, but rather integrating Princeton and Dartmouth by elevating people like him. To Rodriguez, affirmative action fell short by ignoring “the most fundamental assumptions of the classical Left” about the centrality of class. The Latinos who most needed to be uplifted were those he’d met working construction one summer during college—the ones without papers, without English, without a union. But tragically, in color-coded America, those “who were in the best position to benefit from such reforms were those blacks least victimized by racism or any other social oppression.”

Rodriguez would have none of it. He wrote to the English departments that were courting him, explaining, “I cannot claim to represent socially disadvantaged Mexican-Americans. The very fact that I am in a position to apply for this job should make that clear.” He nevertheless was still invited to interviews, and he resolved his moral quandary by withdrawing his name from consideration. Instead of becoming a professor at an elite university with tenure and a TIAA-CREF portfolio, Rodriguez worked as a freelance writer struggling to make rent each month in San Francisco. “The only point to becoming an intellectual,” he would later write, “was to become a public intellectual.”

A martyr but not a saint, Rodriguez supplemented his income in those early, lean years with gigs on the lecture circuit. He gamely played the role of the Latino who opposes affirmative action in a series of talks “at the Marriott Something or the Sheraton Somewhere…. introduced to an all-white audience and hear[ing] their applause so loud.” To critics on the left, he was a “dupe” and a “coconut,” an Uncle Tomás telling white conservatives who couldn’t have cared less about building a racially just society exactly what they wanted to hear. And, indeed, it is hard not to read Rodriguez’s “Sheraton Somewhere” episode as a kind of admission of sin from a writer who tells us, “One of the things I love about [confession in] the church is that motive is assumed: Because I am human.”

[MisterP]

1. that's from Vasconcelos, actually--of a "New" Mexico regressing towards a mean

written in the 20s--that's a world away (plus they didn't know about skin-color genetics that prevent everyone from "caramelizing"--Brazil sure hasn't)

[Liberal_in_LA]

2. kick for later reading