A Finer Grain: Richard Rodriguez's Days of Obligation

KEVIN R. MCNAMARA A Finer Grain: Richard Rodriguez's Days ofObligation The Mexicans, become Chícanos, act as guides on the visit to El Alamo to laud the heroes ofthe American nation so valiantly massacred by their own ancestors. . . . History is full ofruse and cunning. But so are the Mexicans who have crossed the bolder clandestinely to come and work here. Jean Baudrillard, America "Remember the Alamo," children in Sacramento learned to say. Remembering what? Richard Rodriguez, Days ofObligation 'hen richard Rodriguez personifies the United States in Days of Obligation: An Argument with M31 Mexican Father, he imagines a truck-stop waitress, "a blond or a redhead—not the same color as at her last job. . . . Morning and the bloom ofyouth are painted on her cheeks." The bringer of new beginnings, with "one complete gesture [she] pockets the tip, stacks dishes along one strong forearm, produces a damp rag soaked in lethe water, which she then passes over the formica" (55). The trope of open road is a staple of American cultural criticism, from frontier legend to Jean Baudrillard's postmetaphysical musings, but this anti-maternal mother ofus all, this pure product of American placelessness, is in the grain of another of Rodriguez 's predecessors, William Carlos Williams. Arizona Quarterly Volume 53, Number 1, Spring 1997 Copyright © 1997 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004-1610 I04Kevin R. McNamara The affinity between Williams and Rodriguez is deeper than this one character: Days of Obligation and In the American Grain are concerned with the different cultures that share the U.S. and what they might create. For both authors "the American" is an Anglo Protestant. Writing during a period when "the general feeling against Puritanism . . . slipped into high gear" (Gregory xviii), Williams did not undertake to do justice to the complexity of Mather—or Franklin, for that matter. He was not wholly without appreciation for the early settlers; as he tells it, in those first hard New England winters, the Puritans' "tight-tied littleness " bloomed into a "courage, close to the miraculous" (American Grain no) that enabled their survival. Yet, he insists that their fear of a world that reveals human limits left its indelible mark on the nation's unconsciousness. The Puritan mission to subdue '"the Devil's Territories '" (83; quoting Mather) spawned Franklin, "Work[ing] night and day, build[ing] ... a wall against that which is threatening, the terror of life, poverty" (156). For Rodriguez, too, the normative American landscape is a product of the Puritan unconscious: from its gated suburban communities to its southern border, the disposition ofspace in the U.S. reflects the Puritan injunction to "Build a fence around all you hold dear and respect other fences" (Days 163). Thus the "northern strain" (American Grain 68) and its pathology of success manifest in labor-saving devices that free their maker, not from necessity but from contact with the unclean things of the world. It makes a virtue of statistics: "The United States, without self-seeking, has given more of material help to Europe and to the world in the last ten years in time ofneed than have all other nations of the world in the entire history of mankind" (American Grain 174), but this technologymediated humanitarianism is born of fear of "servfing] another, with a harder personal devotion" (American Grain 176), a fear that defined Puritan America from its beginning, as Williams suggests by an anecdote ofthe divine who would call a converted Indian Brother, yet "would not suffer the contrite Indians to lay their hands upon him, . . . but drew back and told them to address themselves to God alone. . . . Afraid to touch!" (American Grain 1 19). Rodriguez suggests that the attitude survives today as a sublimated nativism: "The best thing about immigrants , the best thing they bring to America, we say, is their 'diversity.' We mean they are not us—the Protestant creed" (Da^s 165). A Finer Grain105 Rodriguez and Williams both play this American against another American who is Spanish and Catholic, a fatalist who lives in the sure knowledge of tragedy and therefore does not fear betrayal by the world. Combining qualities of these two American types, Williams sought an alternative America...