Brown: The Last Discovery of America (review)

Brown: The Last Discovery of America. by Richard Rodriguez. Viking, 2002. 233 pages, cloth, $24.95

It had been almost thirty years since I'd been in Los Angeles when I flew out to California from the Midwest to attend the 1987 convention of the National Council of Teachers of English, and from the time I landed to the moment my committee meeting began the next morning, I felt as if I were visiting a foreign country. I lived and worked in the rural center of Michigan's Lower Peninsula; in my community I knew of only one black family and at my university, in a dozen years of teaching, I'd had no more than a dozen "minority" students in the thousands I'd taught. In L.A., among baggage handlers, cashiers, taxi drivers, hotel clerks, waitresses, and salespersons, everyone who spoke to me used English with Meso-American, Caribbean, African, and Asian inflection; I met no one who spoke unaccented American English until I entered the room with my fellow English teachers. I was the Midwest representative on the NCTE Committee on Affiliates and the topic for our annual meeting this year was "diversity." It was a theme our committee embodied—I was one of two or three white men and among the other nine or ten members were several "women of color." When I told them of my monocultural hometown and my unbroken string of multicultural encounters in L.A., the Hispanic woman opposite me nodded sagely and the black woman next to me put her hand on my shoulder, leaned forward with a grin, and said, "Welcome to America, honey."

That incident from decades ago kept popping into my head as I read Brown: The Last Discovery of America by Richard Rodriguez, a book that culminates his explorations of culture, ethnicity, and race. In Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (1982), the book that identified him as an individual and indispensable voice on ethnic identity, Rodriguez traced the arc of his education from his childhood in a Spanish-speaking home and his first days in school, able to speak only fifty or so English words (his parents were born in Mexico and he was raised in Sacramento), through his undergraduate years at Stanford University and graduate study in English at Columbia and University of California at Berkeley. Rodriguez's arguments against bilingual education and affirmative action made the book controversial, but its power arose from his ability to anchor his perspective in his own experience. Like all great autobiographies it allowed the reader to inhabit the writer's experience—how it feels to be a Spanish-speaking child in an English-speaking world, to know you are privileged because of your complexion and ethnic origins rather than because of your talent or ability, to truly be changed by your education. Most of the great themes of Richard Rodriguez's writing emerge forcefully in this book and establish themselves firmly in the flow of contemporary cultural thought.

Rodriguez's collection of linked essays, Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father (1992), confirmed his unique place as a personal essayist whose memoirs were simultaneously important discussions of ethnicity and identity. In it Rodriguez's prose blossomed lyrically without losing any intellectual rigor, and he brought into American creative nonfiction some of the poetic inventiveness characteristic of such Latin American writers as Eduardo Galeano and Octavio Paz. Rodriguez has emphasized the blending of two cultures in himself—the Anglo (the Richard, rather than the Ricardo of his childhood) and the Hispanic (the Rodriguez). In a sense (although it is too simplistic to attempt rigid categories here) Hunger of Memory was his Anglo book, solidly in the British and American literary tradition of autobiography, and Days of Obligation was his Hispanic book, stylistically as well as thematically linked to Mexican traditions. The first book looks at what it means to be...