Obligation: Rodriguez's Tortured Identity

Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father

by Richard Rodriguez

Viking Penguin, $21.00

Ten years ago, Richard Rodriguez published Hunger of Memory and earned himself the label "pocho." The word is used by Mexican Americans to denote someone who has forgetten where he comes from, someone who has neglected his past.

In a time when "getting in touch with your roots" was a favorite pastime, Rodriguez announced his interest in things not considered ethnic. This son of Mexican immigrants wrote defiantly about his love of British novels, his years at Stanford and Cambridge Universities, his Sunday afternoons spent chatting with yuppie friends at champagne brunches in Southern California.

In his new book, Days of Obligation: An Argument With My Mexican Father, he continues to explore his distance from the culture of the nation in which his parents were born. Days is at once more personal and more epic than his earlier book. Rodriguez reveals more of his own life here, drawing profound conclusions about the labels we use to name ourselves. The essays meditate on a broad range of topics, including the California missions, the effect of AIDS on gay life in San Francisco, the materialism of Los Angeles culture and the myth of the Virgin of Guadalupe.

Rodriguez focuses on his native California as the battleground of the "competing theologies" of United States and Mexico. The two nations serve as representatives of several different oppositions that form the argument of the book's title: Protestant individualism versus Catholic collectivity, Disney-toned optimism versus Latin fatality, confident son versus jaded father, comedy versus tragedy.

California becomes not so much a place where these tensions are resolved as a realm of simultaneity. It is the state people dismiss as having "no history," and yet it is strewn with old missions from the Spanish occupancy. It is the state where the place names on highway maps speak of a mythic Catholic past (San Bernardino, San Luis Obispo) and a bland suburban present (Riverside, Pleasant Hill).

The best essays in this book demonstrate Rodriguez's ability to play with these contradictions, to arrive at startling truths about American society. He insists that Americans must realize their culture is by nature a mixture. He contrasts the American obsession with racial and cultural purity to Mexico's ethic of mestizaje (cultural and racial mixing). He insists that the obsession has been pointless: the "mexicanization" of the U.S.A. has in many ways already occured. Quite literally, Rodriguez suggests that the food we put into our mouths, the music we listen to and the people we sleep with have the ability to change us. For Rodriguez, this is not simply a matter of "embracing" diverse cultures. This is an inescapable fact; complexity embraces us.

Rodriguez offers himself as an example and proof of this. He is a Mexican American with an "Italian suit, an American voice and an Indian face," a Catholic homosexual who was taught by Irish nuns in a parochial school in Northern California, a scholar of English literature whose Spanish retains a gringo accent. He steadfastly refuses to give any of these identities primacy, to allow any one gloss on his thought.

It is easy to criticize his work as politically irresponsible, and Chicano and gay rights activists in particular have denounced him for refusing to speak "for" them. But Rodriguez remains responsible not to a political reality but to the more intractable reality of the individual. He insists that he is more than simply a collection of labels, and in doing so challenges us to think about the complexities of human existence. His own reality proves disturbing, fascinating material.