I Sing the Nation Brown: Richard Rodriguez and Latinos as the End of Race by Gustavo Arellano
I Sing the Nation Brown: Richard Rodriguez and Latinos as the End of Race
by Gustavo Arellano
Editor-in-chief, emeritus
W.E.B Dubois famously predicted at the dawn of the 20th century that its most urgent concern would be “the problem of the color line.” There’s been little progress in solving it a century later, the dissolution of colonial empires and scientific theories on race notwithstanding. But Richard Rodriguez thinks he has the answer to Dubois’ prophecy: Latinos.
In his latest book Brown: The Last Discovery of America, Rodriguez doesn’t examine real-life Latino lives so much as take Latinos and their most associated skin tone as a metaphor to show how race can be overcome in this country. To Rodriguez, the sanguinary diversity of Latinos—“la raza cósmica” (the cosmic race) as the Mexican intellectual José Vasconcelos called them—makes them the ultimate solution to the ingrained racial vista of the United States. Heavy in ideas, outlandish in its arrogance, yet ultimately vindicated by its radical hypothesis, Brown has the potential to serve as a starting point for a much-needed racial dialogue for the coming century.
Throughout Brown, Rodriguez interchanges "Latino" and "brown" as metaphors with dazzling results. "Brown as impurity. I write of a color that is not a singular color, not a strict recipe, not an expected result, but a color produced by careless desire, even by accident; by two or several," he writes in the preface to the book. He then proceeds to tell in the next nine chapters' different ways in which Latino/brown has influenced the United States, changing everything from America's relation to the world to its imperialistic outlook of East/West to North/South to-most importantly to Rodriguez-the racial divide.
The book is strongest when Rodriguez-emulating Whitman and Baldwin with his lyrical, introspective prose-expands on his Latinos-as-the-eradicators-of race thesis. When he actually speaks about what the Latino community is as opposed to what it represents, though, the book falters. Brown’s one chapter exclusively devoted to Latinos drowns in self-righteousness and snootiness as Rodriguez abandons intellectual dissemination and comes off sounding like Barbara Coe with lines like "I marvel at the middle-class American willingness to take Spanish up."
But Brown is saved when Rodriguez finds his thesis of the Latino/brown promise amongst-of all the people on Earth, how weird is this?-Richard Nixon. Walking around the lame Nixon Library ("The guards are spooky, their walkie-talkie vigilance suggests only crackpots visit this tomb," Rodriguez wryly notes), Rodriguez finds in the young Nixon the tragic truth of the American racial life. He remembers that when Nixon fumbled and sweated his way through his 1960 debate with John Kennedy, "I saw what many other Americans saw that night: Harvard College will always beat Whittier College in America. The game is fixed and there is nothing to be done about it."
Rather than attempt to help his kind (the working class, not “whites”), though, Nixon apparently betrayed his "people" by classifying people in five racial groups in 1973 (of which "Hispanic" was the most prominent) because it was politically expedient at the time to allow affirmative action to flourish under race rather than class. Within this bureaucratic decree (O.M.B. Statistical Directive 15, to be exact), Rodriguez argues, Nixon also unwittingly laid the seeds of race's destruction because there was no way such narrow classifications could survive America's ensuing multicultural madness. Especially that of “Hispanic”: “Mayan Indians from the Yucatán were directed to the Hispanic pavilion which they must share with Argentine tangoistas, Colombian drug dealers, and Russian Jews who remember Cuba from the viewpoint of Miami.” All of this thanks to whom Rodriguez only half-jokingly refers to as "the dark father of hispanicity" and who might ultimately turn out to be our greatest civil rights reformer.
Brown embraces Latinos not for who they are but what they symbolize: the impurity in America's traditional black/white dichotomy that will probably do away with the country's most pernicious problem. The book makes a convincing case that America can no longer afford to think of itself in racial terms-all thanks to a people/color that the United States set its eyes on subjugating but is now the other way around. "And I am left", Rodriguez writes from his home in San Francisco, "sitting inside, deconstructing the American English word for myself-Hispanic [
BROWN: THE LAST DISCOVERY OF AMERICA BY RICHARD RODRIGUEZ, VIKING PRESS, 231 PAGES, $24.95
______________
Gustavo Arellano is the Editor in Chief for OC Latino. He is also a contributing writer for the OC Weekly.
posted by * at 2:36 AM
<< Home