Days of Obligation:
An Argument With My Mexican Father
By Richard Rodriguez
Viking, 230 pages, $21
This collection of essays, following by 10 years the author`s acclaimed
”Hunger of Memory,” again proves Richard Rodriguez a gifted autobiographer. Wider in range than most self-chroniclers, Rodriguez consistently defines the intersections of personal history and larger social issues.
In his beautifully crafted earlier book he probed his pain of separation from home, from his childhood Spanish and his parents` Mexican-American world, as he sought the wider, presumably freer, public life promised him by English. That volume also indicted legislated bilingualism as a sentimental error that blurred the hard choice between the marginalized home and the larger culture, to which, Rodriguez argued, mastery of English alone guaranteed full entry.
Elegantly and elegiacally, Rodriguez marked his distance from childhood and calculated the cost of assimilation. As a student of Rennaissance English literature and a guest in elegant homes from New York to London, he found himself romantically stereotyped for his striking ”Indian” features; in more politicized contexts, he was variously called a traitor to his roots, a Mexican-American ethnic or a ”Chicano intellectual.” Unable any longer to speak the language of home, he told an arch-American story of the harsh freedom to make himself over in uprootedness and relentless social mobility.
Rodriguez`s new book reminds us that this American story is also a California one, for that strange ”West of the West” is crucial to his history. For him, it is an extreme edge of American dreaming, the former frontierland of Old Mexico, and a place that mingles boom-time fantasies and schemes of self-invention with traces of a vanished Spanish empire and the current flood of its impoverished children from below the border.
If the earlier volume was a flight outward (always tempered by memory`s hunger), ”Days of Obligation” is a backward motion toward the deeper source- family, forebears, and the ethnic and historical tangle of California/
Mexico. Haunting the entire book is the question of where, if anywhere, one takes hold and belongs-to a tradition, a community, a way of thinking. His subtitle-”An Argument with My Mexican Father”-pits Rodriguez`s earlier faith in the self-transformation promised by America against his father`s pessimistic sense that ”life is disappointment and reversal.” Ten years ago, this elegist of his own past would have rebuffed this message; today, he must take its measure.
Reminding us that he ”writes of one life only,” Rodriguez in fact depicts that life as a confluence of culture and history, a continual allegory of sorts. But these large concerns are always anchored in vividly conceived situations. A decade earlier, for example, he dramatized his critique of the bureaucrats` quota-counting Equal Opportunity by refusing all his job offers from prestigious universities hot to hire a properly brown and very talented
”minority person.” Now, he tells of searching with a BBC film crew for the Mexican village of his father`s birth, only to recoil in dismay as the noisy entourage bursts in upon a funeral procession in narrow adobe back streets.
In this book, as before, Rodriguez unmistakably encounters his Indian self in the mirror, for he is the darkest member of his family, his complexion drawing him back to a past he has not known how to acknowledge. Mexico looms large in these pages, for his parents` origins and his own condition lead him repeatedly across both a literal and a richly imagined border-one that not only defines a dimension of his personal history but also much of the past and future of what geographer Joel Garreau has called ”Mexamerica.”
In one chapter, a week of shuttling between San Diego and Tijuana teaches Rodriguez that neither side of the border feels much like home; but in the whirlwind of Mexico City, where his Spanish is barely adequate, he feels the vitality of a people that has absorbed its conquerors. This ”capital of modernity,” he tells us, renewed the ”old world” through miscegenation and carried ”the idea of a round world to its biological conclusion.” Although he does not really fit there, Rodriguez acknowledges himself one of Mother Mexico`s distant sons: ”I take it as an Indian achievement that I am a Catholic, that I speak English, that I am an American. My life began, it did not end, in the sixteenth century.”
In these revisionary essays, Rodriguez ranges widely over issues of personal allegiance, homeland, ethnic identity, the future of Roman Catholicism and the shibboleth of ”diversity” invoked to gloss over the rifts in an increasingly fragmented American society. Through such tangles of history, politics and ideology, the author moves subtly and boldly, with an artist`s feel for associative leaps and juxtaposed images. But if he is always a meticulous writer, one feels he has labored over these pieces, teasing out the implications of earlier insights. ”Hunger of Memory” was a beautiful work of intuition; ”Days of Obligation” too often strains for effect as it explores more complicated and extended terrain.
What is profound, however, is Rodriguez`s need to re-engage that very past for which ”Hunger of Memory” sang an elegy, a song of departure. Employing the metaphor of obligatory days of worship in the Roman Catholic calendar, he re-examines a life that began with a self-wounding turn toward transcendence and the future. His father-portrayed previously as a ghostly, lonely man for whom the American Dream was ashes-is now his son`s
philosophical antagonist. Their dialogue runs:
”Life is harder than you think, boy.”
”You`re thinking of Mexico, Papa.”
”You`ll see.”
And the son indeed sees-that the past of California revives in the
”second-largest Mexican city in the world,” Los Angeles; that no acknowledgement of roots is without ambivalence and pain; that romantic myths blur the past and corrupt the mind much as ethnic abstractions (Hispanic, Chicano, Asian, Third World, African-American) do the individual person; that loneliness, as ever, will dog his steps and surface in his melancholic tone.
In Chapter Two of ”Days” the author sketches a history of gay San Francisco since the 1970s, then reveals himself as one who has lived through it ”circumspectly,” on the edge of the emotional revolution, afraid to embrace life. Unlike many of his gay friends, he is a survivor; but they, he reflects, ”learned to love what is corruptible, while I, barren skeptic . . . shift my tailbone upon the cold, hard pew.” Life, indeed, is harder than he once imagined.
Rodriguez`s voice is subtle, allusive and occasionally obscure. Speaking from between categories, on the edge of movements, fron both sides of borders, he is Anglo-Californian in his protean sense of personal identity, Mexican-Californian in his historical imagination. As he watches the novelty of Pentecostal evangelism burgeoning in his current San Francisco neighborhood, he feels himself an old Catholic who yearns for the earlier community of believers that united Irish and Mexican and Italian immigrants through the ancient Latin liturgy before the reforms of Vatican II.
In his Sacramento childhood he experienced not ”the dead California of Spaniards and forty-niners and Joan Didion`s grandmother, but Kodachrome, CinemaScope, drive-in California.” His ahistorical and very Anglo-Californian ”Protestant faith in the future” was challenged only by his father`s enigmatic smile. Now, in midlife, he reinvokes that skeptical witness and acknowledges the wisdom of a tragic and Catholic vision of person and history. The wrestling with his elusive and insistent past makes these sinuous ruminations worthy of inclusion in the long American tradition of spirtual autobiography.
