Richard Rodriguez

This article is about the journalist and essayist. For the ex member of the Children of God religious movement, see Ricky Rodriguez. For the college football coach, see Rich Rodriguez. For Baruch College student leader and disciple of Andrew Salter, see Andrew Salter § Legacy. For Chilean cyclist, see Richard Rodríguez.

Richard Rodriguez
at the 2014 National Book Festival
Born	(1944-07-31) July 31, 1944 San Francisco or Sacramento, California, United States
Nationality	United States
Education	Christian Brothers High School (Sacramento, California) Sacred Heart School in Sacramento
Alma mater	Stanford University, B.A. in English, 1967 Columbia University M.A. in philosophy, 1969 University of California, Berkeley, graduate study in English Renaissance literature 1969-72 Warburg Institute, London, dissertation research, 1972-73
Occupation	Journalist
Agent(s)	Georges Borchardt, Inc., 136 East 57th St., New York, NY 10022
Known for	opposition to bilingual education and affirmative action
Notable work	Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (autobiography), David R. Godine (Boston, MA), 1982. Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father (autobiography), Viking Penguin (New York, NY), 1992. Brown: The Last Discovery of America, Viking (New York, NY), 2002.
Television	PBS Newshour
Partner	Jim
Parent(s)	Leopoldo Rodriguez Victoria Moran Rodriguez
Awards	-Fulbright Fellowship, 1972-73 -National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship, 1976-77, and Frankel Medal -Commonwealth Club gold medal, 1982 -Christopher Award, 1982, for Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez -Anisfield-Wolf Award for Race Relations, 1982 -George Foster Peabody Award, 1997, for work on the MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour -International Journalism Award, 1990, from World Affairs Council of California. -Emmy Award, 1992
Notes

Richard Rodriguez (born July 31, 1944) is an American writer who became famous as the author of Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (1982), a narrative about his intellectual development.

Early life

Richard Rodriguez was born on July 31, 1944, into a Mexican Russian Indian American Irish German Polish immigrant family in Sacramento, California. Rodriguez spoke Spanish until he went to a Catholic school at age six. As a youth in Sacramento, California, he delivered newspapers and worked as a gardener. He graduated from Sacramento's Christian Brothers High School.

Career

Rodriguez received a B.A. from Stanford University, an M.A. from Columbia University, was a Ph.D. candidate in English Renaissance literature at the University of California, Berkeley, and attended the Warburg Institute in London on a Fulbright fellowship. A noted prose stylist, Rodriguez has worked as a teacher, international journalist, and educational consultant and has appeared regularly on the PBS show, NewsHour. A television documentary about Rodriguez's works earned Jim Lehrer a Peabody Award in 1997. Rodriguez’s books include Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (1982), a collection of autobiographical essays; Mexico’s Children (1990); Days of Obligation: An Argument With My Mexican Father (1992), which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize; and Brown: The Last Discovery of America. Rodriguez's works have also been published in Harper's Magazine, Mother Jones, and Time.

Instead of pursuing a career in academia, Rodriguez suddenly decided to write freelance and take other temporary jobs. His first book, Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez, was published in 1982. It was an account of his journey from being a "socially disadvantaged child" to becoming a fully assimilated American, from the Spanish-speaking world of his family to the wider, presumably freer, public world of English. But the journey was not without costs: his American identity was only achieved after a painful separation from his past, his family, and his culture. "Americans like to talk about the importance of family values," says Rodriguez. "But America isn't a country of family values; Mexico is a country of family values. This is a country of people who leave home." While the book received widespread critical acclaim and won several literary awards, it also stirred resentment because of Rodriguez's strong stands against bilingual education and affirmative action. Some Mexican Americans called him pocho—traitor—accusing him of betraying himself and his people. Others called him a "coconut"—brown on the outside, white on the inside. He calls himself "a comic victim of two cultures."

Personal life

Rodriguez is openly gay. He came out in his book of essays Days of Obligation.

Browning of America

The "browning of America", a phrase that Rodriguez uses in Brown, may seem like a new coinage, but the term predated his book and has been used regularly to describe an increase in the mixing of cultural, racial, and ethnic identities in the United States in the past century. For Rodriguez the phrase has to do more with the color brown as a symbol of mélange in the United States or specifically an increase in its "bi- or even tri-racial" subgroups. The phrase is commonly applied to the current demographic shift towards a higher proportion of minorities in the total population in the United States. It can be used neutrally as a name for the current demographic shift in the United States, but has also been appropriated by organized groups on both the left and the right. The far right evokes the phrase generally as a minority-based usurping of customary or assumed White privilege, while the far left hails it as a welcomed rethinking and/or accountability of deep-seated notions of White "normativity."

Current Project

At present, Rodriguez is writing a book on Judaism, Islam, Christianity, and the desert. Rodriguez reports that he is "interested in the fact that three great monotheistic religions were experienced within this ecology." A sample of this project appeared in Harper's Magazine (January 2008). In this essay, "The God of the Desert," Rodriguez portrays the desert as a paradoxical temple—its emptiness the requisite for God's elusive presence.

Further reading

• America, May 22, 1982, pp. 403–404; September 23, 1995, p. 8.
• The Americas, fall-winter, 1988, pp. 75–90.
• American Scholar, spring, 1983, pp. 278–285, winter, 1994, p. 145.
• Booklist, March 1, 2002, Bill Ott, review of Brown: The Last Discovery of America, p. 1184.
• Christian Science Monitor Monthly, March 12, 1982, pp. B1, B3.
• Commentary, July 1982, pp. 82–84.
• Diacritics, fall, 1985, pp. 25–34.
• Melus, spring, 1987, pp. 3–15.
• New York Times Book Review, November 22, 1992, p. 42; April 7, 2002, Anthony Walton, "Greater than All the Parts, " p. 7.
• Reason, August–September 1994, p. 35.
• Time, January 25, 1993, p. 70.
• Tribune Books (Chicago, IL), December 13, 1992, p. 1.
• Washington Post Book World, November 15, 1992, p. 3.*

External links

External media
Audio
"Richard Rodriguez — The Fabric of Our Identity", On Being
"Richard Rodriguez—Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography." 7th Avenue Project, Oct. 13, 2013
Video
Brown: The Last Discovery of America, Richard Rodriguez, writer, 2003 Melcher Book Award, WGBH News Forum May 14, 2003
Video (and audio) conversation with Rodriguez and Kerry Howley on Bloggingheads.tv

• Profile at NNDB
• Template:Worldcat id
• Profile at Perspectives in American Literature
• Essays at NewsHour Online (PBS)
• Richard Rodriguez (February 18, 1998). "The Browning of America". PBS NewsHour.
• Scott London. "A View From the Melting Pot - An interview with Richard Rodriguez". Scott London.
• Jo Scott-Coe (Winter 2008). American Paradoxes. Narrative Magazine
• S.T. VanAirsdale (October–November 2013). "Finding His Religion". Sactown Magazine. Retrieved 2014-07-04.