Richard Rodriguez

   AN INTERVIEW

by Jo Scott-Coe

Richard Rodriguez arrives at the small, windowed café in San Francisco looking softly formal, wearing a slightly wrinkled linen jacket on this glittering late summer afternoon. We’re just steps away from the hospital where he was born, in 1944, though he was raised in nearby Sacramento, where his father worked as a manual laborer and his mother as a typist. Rodriguez is gracious and a bit shy, and one can still see the Catholic schoolboy he was in his manners. But he is not afraid to show emotion: during conversation, he often leans into the table’s edge to press the urgency of his point. His large, round eyes tear up. When he laughs, his entire face opens. His elegiac voice, in person as on the page, is rich with the awareness of loss, which he holds alongside the celebration of progress. Rodriguez expresses sorrow over his fading confidence and competence in his first language, Spanish, which began when he was small and the nuns paid a visit to his parents to suggest that speaking English at home would be preferable for the boy’s progress. Rodriguez went on to attend Stanford on scholarship, receive a master’s degree in theology from Columbia, and spend several years studying Renaissance English literature at UC Berkeley. But he has paid a price to speak and write in precise, elegant, unaccented English.

      Rodriguez talks of other losses in the spirit of community. His parents, to whom he was very close, have both died. As a gay man living in San Francisco, he attended the bedsides of numerous friends now dead of AIDS. He recently lost a dear friend to cancer and more recently has survived renal cancer himself. Since his own medical ordeal, he says he belongs to the nation of the wounded, an identity he connects naturally to his Catholicism, with its focus on caring for the poor, the sick, and the downtrodden: very much at odds with the dominant ethos of America’s nominally secular society.

      Rodriguez’s work, which has been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Critics Circle Award, among other honors, defies easy categorization. He published his first book, the memoir Hunger of Memory, in 1981, after leaving UC Berkeley without having completed his doctoral dissertation or accepting one of many prestigious job offers made in advance of his graduation, offers that he felt were made purely on the basis of his ethnicity. He now describes writing the memoir as a fundamentally optimistic effort to affirm his individual identity and ambition. Some cultural activists, however, criticized him for speaking against bilingual education and quota-style affirmative action in the book.

      Two more essay collections followed. Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father (1992) examines the complex relationship between the United States and Mexico through the meditative lens of Rodriguez’s appreciation for his immigrant father. In a single chapter, Late Victorians, he alluded publicly for the first time to life as a gay man.

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