[Marxism] Richard Rodriguez and Marx

[Victor Rosado <skygoya@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Victor M. Rosado

Brown Meltdown: Richard Rodriguez's Brown

The project outlined in Richard Rodriguez's Brown: The Last Discovery of
America seeks to engage in a process of envisioning a new conception of race
that transcends the black / white dichotomy still prevalent in contemporary
American society.  In a recent interview, Rodriguez goes as far as to
proclaim that one of the goals of his text is to "undermine" the traditional
notions of race entirely.

Racialized discourse is perhaps one of the most important features of US
culture and history.  Richard Rodriguez is well aware of the profound impact
classic notions of race have had upon our society: "Without race", Rodriguez
admits,"we wouldn't have music, movies, prisons, politics, history,
libraries, colleges, private conversations, motives. Dorothy Dandridge. Bill
Clinton" (Brown, 22).  But Brown seeks to move beyond outmoded theories of
race such as the "one drop theory."  Rodriguez writes:  "I write about race
in America in hopes of undermining the notion of race in America (xi).

No More Black and White
In Brown, Rodriguez begins to discuss the brown nature of America's past, a
past in which the Native American, Black and White have often interplayed.
In one essay, Rodriguez deconstructs a scene from Alexis Detoqueville's
Democracy in America when the European girl and her African and Native
American servants interact through their playful gazes.  For Rodriguez, this
is a truly American moment, a brown moment that is.  Rodriguez also begins
to reflect upon his own brown past. Rodriguez describes how Elvis Priestley
is the personification of brown and what Rodriguez truly was, for Elvis is a
contradictory figure, just like Rodriguez: "something in his manner,
something I recognized, rhymed with the schoolboy I was" (15).  As Elvis
shifted his gyrating pelvis between the perceived boundaries of African and
rural white culture, Rodriguez identifies with the browness of the Rock and
Roll king's gestures.

Rodriguez discovers that his past is like the history of America--a
contradictory past filled with brown moments.  For instance Thomas
Jefferson, the slave-owner and one of the revolutionary founders of the
United States, was himself a brown figure, as he was the father of brown
children (35).  In Brown, Rodriguez has read history through a new
perspective informed by brown.  But in his recent essays, Rodriguez extends
his brown metaphor to problematicize and read contemporary America.

Browning America and Disappearing Borders
What are the origins of Rodriguez's new model for race in America?
According to the author, it is the Latino boom of the past two decades that
is "browning America".    "Well, here we are, 36 million Americans who
describe ourselves outside of a racial category.  We describe ourselves as
Hispanic or Latinos.  That is not a race", states Rodriguez in a recent
interview (Hansen, 4). He continues, "Sammy Sosa is as legitimately Hispanic
as Madonna's daughter, and in that sense we are undermining the whole notion
of race in America."   Essentially what is developing in the United States
is a new cartography of American identity, one which has remapped the
borders of racialized paradigms and categories within the US because, as
Rodriguez explains, "Hispanics are browning America."  The profound change
in the concept of race (black / white dichotomy) is perhaps due to the
increasing influence of Latinos in the US.  Hispanic cultures have
traditionally had a broader spectrum inherent within their notion of race.
These cultures also understood "raza" to be more of a cultural rather than a
pseudo-biological category.  In other words, religion and language heritage
determine one's cultural background more than skin pigmentation or dominant
facial and other physiological features.  With the growth of the Hispanic
population in the US, perhaps the Latino notion of race is informing,
changing, or even, as Rodriguez puts it, "undermining" how Americans
envision race.

Hispanics are also remapping America itself.  The United States' own
citizens have traditionally seen their relationship in the continent as an
east-west problematic.  The Western conquest and the discovery of gold in
California, as Marx understood these events, were world-historic moments in
the development of capitalism in the US.  They have profoundly impacted
American ideology and culture.  Just as important to the history of the US
has been its colonization and imperial role in Latin America.  The Monroe
Doctrine, for instance, is a narrative with a more north-south dialogic.
In Brown, Richard Rodriguez rightly points out that "Because of Hispanics,
Americans are coming to see the United States in terms of a latitudinal
vector, in terms of south-north, hot-cold; a new way of placing ourselves in
the twenty-first century" (xiii).  Hispanics have introduced a new
"geography of the American imagination" (xiii).  Hispanics are introducing a
new plane into the American experiment, one that maps the US (from within)
as el Norte.

The new remapping of America, however, is not just a result of the Latino
boom in the United States, as Rodriguez argues in Brown.  More precisely, it
can be seen as a general outcome of the most advanced stage of global
capitalist culture. The dynamic of capitalism is, as Marx highlighted in the
Communist Manifesto, expressed in "the need of a constantly expanding market
for its products chase the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe.
It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections
everywhere" (7).  In its perpetual quest for profits and because of its
internal drive for expansion, capital penetrates all borders, destroys old
borders, and sometimes establishes new ones.  It is the most dynamic of all
class societies, so dynamic that "all that is solid melts into air".
Through the process of globalization, borders are redrawn as capital
continually expands.  As a result, how we see ourselves and the world is
constantly under flux.  This is evident in Rodriguez's Brown.  He writes:
"America has traditionally chosen to describe itself as an east-west
country.  I grew up on the east-west map of America, facing east.  I no
longer find myself so easily on that map.  In middle age (also brown, its
mixture of loss and capture), I end up on the shore where Sir Francis Drake
first stepped onto California.  I look toward Asia" (xiii).  Rodriguez
cannot identity with the east-west logic of his youth, but with a new
"vector" that orients him and borders differently than the traditional
east-west narrative.  His perspective is much more global, put at the same
time very local, as he comes to realize that California and Asia have for
several generation shared common histories, as evidenced by the Chinese
communities in Sacramento, the city Rodriguez grew up in, and by the
immigrants from South Asia, such as his Indian uncle the dentist.  Not only
does Rodriguez look towards Asia, but the map he uses is a brown map, one in
which headings are varied and borders are more contradictory and porous than
previous divisions.

Brown is a metaphor of the refiguring and shattering of old borders in a
world in which global capital further penetrates and undermines established
norms.  Brown is a space in which Rodriguez deals more directly with some of
the new paradigms of this postmodern era.  His own beliefs are radically
changed by a new brown outlook of society.  For example, his outlook on
language, an important element in the essays of Richard Rodriguez, is very
different.  The strict division that Rodriguez maintains between the "public
language" (English) and private languages (Spanish or any other of the
languages spoken primarily amongst immigrant families in the US) has been
erased. Rodriguez notes in Brown, "the best English novelist in the world is
not British at all, but a Mahogany who lives in snowy Toronto and writes of
Bombay" (40).  Rodriguez has grown accustomed to the brown contradictions of
postmodern capitalist society, whereas before he was much more likely to see
view things consciously or unconsciously through classic bourgeois
dichotomies such as private / public sphere.  He writes in Hunger of Memory,
for instance, "I couldn't believe that Spanish was a public language, like
English" (16).  But today's America is radically different from 50's and
early 60's, the era during which Rodriguez grew up.  The President of the
United States courts his Latino public in Spanish and gives radio addresses
in that language.  "Bush is the first Hispanic President" proclaims
Rodriguez in Brown.  What has changed is a fundamental erasure of the split
between the public / private spheres.  What was once private is now public,
or vice versa.  Rodriguez offers the use of mobile phones as an example of
the fading of what was once the realm of the private individual into the
public arena.  He observes: "Americans do not grant privacy to cell phone
users.  For one thing, the cell phoner insists on maintaining an "I" in
situations where Americans have largely resigned themselves to taking their
places in crowds and waiting to reemerge as singular" (Brown, 213).

The demands of global capital both within and outside of the US have
radically broken down the ideological split between public / private, black
/ white, etc. because capital itself has penetrated everywhere.  Even the
split between Global South and North, so important for the analysis used by
progressive activists, is called into question.  Rodriguez, in one essay
writes: "The fact is that more and more North Americans are becoming like
Latin Americans -- seduced by magic away from reality. To that extent the
border between fiction and nonfiction, North and South, is blurring"
("Magic's Seductive Hold").  This helps explain, according to Rodriguez, the
American fascination with the Latin "toy boy" Ricky Martin and why Las Vegas
is the fastest growing city in the United States and at the same time helps
us understand why Mexican soap opera actresses look like Swedish
supermodels.    Increasingly, it seems that we are heading towards a world
not of black versus white, but of brown.  There are so many
contradictions--a President who speaks more eloquently in Spanish, Reality
Television, and foreign authors who are the finest writers of English--that
a new perspective like brown offers more insight than discourses that
maintain strict ontological splits (neo-Kantian philosophy, Romanticism,
traditional anthropology, etc.)  Rodriguez puts its succinctly: "the future
is brown is my thesis" (Brown, 35).

Brown above all is a metaphor for impurity.  "My book is about brown--not
skin, but brown as impurity" (194) explains Rodriguez to an acquaintance of
his.  It is a metaphor quite different from, for example, Kantian notions of
pure, apriori faculties of the mind or early Romantic notions of being able
to escape urban life by entering a pure relationship of love or leaving to a
countryside untainted by over-industrialization.  Rodriguez's metaphor,
however, emerges during a time when almost everything is corrupted by
capital; hence, nothing is "pure".   Brown as impurity represents the
postmodern individual's contradictory and complex relationship to capital
and his / her inability to hide from it.

Rodriguez discovers that brown is a very liberating process, what he calls
"freedom of substance and narrative." He reveals in a recent interview:

     "Brown" has allowed me to reconcile myself to myself, that is, to
allow for the
    unevenness of my life, to allow for its contradictions, to not have to
figure everything
    out in my life, to see it as whole rather than as partial. Maybe this
is some wisdom of
    middle age too, but I realize now that life is uneven, that I will
always be Catholic as
    inevitably as I will always be a homosexual, that I will always be at
odds with my
    identity, that I will always belong in some odd way to Latin America
and that I will
    always belong to this other place, this country that is not at all like
Latin America.
    That I will have all of those identities and that I will live with them
in a brown way.
    For a man who has struggled with this and has sort of turned his life
into an odd
    exercise in self-laceration, it comes with some great peace, almost as
though I don't
    need to write anymore.  (Hansen, 7)

The contradictions in his life, which at one time where quite overwhelming,
are no longer problematic for Rodriguez.  The alienation, self-guilt, and
sadness that the scholarship boy once felt have been seemingly overcome.
Rodriguez has found comfort, "freedom" in his impureness, his browness.

The Problems of Brown
Rodriguez has found himself a comfortable niche, a resolution, a "great
peace" that has allowed him to be "free".  Brown is the space that allows
him to do this, albeit a very amorphous and contradictory one.  Rodriguez,
getting caught up in his "freedom of substance", has a tendency to conflate
the problems of capital to resistance to brown.
Rodriguez prefers identities forged through brown.  He writes:  "In fact, I
do have a preference for Hispanic over Latino.  To call oneself Hispanic is
to admit a relationship to Latin America in English.  Soy Hispanic is a
brown assertion."  Rodriguez prefers that Latinos and Blacks see themselves
as brown and not as pure ethnicities.  To be brown is to admit one has been
influenced by one's oppressor, by one's negative as well as positive
experiences.  To deny one's relationship with the English language or even
white American culture by cultivating one's own identity group is a flawed
project.  Thus, Rodriguez is critical of the political movements of the 60's
and 70's, as Chicanos and Blacks formed their own collectives, often denying
their contradictory American heritage.  Rodriguez is critical of Blacks
resisting through Hip-Hop, for it is a form of expression that attempts to
distance itself too much from the English language.  Rodriguez argues: "I
may have mastered the tongue, but I never felt the need--or the love,
incidentally--to invent a new one" (30). The way Chicanos and Blacks have
resisted up until this day is too problematic and, as Rodriguez sometimes
suggests, contributes to their own oppression.  They should conform to the
law of brown (which is almost a natural, "biological impulse" as Rodriguez
calls it) in order to emancipate themselves.  It seems that the social
problems of America are due to the fact that people have not fully accepted
the implications of brown.  Blacks and Hispanics, however, have been
oppressed and thrown into jail not just because of the forms their
resistance have traditionally taken but mainly because of the political and
economic forces of institutionalized racism and impoverishment in their
communities.
Rodriguez's reading of the events of September 11 highlights similarly the
flaws of the thesis of Brown.  Rodriguez is quite aware that brown can be
problematic: "As much as I celebrate browning of America (and I do), I do
not propose an easy optimism" (xii).  Sept.  11 represents the "dangers of
brown", demonstrating how fundamentalist "puritanical" beliefs lead to
disaster.  Their "war against the impurity that lies without" was a more
radical rejection of brown.  But once again brown fails us because it paints
over the role that economic and political friction played in forging the
events of Sept. 11.  If Osama Bin Laden would have been more open to brown
modernity and postmodernity, would he have resisted so fiercely?  It seems
highly unlikely, for he is principally an economic and political rival of US
imperialism, an aspiring capitalist who wants a greater share of the prize
that is the Middle East.  Saddam Hussein was an ally of the US who was (and
still is) a fierce critic of "puritanical" fundamentalism and open to the
modernity of the Western states.  Yet, the friction between him and the US
has lasted 12 years, no doubt because of their disputes over who will
control oil revenues for the next 20 years or so.
Rodriguez unfortunately gets caught up too much in his own thesis, tending
to conflate many contemporary issues to his brown metaphor.  As we speak,
traditionally white suburbs are browning, as young teens are listening to
the brown rapper Eminem and Latinos are moving to the hamlets of Long
Island.  We are on the verge of a final frontier, as Rodriguez's subtitle
suggests, a "Last Discovery of America" that is leading us to a brown
future, although the ride will be bumpy along the way.   Nevertheless, hate
crimes and racial attacks in Farmingville, New York and Dearborn, Michigan
committed against brown people are likely to continue not because people
have not embraced brown enough, but because of the contradictory nature of
capital's political and economic mechanisms.


Bibliography
Hansen, Suzy.  "The browning of America."  An interview with Richard
Rodriguez.
    Salon.com.  April 27, 2002.
"http://www.salon.com/books/int/2002/04/27/rodriguez";

Rodriguez, Richard.  Brown:  The Last Discovery of America.  New York:
Viking, 2002.
___________.  Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father.  New
York:
    Bantam, 1992.
___________.  Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez.  New
York:
    Bantam, 1982.
___________. "Magic's Seductive Hold." Essay.  Salon.com.  July 17, 1999.
    <http://www.salon.com/news/feature/1999/06/16/magic/index.html>
Marx and Engels.  The Communist Manifesto.  New York: Monthly Review Press,
1998



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