Blaxicans PDF

140 Chapter 4 Definition
“Blaxicans” and Other Reinvented

Americans
Richard Rodriguez
The son of immigrant Mexican parents in San Francisco, Richard Rodriguez (b. 1944)
grew up in a Mexican American section of Sacramento. He was educated in Catholic gram-
mar and high schools, and he attended Stanford and Columbia universities, where he took
a bachelor’s and a master’s degree, as well as the Warburg Institute in Great Britain. He is
the winner of a Fulbright Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and
a Peabody Award, which recognizes outstanding work in the electronic media.
Rodriguez achieved recognition in 1981, when he published Hunger of Memory:
The Education of Richard Rodriguez. The book includes a criticism of both affirmative
action and bilingual education on the grounds that they tend to separate rather than unite
people. He is also the author of Days of Obligation: An Argument with my Mexican
Father (1992) and of Brown: The Last Discovery of America (2002). He is currently
working on a book about Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Rodriguez has written numer-
ous essays, which have appeared in Harper’s Magazine, American Scholar, Time,
Mother Jones, Forum, and Nuestro.
The essay that follows was first published in the Chronicle of Higher Education, a
publication for college professors and administrators. In it Rodriguez argues that the old
racial classifications—black, white, Hispanic, and so on—should be abandoned, for they
misrepresent the cultural and ethnic realities of today’s America.
VOCABULARY
incomprehensibly, mythic, rind, aforementioned, perpetual, dilute,
ineffable, mulatto, fallacious, archetypal, demythologizing
1 There is something unsettling about immigrants because … well, because

they chatter incomprehensibly, and they get in everyone’s way. Immigrants
seem to be bent on undoing America. Just when Americans think we
know who we are—we are Protestants, culled from Western Europe, are
we not? —then new immigrants appear from Southern Europe or from
Eastern Europe. We—we who are already here—we don’t know exactly
what the latest comers will mean to our community. How will they fit in
with us? Thus we—we who were here first—we begin to question our
own identity.
2 After a generation or two, the grandchildren or the great-grandchildren
of immigrants to the United States and the grandchildren of those who
tried to keep immigrants out of the United States will romanticize the
immigrant, will begin to see the immigrant as the figure who teaches
us most about what it means to be an American. The immigrant, in
Buscemi, Santi, and Charlotte Smith, 75 Readings Plus, New York: The McGraw-Hill Companies, 2013.
bus26444_ch04_114-147.indd 140 Provided for testing purposes only. 12/20/11 3:43 PM
“Blaxicans” and Other Reinvented Americans Richard Rodriguez 141
mythic terms, travels from the outermost rind of America to the very
center of American mythology. None of this, of course, can we admit
to the Vietnamese immigrant who served us our breakfast at the hotel
this morning. In another 40 years, we will be prepared to say to the
Vietnamese immigrant that he, with his breakfast tray, with his intuition
for travel, with his memory of tragedy, with his recognition of peerless
freedoms, he fulfills the meaning of America.
In 1997, Gallup conducted a survey on race relations in America, but 3
the poll was concerned only with white and black Americans. No ques-
tion was put to the aforementioned Vietnamese man. There was certainly
no question for the Chinese grocer, none for the Guatemalan barber, none
for the tribe of Mexican Indians who reroofed your neighbor’s house.
The American conversation about race has always been a black-and- 4
white conversation, but the conversation has become as bloodless as
badminton.
I have listened to the black-and-white conversation for most of my 5
life. I was supposed to attach myself to one side or the other, without
asking the obvious questions: What is this perpetual dialectic between
Europe and Africa? Why does it admit so little reference to anyone else?
I am speaking to you in American English that was taught me by Irish 6
nuns—immigrant women. I wear an Indian face; I answer to a Spanish
surname as well as this California first name, Richard. You might wonder
about the complexity of historical factors, the collision of centuries, that
creates Richard Rodriguez. My brownness is the illustration of that
collision, or the bland memorial of it. I stand before you as an Impure-
American, an Ambiguous-American.
In the 19th century, Texans used to say that the reason Mexicans 7
were so easily defeated in battle was because we were so dilute, being
neither pure Indian nor pure Spaniard. Yet, at the same time, Mexicans
used to say that Mexico, the country of my ancestry, joined two worlds,
two competing armies. José Vasconcelos, the Mexican educator and phi-
losopher, famously described Mexicans as la raza cósmica, the cosmic race.
In Mexico what one finds as early as the 18th century is a predominant
population of mixed-race people. Also, once the slave had been freed in
Mexico, the incidence of marriage between Indian and African people
there was greater than in any other country in the Americas and has not
been equaled since.
Race mixture has not been a point of pride in America. Americans 8
speak more easily about “diversity” than we do about the fact that I
might marry your daughter; you might become we; we might become us.
America has so readily adopted the Canadian notion of multiculturalism
because it preserves our preference for thinking ourselves separate—our
elbows need not touch, thank you. I would prefer that table. I can remain
Mexican, whatever that means, in the United States of America.
9 I would propose that instead of adopting the Canadian model of

multiculturalism, America might begin to imagine the Mexican alterna-
tive—that of a mestizaje society.
10 Because of colonial Mexico, I am mestizo. But I was reinvented by
President Richard Nixon. In the early 1970s, Nixon instructed the Office of
Management and Budget to identify the major racial and ethnic groups in
the United States. OMB came up with five major ethnic or racial groups.
The groups are white, black, Asian/Pacific Islander, American Indian/
Eskimo, and Hispanic.
11 It’s what I learned to do when I was in college: to call myself a
Hispanic. At my university we even had separate cafeteria tables and
“theme houses,” where the children of Nixon could gather —of a feather.
Native Americans united. African Americans. Casa Hispanic.
12 The interesting thing about Hispanics is that you will never meet us
in Latin America. You may meet Chileans and Peruvians and Mexicans.
You will not meet Hispanics. If you inquire in Lima or Bogotá about
Hispanics, you will be referred to Dallas. For “Hispanic” is a gringo
contrivance, a definition of the world according to European patterns
of colonization. Such a definition suggests I have more in common with
Argentine Italians than with American Indians; that there is an ineffable
union between the white Cuban and the mulatto Puerto Rican because
of Spain. Nixon’s conclusion has become the basis for the way we now
organize and understand American society.
131 The Census Bureau foretold that by the year 2003, Hispanics would
outnumber blacks to become the largest minority in the United States.
And, indeed, the year 2003 has arrived and the proclamation of Hispanic
ascendancy has been published far and wide. While I admit a competi-
tion has existed—does exist—in America between Hispanic and black
people, I insist that the comparison of Hispanics with blacks will lead,
ultimately, to complete nonsense. For there is no such thing as a Hispanic
race. In Latin America, one sees every race of the world. One sees white
Hispanics, one sees black Hispanics, one sees brown Hispanics who are
Indians, many of whom do not speak Spanish because they resist Spain.
One sees Asian-Hispanics. To compare blacks and Hispanics, therefore, is
to construct a fallacious equation.
14 Some Hispanics have accepted the fiction. Some Hispanics have too
easily accustomed themselves to impersonating a third race, a great new
third race in America. But Hispanic is an ethnic term. It is a term denot-
ing culture. So when the Census Bureau says by the year 2060 one-third
of all Americans will identify themselves as Hispanic, the Census Bureau
is not speculating in pigment or quantifying according to actual histori-
cal narratives, but rather is predicting how by the year 2060 one-third of
all Americans will identify themselves culturally. For a country that tra-
ditionally has taken its understandings of community from blood and
color, the new circumstance of so large a group of Americans identifying
themselves by virtue of language or fashion or cuisine or literature is an
extraordinary change, and a revolutionary one.
People ask me all the time if I envision another Quebec forming in the 15
United States because of the large immigrant movement from the south.
Do I see a Quebec forming in the Southwest, for example? No, I don’t see
that at all. But I do notice the Latin American immigrant population is
as much as 10 years younger than the U.S. national population. I notice
the Latin American immigrant population is more fertile than the U.S.
national population. I see the movement of the immigrants from south
to north as a movement of youth—like approaching spring! —into a
country that is growing middle-aged. I notice immigrants are the arche-
typal Americans at a time when we—U.S. citizens—have become post-
Americans, most concerned with subsidized medications.
I was at a small Apostolic Assembly in East Palo Alto a few years 16
ago—a mainly Spanish-speaking congregation in an area along the free-
way, near the heart of the Silicon Valley. This area used to be black East
Palo Alto, but it is quickly becoming an Asian and Hispanic Palo Alto
neighborhood. There was a moment in the service when newcomers to
the congregation were introduced. Newcomers brought letters of intro-
duction from sister evangelical churches in Latin America. The minister
read out the various letters and pronounced the names and places of
origin to the community. The congregation applauded. And I thought to
myself: It’s over. The border is over. These people were not being asked
whether they had green cards. They were not being asked whether they
arrived here legally or illegally. They were being welcomed within a new
community for reasons of culture. There is now a north-south line that is
theological, a line that cannot be circumvented by the U.S. Border Patrol.
I was on a British Broadcasting Corporation interview show, and a 17
woman introduced me as being “in favor” of assimilation. I am not in
favor of assimilation any more than I am in favor of the Pacific Ocean or
clement weather. If I had a bumper sticker on the subject, it might read
something like ASSIMILATION HAPPENS. One doesn’t get up in the
morning, as an immigrant child in America, and think to oneself, “How
much of an American shall I become today?” One doesn’t walk down
the street and decide to be 40 percent Mexican and 60 percent American.
Culture is fluid. Culture is smoke. You breathe it. You eat it. You can’t
help hearing it —Elvis Presley goes in your ear, and you cannot get Elvis
Presley out of your mind.
I am in favor of assimilation. I am not in favor of assimilation. I rec- 18
ognize assimilation. A few years ago, I was in Merced, Calif. —a town of
about 75,000 people in the Central Valley where the two largest immi-
grant groups at that time (California is so fluid, I believe this is no longer
the case) were Laotian Hmong and Mexicans. Laotians have never in the
history of the world, as far as I know, lived next to Mexicans. But there
they were in Merced, and living next to Mexicans. They don’t like each
other. I was talking to the Laotian kids about why they don’t like the
Mexican kids. They were telling me that the Mexicans do this and the
Mexicans don’t do that, when I suddenly realized that they were speaking
English with a Spanish accent.
19 On his interview show, Bill Moyers once asked me how I thought of
myself. As an American? Or Hispanic? I answered that I am Chinese, and
that is because I live in a Chinese city and because I want to be Chinese.
Well, why not? Some Chinese American people in the Richmond and
Sunset districts of San Francisco sometimes paint their houses (so many
qualifiers!) in colors I would once have described as garish: lime greens,
rose reds, pumpkin. But I have lived in a Chinese city for so long that my
eye has taken on that palette, has come to prefer lime greens and rose reds
and all the inventions of this Chinese Mediterranean. I see photographs in
magazines or documentary footage of China, especially rural China, and
I see what I recognize as home. Isn’t that odd?
20 I do think distinctions exist. I’m not talking about an America tomor-
row in which we’re going to find that black and white are no longer the
distinguishing marks of separateness. But many young people I meet
tell me they feel like Victorians when they identify themselves as black
or white. They don’t think of themselves in those terms. And they’re
already moving into a world in which tattoo or ornament or movement
or commune or sexuality or drug or rave or electronic bombast are the
organizing principles of their identity. The notion that they are white or
black simply doesn’t occur.
21 And increasingly, of course, one meets children who really don’t
know how to say what they are. They simply are too many things. I met
a young girl in San Diego at a convention of mixed-race children, among
whom the common habit is to define one parent over the other—black
over white, for example. But this girl said that her mother was Mexican
and her father was African. The girl said “Blaxican.” By reinventing lan-
guage, she is reinventing America.
22 America does not have a vocabulary like the vocabulary the Spanish
empire evolved to describe the multiplicity of racial possibilities in the New
World. The conversation, the interior monologue of America cannot rely on
the old vocabulary—black, white. We are no longer a black-white nation.
23 So, what myth do we tell ourselves? The person who got closest to it
was Karl Marx. Marx predicted that the discovery of gold in California
would be a more central event to the Americas than the discovery of
the Americas by Columbus—which was only the meeting of two tribes,
essentially, the European and the Indian. But when gold was discovered
in California in the 1840s, the entire world met. For the first time in
human history, all of the known world gathered. The Malaysian stood in
the gold fields alongside the African, alongside the Chinese, alongside the
Australian, alongside the Yankee.
24 That was an event without parallel in world history and the begin-
ning of modern California—why California today provides the mytholog-
ical structure for understanding how we might talk about the American
experience: not as biracial, but as the re-creation of the known world in
the New World.
25 Sometimes truly revolutionary things happen without regard. I mean,
we may wake up one morning and there is no black race. There is no
white race either. There are mythologies, and—as I am in the business,
insofar as I am in any business at all, of demythologizing such identities
as black and white—I come to you as a man of many cultures. I come to
you as Chinese. Unless you understand that I am Chinese, then you have
not understood anything I have said.
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
Content
a. In your own words, state Rodriguez’s thesis.
b. In paragraph 2, the author says we cannot admit certain things to “the
Vietnamese immigrant who served us our breakfast.” What are those
things? Why does Rodriguez say we can’t admit them?
c. What is meant by the term “Ambiguous-American” (paragraph 6)?
What is la raza cósmica (paragraph 7)?
d. Explain what the author means by “the Canadian notion of multicul-
turalism” (paragraph 8)? What model does he want us to follow?
e. What does Rodriguez mean when he says that he was “reinvented” by
President Nixon (paragraph 10)?
f. Why does the author object to being called “Hispanic”? Why does he
object to comparing blacks and Hispanics?
g. Explain the reference to Quebec in paragraph 15. If necessary, research
this question on the Internet.
h. Paragraph 16 ends with a curious sentence. Re-read that paragraph
and explain what that sentence means.
i. On what grounds does the author claim to be Chinese?
j. What does he mean in paragraph 24 when he says: “California …
provides the mythical structure for understanding how we might talk
about the American experience”?
Strategy and Style

k. What is Rodriguez’s purpose? Does it go beyond pure definition?
l. How does paragraph 2 set the tone for the rest of the essay?
m. How would you evaluate Rodriguez’s introduction? What methods

does he use to capture our attention?
n. As you learned in the introduction, this essay first appeared in a pub-
lication for college teachers and administrators. What in Rodriguez’s
style indicates that he is writing to such an audience?
o. Often, writers define things by explaining what they’re not. Where
does Rodriguez do this?
p. Where does the author use anecdotes? Where does he use contrast?
q. What function, other than ending the essay, does the conclusion serve?
ENGAGING THE TEXT

a. In paragraph 15, Rodriguez claims that immigrants are “archetypal
Americans” while citizens are “post-Americans, most concerned with
subsidized medications.” What does he mean? Is he being fair and
accurate? Explain why or why not.
b. In paragraph 20, the author asserts that today’s young people use cat-
egories other than those of race to identify themselves. Paraphrase that
paragraph. Then, write a paragraph or two in which you support or
deny that assertion.
SUGGESTIONS FOR SUSTAINED WRITING

a. Rodriguez tells Bill Moyers that he’s Chinese. Have you ever wished to
be a member of an ethnic, cultural, or religious group other than your
own? If so, which one, and why? Write an essay in which you define
that group by discussing its most interesting or attractive characteris-
tics, and customs.
b. In paragraph 24, the author states that in California the “known world”
has been re-created in the “New World.” His point is that a multitude
of people from different countries reside in this state. Can you say the
same about your campus, your state, your city, or your community? If
so, write an essay that defines this locale as a gathering point for many
diverse cultures.
If this assignment does not interest you, write an essay that begins
by explaining how, in “Blaxicans,” Rodriguez views the attitudes of
American citizens towards immigrants. Continue the essay by discuss-
ing your own opinions on this issue.
c. Paragraph 23 of Rodriguez’s essay mentions that Karl Marx believed
that the California Gold Rush was “a more central event to the
Americas” than Columbus’s discovery. Write an essay that uses schol-
arly research to support or deny this claim.
2003 by Richard Rodriguez. Reprinted by permission of Georges Borchardt,
Inc., Literary Agency. Originally published in The Chronicle of Higher Education
on 12 September 2003 in The Chronicle Review section, Volume 50, Issue 3,
page B10.

As an alternative, you might write about another historical event
that you consider central to the development of the United States.
Possible topics include the Boston Tea Party, the adoption of the U.S.
Constitution, the Battle of Gettysburg, the assassination of Abraham
Lincoln, the Mexican American War, the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the
assassination of President Kennedy, the passing of the Civil Rights Act
of 1964, the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, or the terrorist
attacks of September 11, 2001. You can also look into the distant future
and predict ways in which an event like the election of the first African
American president will change the United States.
READ MORE
About and by the Author

London, Scott. “A View from the Melting Pot: An Interview with
Richard Rodriguez.” scottlondon.com (http://www.scottlondon.com/
interviews/rodriguez.html): Adapted from a broadcast of the radio pro-
gram Insight & Outlook, this interview first appeared in print as “Crossing
Borders” in The Sun magazine of August 1997.
Rodriguez, Richard. Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican
Father. New York: Viking, 1992.
Rodriguez, Richard. “Essays” (http://www.pbs.org/newshour/essays/
richard_rodriguez.html): Provides access to dozens of essays by Rodriquez
online.
Rodriguez, Richard. Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez.
Boston: Godine, 1981.
Rodriguez’s Autobiography
Woods, Richard D. “Richard Rodriguez” Dictionary of Literary Biography.
Thomson Gale (http://www.bookrags.com/biography/richard-rodri-
guez-dlb).
On Race and Racial Classification

Hacking, Ian. “Why Race Still Matters.” Daedalus 134:1 (2005):102–16.
“OMB Standards for Data on Race and Ethnicity.” The Office of
Minority Health. US Department of Health and Human Services (http://
minorityhealth.hhs.gov/templates/browse.aspx?lvl=2&lvlID=172):
Includes links to important definitions and legislation.
Prewitt, Kenneth. “Racial Classification in America: Where Do We Go
from Here?” Daedalus 134:1 (2005): 5–17.

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140 Chapter 4 Definition

“Blaxicans” and Other Reinvented

1 There is something unsettling about immigrants because … well, because

9 I would propose that instead of adopting the Canadian model of

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

Strategy and Style

m. How would you evaluate Rodriguez’s introduction? What methods

ENGAGING THE TEXT

SUGGESTIONS FOR SUSTAINED WRITING

“Blaxicans” and Other Reinvented Americans Richard Rodriguez 147

About and by the Author

On Race and Racial Classification

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