The Invisible Ethnic: Vladimir Nabokov, Richard Rodriguez, and Ethnic Literature

This essay explores the possibilities and constraints of reading texts as ethnic literature. It does so by tracing the master theme of transcendence in Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory and by drawing comparisons with Latino autobiographer and essayist Richard Rodriguez. To date Speak, Memory has transcended categorization as a particular conception of ethnic literature that precludes also reading it as universal. Rodriguez, in contrast, laments that his books are less likely to be read as universal precisely because shelved and categorized as ethnic literature rather than as memoir or simply “literature.” As Rodriguez notes, the conception of Ethnic Literature as a genre marginalizes even as it celebrates ethnic cultures. That is, treating works by ethnic authors as a conventional genre—in the sense that memoirs, westerns, and mystery novels are genres—can have a ghettoizing effect. I argue that ethnic literature is universal despite its focus on a particular culture. To the extent that any work of literature can said to be universal it achieves that status through the particular: a story grounded in a particular culture and, usually, focusing on the particularity of individual characters. There is no view from nowhere. As with other works of literature, ethnic literature is the view from somewhere. I conclude that, when it comes to how we read ethnic literature, it is time for a paradigm shift.

Of Lascivious Mysticism and Other Hibernian Matters

Harold Frederic’s The Damnation of Theron Ware recasts The Scarlet Letter as a Methodist minister’s romance with Catholics and fin-de-siècle intellectual Catholicism. The Reverend Theron Ware is a liberal progressive Dimmesdale update, happily married at the novel’s outset, who is assigned to a fundamentalist, anti-Catholic congregation yet comes increasingly under the spell of a trio of erudite, somewhat unorthodox Catholic leaders—one of whom, Celia Madden, the Hester Prynne update, is a single woman, seemingly independent yet Church-integrated, whose mastery of the organ and articulation of Continental aesthetics are all too provocative to be ignored. The resultant interplay between Theron’s late-century Protestant dissipation and the edgy Catholicism of Celia and her erudite comrades (one priest, one scientist) is lit in knowing commentary—religious anthropology cum wicked irony—that hangs in the air long after Theron’s hurtful sexploration comes to its merciful—mercy-filled, Angel-conducted—end. In The Damnation of Theron Ware, the Catholic-inspired, Catholic-tutored mythopoetics of Protestant self-consciousness take a mighty leap forward, in seeming lock-step with Henry Adams and in anticipation of such contemporary thinkers as Richard Rodriguez, Camille Paglia, and James T. Fisher. Religious wanderlust is seen to drive forbidden love at least as much as the original way around. And the narrative staging of Protestant wonderment and wanderlust, dramatized in terms of the Protestant-side tangle between its persisting Calvinism and emergent liberal pragmatism, takes a nasty 180-degree turn against itself, courtesy of its Catholic protagonists—though, really, of its Protestant author.

Mexican American (Chicana/o)

Discussions and debates in and around the formation of Mexican American letters, including its periodization and formulations of its unique ontology, are reviewed, and discussions and analysis of key literary phenomena that have shaped in time (history) and space (region) Mexican American and Chicana/o letters are presented. Foundational scholars such as María Herrera-Sobek, Luis Leal, José Limón, and Juan Bruce-Novoa are considered along with scholar-creators such as Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga. A wide variety of Mexican American and Chicana/o authors of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction are reviewed, including Alurista, María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Marío Suárez, Arturo Islas, Richard Rodriguez, and Ana Castillo, among many others.

Rodriguez, Richard

The overwhelming critical attention received by Richard Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (1982) has eclipsed the complexity and diversity of his work as well as the discussion on his impact on Latina/o studies and autobiography studies. A great deal of bibliography dedicated to Rodriguez is the result of the ideological battles the book was engaged in during the 1980s. The political context in which the book was used (mostly to oppose affirmative action and bilingual education) defined the rest of Rodriguez’s work, as some critics considered his positions on education almost treasonous. Lee Bebout summarizes those reactions in “Postracial Mestizaje: Richard Rodriguez’s Racial Imagination in an America Where Everyone Is Beginning to Melt,” as he mentions how most critics saw Rodriguez’s work as the result of a colonized mind, a mannequin for white America. “Tomas Rivera, Ramon Saldívar, William Nericcio, and others critiqued Rodriguez’s thinking, and sometimes Rodriguez himself, as the result of a colonized mind, blind to history and structural inequalities, and playing the role of a “Mexican” mannequin in the mind of white America.” In an interview with scholar José Antonio Gurpegui in Camino Real, Rodriguez admitted “I do see myself—in some more complicated way—as truly being a traitor to memory, if not exactly a traitor to Mexico or to Latin America. I do think I betrayed my family, betrayed my mother and father by becoming someone new—a ‘gringo.’” If we place his work in this context, Rodriguez’s work brings urgency and new significance to Latina/o studies in the 21st century by highlighting the unresolved contradictions that memory, culture, and identity posit as vehicles of agency. His approach to autobiography redefines traditional notions of identity, race, and language, and offers critical notions of subject formation beyond cultural nationalism, proposing queer paradigms that complicate and challenge writing as a clear vehicle for self-empowerment. His writing, queer to cultural nationalism, is deeply committed to the exploration of autobiography as discontinuous space—a space of disruptive transgression where words are barely a ghostly shell; a floating dream in search of an identity.

Alternative Ways of Challenging and Resisting in Richard Rodriguez’s Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography

There are several reasons why essayist Richard Rodriguez could be classified as a ‘minority’ writer; namely, his Mexican-American roots, his Catholic faith, and his self- declared homosexuality. However, readers who expect his writings to display the kind of attitudes and features that are common in works by other ‘minority’ authors are bound to be disappointed. The meditations that Rodriguez offers are far from clearly dividing the world between oppressors and oppressed or dominant and subaltern. As he sees it, ethnic, religious, class or sexual categories and divisions present further complications than those immediately apparent to the eye. Does this mean that Rodriguez fails to resist and challenge the dynamics he observes between different social groups? Or that his observations are complaisant rather than subversive? Not necessarily, since his essays are always a tribute to the possibilities of disagreement and defiance. My analysis of his latest collection of essays, Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography (2013), maps out and dissects the writing strategies that Rodriguez employs to generate dialogical forms of inquiry and resistance regarding such up-to-date topics as religious clashes (and commonalities), Gay rights (in relation to other Human Rights) or how public spaces are being re-imagined in this global, digital era.

Dormant Bilingualism in Neoliberal America

Chapter four examines the relationship between language and race in neoliberal America through the writings of Richard Rodriguez and Chang-rae Lee and the legal briefs contesting English-only policies. As literary accounts of post-civil rights assimilation, Richard Rodriguez’s memoirs and Chang-rae Lee’s novel, Native Speaker, reflect the social concerns on civic disunity that provoked English-only policies and induced a social climate of language covering. This chapter shows the rhetorical figure of analogy in both the legal briefs contesting English-only rules, where bilingual plaintiffs claim an analogy between language and race to seek legal protection, and in Rodriguez’s and Lee’s representations of dormant bilingualism. While the analogy between language and race mostly fails in the courtrooms, it is a productive rhetorical move for Rodriguez and Lee as they show that language is prone to be influenced by the same capitalist logic that commodifies race.