Play Book Tag discussion

I was attracted to this set of “essays impersonating an autobiography” from 1982 due to the warm, wise, and sensitive persona he projected in his reflections on the human condition in his TV segments on Charles Kuralt’s CBS production “Sunday Morning”. He paints a vivid picture of his emotional and mental development as the child of working class Mexican immigrants in Sacramento. I loved his portrayal of the impact Catholicism had on him in youth, his comfort in the rituals and mystery, inspiration from their high Latin Mass then standard, and serving as an altar boy. He didn’t suffer much from explicit racist incidents, but he internalized significant levels of internal racism from his mother’s linkage of a dark complexion with poverty and manual outdoor labor and his sister’s sense that lighter skin was more attractive. His parents sacrificed a lot for him to get a decent education, but the drive he developed toward success in that realm led to a wedge between him and their culture. They could be proud of him, but for a long time he had lost the ability to be proud of them. The process led him toward some sense of shame over their lack of education and associated sophistication.

I was fascinated with his emerging concept that Spanish spoken at home was for expression of his private and true self, whereas the English spoken in school was for projecting a public persona. At first his steps toward achievement and precocious involved a mercenary pleasing his teachers and parroting their ways and thoughts. Eventually, he learned that the assimilation he was experiencing was a valuable ticket to healthy skills of expressing a private identity in public. This was part of the insight that led him to fame in essays against bilingual education and affirmative action. He was obviously talented or he wouldn’t have been able to excel at Stanford and Berkeley and complete a Fullbright Fellowship on Renaissance literature. But he did come see how unjust it was for him to benefit so much from scholarships and affirmative action as a minority student, when the real source of unequal opportunity lay in poor early education. I can identify with the elements of his story related to being a poor scholarship student under special pressures and guilt from receiving such opportunity and to the sense of alienation in the divorce of the Ivory Tower from one’s roots.

Rodriguez true claim to fame came not from the traditional arena of academic pursuits, but as an essayist with a special knack of elucidating our social reality in American by infusing objective analyses with the personal. My “B” grade for this reflects to diminishing relevance of the topics of bilingual education and affirmative action which figure significantly in this volume. I have collected two of his three other autobiographical collections and due to their different subjects look forward to pursuing them eventually because of his writing skill.