The Invention of Hispanics
and the Reinvention of America

April 14, 2003

CORRECTED TRANSCRIPT

5:15 p.m.	Registration
5:30	Speaker:	Richard Rodriguez, journalist and author
7:00	Adjournment

Proceedings:

Thank you very much. It’s a pleasure to be here, for several reasons. One is that Michael Novak is sitting in the second row, and suddenly I feel like an undergraduate again at Stanford. And Michael, my teacher, my excellent teacher, was in fact the first person who ever suggested that I might be a writer. So if you have any problems with that, you might address them to Michael Novak.

I am speaking here tonight under the sponsorship of the Bradley Lectures, and I’m grateful to them. But I should offer an apology to start with. I am not a sociologist. I’m not a political scientist. I’m not an anthropologist. I am a writer.

No one knows very much what to do with writers these days, especially writers who try to steal the English language away from the political class. I have been trying to do that for the last 20 years, beginning with the word "minority"--which was foisted on me. I belong to that first generation of affirmative action that dealt with that troubling word and then the series of words that came with that word--disadvantaged, the paradox of affirmative action, and so on and so forth, leading finally to the word Hispanic, which I try to deconstruct in my latest book, Brown: The Last Discovery of America.

I am indeed the son of Mexican immigrant parents. I should tell you also that I was struck quite early with something which America does not talk about very easily, and that is its--the remarkable thing about the United States is that it proposes to the immigrant citizenship as a series of ideas. The notion of America as this intellectual construction is quite magnificent. It comes to us, it is presented to us in our hand as the Constitution, as the Federalist Papers, as the Declaration of Independence--as ideas available to all, and generous to that degree.

So therefore I was--it was in that way that I was handed the first person singular pronoun by this country, the "I"--along with a skateboard. And I was expected to float my first person pronoun on that skateboard into the future.

But one of the things I want to remark on today is something that America, the country of ideas, doesn’t as easily discuss, and that is the physicality of America, what I call the five senses of America. What the child sees quite clearly, and early, is that Americans walk with a certain stance. We lean waiting for the bus with a certain slouch. We speak American English with this high, almost nightmarishly panicked sound of American English. No one exactly remarks on it that Americans look like each other and that we exist within this universe of sensory impressions.

I have a Cuban friend who came with the Marielitos, the Mariel immigration, into Florida. And he says that when he first came to America, and maybe for about two weeks, America greeted him as a kind of green smell. I was reading another immigrant’s memoir, this a Chinese writer coming to California, who described America as the smell of cut grass.

No one speaks of such things, of course, because we only think of America as ideas. But I tell you what the immigrant knows is that America has a body to it, a slouch, a stance, an accent, an assurance.

I was once being interviewed on the BBC World Service, and the woman introduced me as being in favor of assimilation. "Mr. Rodriguez is in favor of assimilation." And I thought to myself, that’s not quite right I’m "in favor of" assimilation--any more than I am in favor of the Pacific Ocean. It didn’t seem like a choice to me, the way America swallows you up, the way America takes you in the embrace of the crowd and turns you into a child quite different from your parents. If I had a bumper sticker on my car, I would put "Assimilation Happens."

I have come here today to say to you that you are going to end up looking like the person sitting right next to you, so you’d better hold in your elbows. What we already say about you behind your back is that you look remarkably like your dog. And even more shocking, your dog is beginning to look like you.

Which is a way of saying that I’ve come to you to speak today about brown, this color that I have been thinking about for seven, eight years. Writers are loony under the best of circumstances, but when you spend seven or eight years thinking about a single color, you are eccentric indeed. Many was the morning when I would tire of my writing and I would get up to go to the kitchen, about 10 in the morning, to make myself coffee. I take my coffee black, which is in fact brown. I would be waiting for the water to boil and I would look at the ceiling in my kitchen, which is turning brown from time because I haven’t cleaned the ceiling, and it looks rather like the Sistine Chapel before the Polish pope got his hands on it. And then the doorbell would ring, and it would be the UPS man.

I speak of brown not as a primary color, not as red or yellow, not even as a secondary color like purple, but brown a tertiary color; brown the color that it takes two or three or four colors to create. I think of the careless child on a summer day in Sacramento, California, leaving the box of Crayolas in the summer sun. For this child, careless child, the summer sun melting the box of Crayolas into brown. My mother coming to put the laundry up on the line. My mother stepping on the box of Crayolas, splat. Thinking that the dog had left behind what is under her foot, but it is in fact brown. I have left it.

When I speak of brown, I am not speaking of this. I am not speaking of me. I am not speaking of my color. I think of myself as Aztec orange. In a paint shop I would be described in a paint sample as suitable for patios and barbecues. It is only when I meet you that I become brown. Richard Rodriguez, the Hispanic, is not brown; Richard Rodriguez, the American, is brown, because then Richard Rodriguez lives in the world, this global society we call the United States of America.

Brown is the color I associate with the Age of Exploration and with spice routes, with 1492 when Columbus was testing the rather brave idea that the world was round, an idea that we have not fully yet absorbed. Columbus thinking that he was on his way to a good curry meal and seeing on the horizon the Americas, and naming the natives that he saw "Indians." Columbus was met by a tribe of Indians, and in one of the most extraordinary moments of brown history, the Indians who saw Columbus that day on the horizon, the three galleons, had no reason to expect Columbus or to know what they were seeing, the three ships without precedent on the horizon, but they were not afraid.

The Indians that day in October of 1492 came out of the forest. They did not run to George Washington University to set up an ethnic studies program. They came to the water’s edge. And they waited. I date my beginning from that moment, that moment of mixture, that moment of confusion, that moment of surprise, that moment of desire.

But I grew up in a black and white America. Even though my uncle was from India and my father worked for Chinese dentists--and I’ve attended probably more Chinese weddings than anyone else in this room--and my nuns, the people who forced the English language down my throat, were Irish Catholic nuns, God bless them, I nonetheless lived in the black and white America, which had no place to put brown. America was a dialectic, a bitter, angry, old dialectic between Europe and Africa.

It was not until 1972, 400 years after I was born in the 16th century, that Richard Nixon came up with a name for me. Richard Nixon invented the Hispanic in 1972. By that time, I was a very big baby. Pat Nixon was my godmother. I jostled around in her arms, and I almost fell into the baptismal font.

But it was in 1972, in a document called Statistical Directive 15, that Richard Nixon invented Hispanics. Richard Nixon in that same year also invented Asians. And Pacific Islanders. And he described America as no longer a dialectic, but rather a pentagon, something closer to a circle, as Columbus imagined.

I don’t have time to deconstruct the various categories of Richard Nixon. But I want to concentrate on that term "Hispanic" and the possibility that the world is indeed round.

I’ve always thought that Richard Nixon, the Californian, as Californian, has been underestimated. Richard Nixon in Yorba Linda, California, lived little more than an hour from the Mexican border in one direction, and a little more than an hour in the other direction from the Asian horizon, the Pacific coast. Richard Nixon would have known that the world is round in California and not simply a dialectic between Europe and Africa.

But what of this Hispanic? There was in that word already the recognition, as the numbers began to gather in the 1970s and 1980s--18 million Hispanics in the United States, 22, 24, 28 million Hispanics, 31. Like a stockbroker’s tally. 32, 34. 34 million Hispanics, becoming 35.

In a way, the largest influence we’ve had in the United States is to change the imagination of those of us who are not Hispanic. Because whereas once everything south of the border was regarded as exactly that--south of the border, over there, down there--there were now gathering millions of people in the United States who described the United States as El Norte, the extreme state of el norte.

And in a way, what we began to do with our north-south movements in a country that had notoriously described itself in one direction only, from east to west--we had our children’s history books begin on the East Coast, at the editorial offices of the New York Times, and move west to Marilyn Monroe’s suicide or murder in the 1950s. We move in one direction only as Americans, from east to west. And suddenly there were millions of Americans who were describing their progress from south to north and back again.

In a way, we opened up the implications of Columbus’s round idea, because not simply was the country to be viewed from east to west, but also from north to south if it is truly round. And then, to say nothing of the Asian point of view, which turns everything backwards and begins in the west and looks east.

You wonder why Californians are confused.

There was also, it seems to me, something in this Hispanic that was, what shall I say, fanciful. I have traveled throughout Latin America. I’ve gone to Chile and Peru and Bolivia and Mexico and Puerto Rico. I have looked for Hispanics. And everyone tells you that there are no Hispanics in Latin America. You have to go to Washington, D.C. to find one. In fact, this afternoon, there’s one at the American Enterprise Institute. He’s giving a speech at 5:30.

There are no Asians in Asia, either. Which is to say that the whole category of the Hispanic--or the Latino, as some politically correct Latinos prefer--is in fact an American fabrication. And insofar as we are Hispanics, we are in fact indicating that we live north of the border.

There is a problem with the word Hispanic, too, in that it blinds us to the Indian, the Indian who is speaking to you now. We describe a group of people standing in a line tonight waiting in Tijuana to cross across that dangerous border after dark, we describe them as Hispanics coming this way. We do not see the Indian.

The Indian is in movement throughout the Americas. There are Indian villages in Peru that know exactly when the apple-picking season begins in the Yakima Valley. There are Indian villages in Bolivia who know when the fishing villages are hiring in Alaska. The Indians are on the move, and we call them Hispanics.

And to distinguish Hispanics from the rest of Americans, we call you Anglos, which is equally unsatisfying. I’ve read in the Dallas Morning News that there was a quarrel in a Dallas high school between Anglos and Hispanics--in imitation of the Spanish Armada, no doubt--and it was as though we could not find a way to describe ourselves except as remnants of the old Spanish and English empires. We had no trust in the possibility that we belong to the new world and had created ourselves differently in the new world. The Hispanic.

And then there was this obscene little flattery in that word Hispanic. Beginning about 1984, 1985, I began to hear the predictions of the U.S. Census Bureau that the Hispanic was destined to replace African Americans as the country’s largest minority. And it was obscene, this notion that Hispanics would "replace" African Americans. I do not know what that word, that verb meant in the mouths of the Census Bureau statisticians.

In what sense do I replace African Americans? Do I enter the room and they all leave? You cannot compare Hispanics to African Americans. Because some of us are black. We come in all colors in Latin America. Hispanic, indeed, is not a racial category, it is a cultural category. So in what sense do I replace myself?

And then I think of the boy in Sacramento, California, watching on the small black and white television in the 1950s the Negro civil rights movement, watching that extraordinary movement snake its way through the South, the determination of people, a people who had been humiliated in every way, their determination to stand upright. And the boy is learning from them that they somehow described what it means to be an American more powerfully than any other people had ever done for him. I do not replace African Americans. I owe my American existence to them.

And insofar as I am Hispanic--that is, insofar as I define myself culturally rather than racially--I am African American, not Latin American. But insofar as I describe myself culturally, I am revolutionary in America. The notion of the Hispanic as referring to la cultura--culture rather than blood, as we in America have always defined ourselves, with reference to blood--but redefining himself with reference to culture was a radical idea. And now there are 36, 37, 38 million of us who define ourselves culturally.

The wonderful thing about culture is that I can give you my culture. I can share my culture. You can eat my culture, you can dance my culture, you can sing it, you can wear it. Here, take it.

The problem with using Hispanic--even in a discussion of affirmative action it is becoming clearer to us, although we do not say it because we are polite in America, Hispanics have played the role of the fifth race in America. We have pretended that Hispanic is a racial category and we have accepted benefits that come to us as a racial group that should never have come to us racially. I am referring to the fact that it is possible for Hispanic whites to be accepted to American universities as minorities at a time when it is not possible for Appalachian whites to be accepted as minorities.

We are not a race. America has a great deal of difficulty putting its arms around that idea. We are not a race. And as Hispanics I do not even think we qualify for affirmative action, as Hispanics.

Anyway, Richard Nixon’s pentagon is now 30 years old and there are problems with the pentagon. The brown circle is beginning to grow more complicated indeed--brown within brown. And now there are people in America who belong not simply to one of Richard Nixon’s five categories, but to several. They are brown. And America, skittish America that is afraid of the body, that is afraid of the desire we have for one another in the dark, is unable to acknowledge such people, to even name them.

My friend Gladys in Seattle, Washington, who looks like Lucille Ball, married a Chinese American and they had two sons. And their sons went to a school in Seattle, Washington, where they were presented with Richard Nixon’s pentagon. And they marked down white and they marked down Asian. And they got a call on a Tuesday morning from the school bureaucrat who said you cannot be both. And my friend Gladys said, but we are both. And the bureaucrat said, Gladys, it’s Tuesday morning, I have a headache. I need you to choose one. And Gladys said, well, which one should we choose? And the bureaucrat said, well, we could use more Asians. And so for 18 years, these two boys went through their entire education, into college, exchanging racial identities. One year one of the brothers was white and the other was Asian, and vice versa.

I keep thinking now as I look at my nieces and nephews, who carry Scottish and German and Dutch surnames, that Hispanics, precisely at the moment of our numerical ascendancy, may be about to disappear in one generation. For our gift is the gift of mixture. We will marry you.

Anyway, because I am Hispanic, and it comes usually April or May, it’s usually diversity time in American high schools and colleges, so I am appointed by various schools to play the part of the Canadian. And I willingly go. I am complicitous in all of this. Do not think otherwise. I go to play the part of the Canadian.

Canada in the same year, 1972, that Richard Nixon invented Hispanics, Canada invented multiculturalism. And all this time Americans have been reaching for the good clean bottle of Canadian water thinking that it was pure--what else is Canadian water except pure?--and we have been guzzling it down with no thought to maybe there was a tiny little virus in the Canadian water called multiculturalism.

And now it has infected every classroom in America. And the headmaster, who I think is Australian, but he speaks in a British accent, says to me as we’re going down the hallway at this prep school in Los Angeles, by the way, he says. I can hear the pagans in the coliseum growling for Christian flesh. By the way, he says, the kids hate the word diversity. Now he tells me. They have had it up to here with diversity, he says. But the parents love the word diversity.

The English speak in irony. England gave us this I, this remarkable pronoun. I don’t think any country has taken it as far as America has taken it, on roller skates and skateboards as far as the I could take us. America gives its immigrants this I. But curiously, the country of I now becomes a magnet for people from we countries, from brown countries that are filled with the first person plural pronoun, the nosotros, the we.

So you give me the I and I give you the we. I tell you that there is an America here--body, stance, slouch, accent, smell; you give me the I--individualism, solitude, ambition, difference. Canada, curiously enough, like the United States, has become very attractive to people of the we for precisely the same reason. Canada offers the I. And you hear it within multiculturalism, the Canadian I. You do not have to give up your identity by becoming a Canadian. You can be a Greek Canadian and we will not extract from you your Greekness. You can be a Ukrainian Canadian. We will not take Ukraine away from you. You can be a Vietnamese Canadian. We will not take Vietnam from you.

But it is, curiously enough, immigrants to Canada now who are beginning to say to Canada, but Canada exists, there is a place here--a climate, a sky, an accent. Though, curiously, not a food. Isn’t it odd that Canada doesn’t have any food? What do you think those people eat up there? I mean, when was the last time a friend of yours said let’s go to a good Canadian restaurant tonight? What might they serve there? Buckets and buckets of water, perhaps. And beer.

My friend Robin MacNeill, the good Canadian son, tells me that there is a good Canadian restaurant on the Upper West Side of New York over by Lincoln Center, the Royal Mounted something-or-other. And I said, Robin, what do they serve there? He says, pancakes. Very large pancakes.

It seems to me that Canada is telling us in a time of global societies--Sydney, Toronto, New York, London, brown London--at a time of globalism within our capitals now we are beginning to turn to Canada for a solution. Multiculturalism, when the kids in school are beginning to roll their eyes and thinking of the burrito they will have after school and the Filipino is dating or flirting with the African American and they make an appointment with their fingers to meet after school.

And there is Mexico. There is the alternative to Canada. Mexico in the sixteenth century, which describes its birth as a rape. Mexico that had no cherry trees, nothing like George Washington to talk about as its beginning. But Mexico which describes its birth as a moment of violent eroticism, the hairy Spaniard having his way with the smooth Indian. A very different story indeed to anything the United States proposed.

By the 18th century, the majority population of Mexico was "mixed"--mestizo. Mexico speaks candidly of such things. There is an entire vocabulary of mixture, not only in Mexico but in all of Latin America. There are over 300 words in Brazilian Portuguese to speak of brown. If popi is this and momi is this, then baby is this.

In 18th century Latin America there was a tradition of painting called las castas, showing fathers and mothers of various hues and their baby, who looked exactly like none of them. And behind these New World Indians and Africans and Europeans, there would be pineapples and parrots, the suggestion clearly being that we lived in a new world and the identities of the old world no longer applied.

There is the mestizo here on my south and Canadian multiculturalism on our north, the cold and the hot. In the classroom we are opting for Canada. In the schoolyard we are opting for Mexico. If there was some way of melting--of joining the consciousness of Mexico, the erotic sense of Mexico, with the distinction of Canada, its respect for the individual, Iowa would be a very sexy place.

But alas. Iowa is not sexy. Iowa has declared itself safe for the English language. Iowa passed legislation last year to declare the English language the official language of Iowa. That was a close one. So I was two weeks too late in Des Moines to tell Iowa that we do not speak English in this country, we speak American. And the British have been trying to tell us that for over 150 years. We speak a brown tongue.

Already in the 1850s, as Mencken notices, the Britons were describing negroisms on our tongue--a different cadence, African words. And in American Indian words not used anywhere in the British Isles. And then come the first generations of European immigrants from Poland and Ireland and Sicily--the grandmothers with their mustaches and their suitcases filled with strange words, recipes, words for food first, which come onto the tongue.

And then someone tells me the other day in a debate I was having on bilingualism, someone called me a shmuck. And I thought to myself how wonderful it is to exist within this American tongue, where this word--who knows where it came from, some sweatshop on the Lower East Side--has come into my world and has crowned me. I am happily a shmuck.

We have a brown tongue, so brown that when Mexico and America fought in the 19th century and America took over half of Mexico’s territory--we wonder why Mexico’s a little skittish today--we were not satisfied with the land. We wanted the words on the map. We wanted rio and arroyo and mesa. We wanted San Antonio. We wanted Los Angeles, even though when we came from the Midwest to Southern California we called it L.A. And now there is no one in the United States, even in Iowa, who does not speak Spanish by virtue of the American tongue. By virtue of the American tongue.

But I am defeated. As a writer I am defeated. I am subject to the whims of marketers and I exist now in Borders Books in a section described as Latin American Studies. That is where you will find me. I’m way over to the left, beyond Astrology and Lesbian Literature. It is very cold over there.

So many of the books I love, so many of the books I loved that framed this mouth are in another part of the bookstore altogether. They’re--James Baldwin is on a shelf called Black Literature. Jimmy Baldwin, who taught me so much about language and about how to stay calm when you’re most angry. And then there’s another shelf, a big shelf, called Literature, which is white. That’s where D. H. Lawrence lives.

Can I say something about whiteness? It does seem to me that it is a dangerous thing to use the term "whiteness" in America. It doesn’t exactly get at the complexity of our lives to call people white. I meet so many young people in this country who come up to me and say, I’m white, I don’t have a culture; I’m white, I’m nothing.

HBO, the television network, had a documentary on the white race, which ran for 15 minutes. It had a husband and wife on the patio of their house. She had curlers in her hair, he was at the barbecue. The kid walks out with this enormous canister of mayonnaise.

That’s the White Literature section.

But now, something is happening in America. I have come to Washington, where the politicians are still talking as though it’s the 1950s. Something is happening in America. We are beginning to speak brownly in this country, even though brown was the color denied African Americans by the theory called the One Drop theory. You could not be brown in America if you were African. If you had one drop of African blood, you were black. Black as tar.

And now the two most prominent African Americans--I mean Colin Powell and Tiger Woods--both speak of themselves brownly. Colin Powell says on page nine of his autobiography that he is African and Caribbean Indian and Scots-Irish and Anglo-Saxon. And I do not know a history in America that we hand our children that can account for such a life. Because the history books we give our children are filled with conflict--civil war, defeats, victors and losers. But in none of the histories we give our children is there talk of love, is there talk of people actually mating and creating children who look like none of their grandparents.

And now they are here. They are the children of Los Angeles who call themselves blaxicans. They call themselves blaxicans because we adults have no name to give them. We adults still live in a world of Richard Nixon’s five. And there is no name for the child who is African and Hispanic, so he calls himself by his own name, a blaxican.

I’m running out of time.

Brown is everywhere. It is in our food, at the Italian-Vietnamese restaurant. We are eating miscegenation. I was trying to tell that one day to a skinhead who wanted to put a wall between the United States and Mexico. But when it came time for lunch, he wanted a burrito. I said to him, Have you ever looked inside a burrito? Do you have any idea what’s going on inside a burrito? There’s a Spaniard making love to an Indian inside a burrito. And on some days, an African comes in and it’s a threesome. That’s what you’re eating.

We are listening to brown music. And increasingly, our religion is becoming brown in America. I say this to you at a moment early in the 21st century, when we may be headed for a century defined more by religious difference than by racial or blood difference--but a difference of soul.

Osama bin Laden already describes America as a Jewish-Christian nation. He taunts our creation of a secular state. But I think of my parents. My mother, who died last year, one year, almost to the day, after my father died, lived on the most prosaic of streets in San Francisco, in the Sunset District. There are streets like 29th Avenue all over the United States now. My Mexican Catholic parents lived next door to Chinese Confucians who lived next door to Iranian Muslims who lived next door to--I don’t know who they were. I think they were from Washington, D.C. and they believed in clean water and Mother Earth--who lived next door to Jews who lived next door to Russian Orthodox.

And down the block we went. Neighbors. It has never happened in history before that people of so many religions would be living side by side. And now we end up at each other’s wedding, where the Jew is marrying the Russian Orthodox and they perform a Native American dance before the wedding. And the second wife is not talking to the mother-in-law. And the salmon has gone bad in the sun. And we are accustomed to mixture in the thing that used to keep us most separate, in our creed.

I remember one of the Irish nuns used to warn us against mixed marriages. They were not talking about the marriage of different races; they were talking about the danger of marrying a Methodist.

Perhaps because of such browning in the world, perhaps because of such theological browning there is a need now to make distinctions, maybe even to create straight lines in place of the baroque line, to say this is what I believe. Well, this is what I believe. I’m a Roman Catholic, or more precisely, I’m an Irish Catholic. I’m not Buddhist, I’m not Hindu, and yet I am. I meditate at the Buddhist Center. My uncle was from India. And one of my earliest experiences of Christmas was Hindu Christmas--turbans at Christmas dinner, bodies jostling up against one another, Dr. Gupta extending her hands over the Christmas turkey, chanting her Hindu hymns. And the turkey did not flinch.

There are skinheads in Idaho tonight who want nothing to do with Washington, D.C. or Chicago--the second largest Hispanic city in the United States--or Los Angeles or Miami. They want an enclave of people exactly like themselves. And if he is alive tonight, Osama bin Laden is living in a cave with people exactly like himself because he, the boy who was raised a cosmopolite speaking several languages, traveling widely, reached the point in his life where he did not want this brown room. And he withdrew.

There are people now rejecting brown. I tell you, I am not speaking about khaki in the world right now. I am not in favor of khaki. I am not in favor of turning everything flat. But I am in favor of a world in which we would learn from one another and recognize the three great desert religions--Judaism, Christianity, and Islam--so brown, having influence one another, having shaped one another. I like rather what the pope, Pope John Paul, the Polish pope, said last year, that Catholics might consider fasting on the last day of Ramadan in solidarity with the Islamic world. That seems a very brown recommendation, and a good one.

But Osama bin Laden lives at the same time and the same corner of the century with Madonna, the Material Girl. Madonna, who has discovered quite before the politicians--no surprise there--the meaning of brown. Madonna, who yesterday was a Japanese geisha, today is Marilyn Monroe. Tomorrow she will be Eva Peron. And the king of brown is Michael Jackson, with his Mitzi Gaynor nose. Michael Jackson, who morphs into all the races of the world in his rock video, and both sexes.

Anyway, it’s 10 in the morning and there’s my UPS man at the door. I remember as a boy going to hear Malcolm X in Sacramento. I do not know when I went, but Malcolm X normally restricted his speeches to black audiences. But I was brown, and I did not suffer from restriction as brown. I was irrelevant, yes, in America, but I was not kept from anything in America. There were these two thugs at the door who looked like Sunny Liston, who looked down at me as I entered the room, and they let me through. I remember Malcolm standing at this podium in the bright light, his skin almost white with the light. Malcolm urging African Americans away from skin lighteners and hair straighteners.

And I open my door, and there is my UPS man. And I cannot tell you what race my UPS man is. I think he is African-Samoan, maybe Filipino-African-Samoan, maybe more. He has blue hair.

Thank you very much.