"America exists," says Rodriguez with some exasperation. "I'man American."
Just recently, when he was in Chicago to promote the newpaperback edition of his book, Days of Obligation: An Argument WithMy Mexican Father (Penguin, $11), a woman followed him out ofWaterstone's book store on North Michigan Avenue.
"She trailed me down the street, shouting at me. She keptsaying, `You're not Mexican,' and I said, `No, I'm not. I'm anAmerican,' " he says.
But the 48-year-old Rodriguez does write almost obsessively -and powerfully - about his Mexican heritage.
His musings in two books on life as a gay, Roman Catholic,middle-class Mexican-American have set him on a tangent from hisoriginal path toward a career as a professor of English Renaissanceliterature.
The son of immigrants who met and married here, Rodriguezabandoned his academic trajectory 12 years ago as a newly mintedPh.D. after studying at Stanford and Columbia, the Warburg Institutein London, and Berkeley, when he received "20 or 30 job offers,"while many of his white male fellow graduates got none.
"I thought I knew what that was about," Rodriguez says. "I wasgoing to take the job at Yale, but then I had a crisis. If thetables had been turned, if they had been getting this stack of offersand I had got none, it would have been very offensive to me. So Ileft teaching in a quiet protest against affirmative action, and Iwon't go back as long as affirmative action is in place in theAmerican university."
He worked for a year in an advertising agency, where he realized"that for this little moral principle, I was jeopardizing a greatdeal. I got really scared, and I began to write to keep myselfintellectually alive. That was the birth of the writer."
In his first book, Hunger of Memory, Rodriguez took on thesacred cow of bilingual education, voicing his reflexive horror atthe "ludicrous kind of sentimentality" that leads to what he sees asthe disenfranchisement of minority students from their rightful placeas full participants in American life.
"The classroom has no business teaching you to be proud of beingMexican; that's your grandmother's business," he says.
After the book came out, "People said I was a man who had losthis culture. I'm seen as kind of a traitor (to the Mexican-Americancommunity)," he says. That response persists: Recently, he says,Hispanic teachers in Dallas tried to have Hunger of Memory taken offthe high school reading list.
Says Rodriguez, "I am skeptical about the way we treatminorities in this country. We talk so much about race andmulticulturalism that we lose sight of the importance of class. Weneed to improve the education of the poor - all the poor." Andwhile, he says, "the idea that there is not a white lower class inthis country is grotesque," Rodriguez also notes that the schooldropout rate among Hispanic students is "much higher than for whitesor blacks."
Rodriguez, who spoke only Spanish until he was 5 ("I spokeSpanish the way a white kid in Appalachia speaks English," he says),himself went to Catholic schools in Sacramento, Calif., where theIrish Sisters of Mercy "forced the apple of English against my mouthand made me eat it. They wouldn't let me go until I believed it wasmine. Those Irish nuns forced me to imagine myself as an American,as someone who belonged."
Rodriguez thinks it is a great tragedy when any Americanchildren miss out on that. He talks about reporting a story in EastLos Angeles about some Mexican-American gang members, whose worldview, he found, was confined to the few blocks where they could weartheir gang colors without being shot at.
He asked one if he would like to visit New York, and the youngman replied, "What would I do in New York, man? I'm Mexican."
Says Rodriguez, "How can he be Mexican? He doesn't know hisway to the beaches in the city where he was born" - Los Angeles.
About Days of Obligation, Rodriguez says, "I really wrote thisbook about religion, about what it was like growing up a Catholic,and an Indian Catholic at that, in a Protestant country."
One lovely essay called "India" deals among other subjects withthe appearance of the Blessed Virgin Mary to the Indian convert JuanDiego at Guadalupe, and strikes a recurring theme in the book - thatit is not the European sensibility but rather the Indian one that hastriumphed in the meeting of two cultures in Mexico.
Sophisticated readers of the story may assume that the Spanishinvented the event to dupe the Indians into accepting Christianity,which they did, en masse after the miracle, Rodriguez says.
But he writes: "The faith that Europe imposed in the 16thcentury was, by virtue of the Guadalupe, embraced by the Indian.Catholicism has become an Indian religion. By the 21st century, thelocus of the Catholic Church, by virtue of numbers, will be LatinAmerica, by which time Catholicism itself will have assumed theaspect of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Brown skin."
Rodriguez says that in the United States, for American Catholicsof his generation, there has also been a meeting of two cultures, onethat has never been fully resolved.
That coming out of the "16th century classroom" into "an Americain which we were on our own, where we were encouraged to questionauthority, where we could be anything we wanted, where what you dowith your body is your business - all these great Protestant ideas -is a drama that has never been discussed."
Rodriguez spent a couple of years at the Union TheologicalSeminary in New York - not preparing to become a minister, he says,but "looking for America."
That still is his mission, or at least a major part of it, as hesees it. Rodriguez maintains two homes: He writes in San Francisco,but he spends a lot of time in Los Angeles, which he sees as "thecultural capital of America."
He says, "I'm very grateful to the American Protestant culturefor my ambition and my sexual freedom - I would not be `out' inMexico" as a homosexual.
But he still reserves a great portion of his gratitude for theSisters of Mercy.
"I believe I became a writer because of that linguistic changein my life. I have been haunted by it ever since, that leaving onelanguage for another. For me, it was leaving home, moving into thegreat city, realizing myself as a public person."
Says Rodriguez, "Americans like to talk about the importance offamily values. But America isn't a country of family values; Mexicois a country of family values. This is a country of people wholeave home."
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