With Days of Obligation (230 pages. Viking. $21), his second book, Rodriguez seems determined to be nobody’s pet. It is not so much a recantation of its predecessor as it is a more personal, less didactic rethinking of the same issues. Rodriguez still believes in the “dreadful metaphor” of the melting pot, but he has become more sensitive to the loss of cultural identity that comes with assimilation. “For the child of immigrant parents the knowledge comes like a slap: America exists,” he writes. But, he insists, while the third generation may never learn the language of the immigrant grandparents, habits of culture do not die so easily. Thus, though he lives in a “California of pastels and pasta salads,” he sees evidence everywhere that “Californians are linked by memory-mainly unconscious-to a founding Hispanic culture.”
Rodriguez probes this influence with a sardonic eye, as when he notes that the chore of preserving California’s Roman Catholic missions has largely fallen to Protestant men and women who, “venerating history, rebuilt second-class relics of the Church… in the spirit of the Mission Indians, uncomprehending.” And even when the author’s opinions, such as scorn for multiculturalism, are predictable, his reasoning is intriguing: arguing that Protestant America has always disregarded the past, he finds it unsurprising that universities are “dismantling the American canon in my name … Hispanics and Asians have become the convenient national excuse for the accomplishment of what America has always wanted done-the severing of memory, the dismantlement of national culture.”
As a writer, Rodriguez can be maddeningly elliptical, but his lapses do little to spoil an otherwise engrossing book. It’s unlikely this work will prompt the sort of controversy occasioned by “Hunger of Memory,” but that is a point in its favor. There is more here to chew on. Rodriguez has grown from being a man who demands our attention to a man who warrants it.
At the beginning of Latinos (520 pages. Norton. $25), author Earl Shorris asks one of his subjects what she would say if she were writing his book. “Just tell them,” she said, “who we are and that we are not all alike.” Taking this advice to heart, Shorris has produced a voluminous, faceted portrait of the Spanish-speaking peoples-Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans and others-who now live in the United States a Latinos or Hispanics (the name itself is controversial, even among Latinos).
The people Shorris profiles vary in their attitudes toward money, food, what they value most highly. Cubans (other Latinos see them as “aggressive, assertive”) respect those who not only speak Spanish but speak it well. Mexican-Americans revere teachers and education. But one attribute Latinos share: they are “both sojourners and citizens, more resistant to the melting pot than any major immigrant group in the history of the nation.” In the last decade, the Latino population of the United States increased by 53 percent, not counting illegal aliens’ They have used the power of their numbers to survive in Anglo society with their own culture intact.
Shorris doesn’t hide his own biases-he’s a liberal-but he always lets the Latinos explain themselves. First and last, this is a piece of diligent reporting. Anyone with the slightest interest in what is soon to be the nation’s largest minority will find “Latinos” an indispensable primer.
