Richard Rodriguez

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Richard Rodriguez
Born (1944-07-31) July 31, 1944
San Francisco or Sacramento, California, United States
Residence San Francisco, California
Nationality United States
Ethnicity Mestizo[1] or Indian[2]
Education Stanford University, B.A. in English, 1967
Columbia University M.A. in philosophy, 1969
University of California, Berkeley, graduate study in English Renaissance literature 1969-72
Warburg Institute, London, dissertation research, 1972-73
Alma mater Christian Brothers High School (Sacramento, California)
Sacred Heart School in Sacramento
Occupation Journalist
Agent Georges Borchardt, Inc., 136 East 57th St., New York, NY 10022
Known for opposition to bilingual education and affirmative action
Notable work(s) Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (autobiography), David R. Godine (Boston, MA), 1982.
Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father (autobiography), Viking Penguin (New York, NY), 1992.
Brown: The Last Discovery of America, Viking (New York, NY), 2002.
Home town Sacramento, California
Television PBS Newshour
Religion Roman Catholic[3]
Partner(s) Jim
Parents Leopoldo Rodriguez
Victoria Moran Rodriguez
Awards -Fulbright Fellowship, 1972-73
-National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship, 1976-77, and Frankel Medal
-Commonwealth Club gold medal, 1982
-Christopher Award, 1982, for Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez
-Anisfield-Wolf Award for Race Relations, 1982
-George Foster Peabody Award, 1997, for work on the MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour
-International Journalism Award, 1990, from World Affairs Council of California.
-Emmy Award, 1992
Notes

Richard Rodriguez (born July 31, 1944) is an American writer who became famous as the author of Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (1982), a narrative about his intellectual development.

Early life

Richard Rodriguez was born on July 31, 1944, into a Mexican immigrant family in Sacramento, California. Rodriguez spoke Spanish until he went to a Catholic school at age six. As a youth in Sacramento, California, he delivered newspapers and worked as a gardener. He graduated from Sacramento's Christian Brothers High School.

Career

Rodriguez received a B.A. from Stanford University, an M.A. from Columbia University, was a Ph.D. candidate in English Renaissance literature at the University of California, Berkeley, and attended the Warburg Institute in London on a Fulbright fellowship.[4] A noted prose stylist, Rodriguez has worked as a teacher, international journalist, and educational consultant and has appeared regularly on the PBS show, NewsHour.[7] A television documentary about Rodriguez's works earned Jim Lehrer a Peabody Award in 1997. Rodriguez’s books include Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (1982), a collection of autobiographical essays; Mexico’s Children (1990); Days of Obligation: An Argument With My Mexican Father (1992), which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize; and Brown: The Last Discovery of America. Rodriguez's works have also been published in Harper's Magazine, Mother Jones, and Time.[8]

Instead of pursuing a career in academia, Rodriguez suddenly decided to write freelance and take other temporary jobs. His first book, Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez, was published in 1982. It was an account of his journey from being a "socially disadvantaged child" to becoming a fully assimilated American, from the Spanish-speaking world of his family to the wider, presumably freer, public world of English. But the journey was not without costs: his American identity was only achieved after a painful separation from his past, his family, and his culture. "Americans like to talk about the importance of family values," says Rodriguez. "But America isn't a country of family values; Mexico is a country of family values. This is a country of people who leave home." While the book received widespread critical acclaim and won several literary awards, it also stirred resentment because of Rodriguez's strong stands against bilingual education and affirmative action. Some Mexican Americans called him pocho—traitor—accusing him of betraying himself and his people. Others called him a "coconut"—brown on the outside, white on the inside. He calls himself "a comic victim of two cultures."[2]

Personal life

Rodriguez is a homosexual.[2] He came out in his book of essays Days of Obligation.[9] This caused some readers and critics, especially Latinos, to be less critical of his ideas.[10]

Browning of America

Rodriguez's original ideas are further explored in his 2002 collection of essays entitled Brown: The Last Discovery of America, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Award.

The "browning of America", a phrase that Rodriguez uses in Brown, may seem like a new coinage, but the term predated his book and has been used regularly to describe an increase in the mixing of cultural, racial, and ethnic identities in the United States in the past century. For Rodriguez the phrase has to do more with the color brown as a symbol of mélange in the United States or specifically an increase in its "bi- or even tri-racial" subgroups. The phrase is commonly applied to the current demographic shift towards a higher proportion of minorities in the total population in the United States. It can be used neutrally as a name for the current demographic shift in the United States, but has also been appropriated by organized groups on both the left and the right. The far right evokes the phrase generally as a minority-based usurping of customary or assumed White privilege, while the far left hails it as a welcomed rethinking and/or accountability of deep-seated notions of White "normativity."[citation needed]

Current Project

At present, Rodriguez is writing a book on Judaism, Islam, Christianity, and the desert. Rodriguez reports that he is "interested in the fact that three great monotheistic religions were experienced within this ecology."[11] A sample of this project appeared in Harper's Magazine (January 2008). In this essay, "The God of the Desert," Rodriguez portrays the desert as a paradoxical temple—its emptiness the requisite for God's elusive presence.

References

  1. Louise Steinman, Charles C. Mann, Richard Rodriguez (2011). World History - "1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created" - Book TV. Event occurs at 11:32.  Interview first broadcast Sun October 2, 2011. Duration 01:13:32.
  2. 2.0 2.1 2.2 London, Scott (August 1997), "A View From the Melting Pot: An Interview with Richard Rodriguez", The Sun (Chapel Hill, North Carolina) (260), retrieved 2012-01-06  Originally titled Crossing Borders - An Interview With Richard Rodriguez.
  3. PBS Newshour interview dated November 7, 2013
  4. 4.0 4.1 "Richard Rodriguez" (fee, via Fairfax County Public Library). Dictionary of Hispanic Biography. Gale. November 6, 1996. GALE|K1611000359. Retrieved 2012-01-05.  Gale Biography In Context.
  5. "Richard Rodriguez" (fee, via Fairfax County Public Schools). Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale. 2003. GALE|H1000084032. Retrieved 2012-01-05.  Gale Biography In Context.
  6. "Participants". 64th Annual Conference on World Affairs. CU-Boulder. Retrieved 2012-01-06. 
  7. "NewsHour Essayists". PBS. Retrieved 16 September 2012. 
  8. Wyrick, Jean; Slaughter, Beverly J. (1999). The Rinehart Reader (third ed.). Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace College Publishers. pp. 309, 586. ISBN 0-15-505512-7.  (Thomson Heinle)
  9. Rodriguez, Richard (October 19, 1998), "My heterosexual dilemma", Salon.com, retrieved 2007-10-26 
  10. García, Mario T. (2000), "Santa Barbara", Luis Leal: An Auto/Biography, University of Texas Press, p. 171, ISBN 0-292-72829-8 
  11. Rodriguez, Richard, "The God of the Desert" in The Best American Essays 2009, Ed. Mary Oliver (Mariner: Boston, 2009), 157

Further reading

  • America, May 22, 1982, pp. 403–404; September 23, 1995, p. 8.
  • American Review, fall-winter, 1988, pp. 75–90.
  • American Scholar, spring, 1983, pp. 278–285, winter, 1994, p. 145.
  • Booklist, March 1, 2002, Bill Ott, review of Brown: The Last Discovery of America, p. 1184.
  • Christian Science Monitor Monthly, March 12, 1982, pp. B1, B3.
  • Commentary, July 1982, pp. 82–84.
  • Diacritics, fall, 1985, pp. 25–34.
  • Melus, spring, 1987, pp. 3–15.
  • New York Times Book Review, November 22, 1992, p. 42; April 7, 2002, Anthony Walton, "Greater than All the Parts, " p. 7.
  • Reason, August–September 1994, p. 35.
  • Time, January 25, 1993, p. 70.
  • Tribune Books (Chicago, IL), December 13, 1992, p. 1.
  • Washington Post Book World, November 15, 1992, p. 3.*

External links

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