A Darker Shade of Crimson

This book is worth reading since it is provocative and has interesting observations about being Latino in the Ivy League. Particularly interesting is his encounter with Richard Rodriguez, who starts out as an enemy and becomes a friend and intellectual mentor of sorts. However, as the book progresses, it feels more like a revisionist explaining away of his shortcomings--why he couldn't commit to his girlfriend and how his confrontations earn him enemies, who of course are mean, petty people in his version of events. Navarette makes everything seems so extreme--it's either Fresno State or Harvard, with nothing in between. He seems shocked that almost every institution in his life from UFW to Harvard's RAZA group turns out to be imperfect so ends up basically condemning them as evil. It seems as if he is very good at pointing out the imperfections in everything around him and is obsessed with making people agree with him. The book ends abruptly and on a note of frustration as he gets fed up with the shortcomings of the educational system and leaves graduate school. You really have to start over to the introduction to get any sense of resolution that he has learned something from his experience and not just grown in cynicism and ego.

I loved this book because it describes the experience of those who are often overlooked: English speaking Mexican-Americans whose families have been here several generations. Navarrette questions the ethnic labels that have been imposed upon him (Latino, Hispanic) and rightly wonders why one can be considered Italian and American, or Irish and American, but not Mexican and American. For some reason the latter is seen as a contradiction. This book is interesting, well written and provides a good first person account of the college experience and the subsequent process of constructing one's own identity. I highly recommend it!

I've experienced much of the same situations and feelings as a student at Berkeley and (later) as a law student at Stanford. I'm sure that one does not need to be an ethnic or racial minority to feel like a "fish out of water" at any major university, yet it still interesting to find out there are others like oneself. As a Mexican-American, I welcome the day when our presence on an elite (or any) campus is not an oddity, or a source of resentment ("You kept out my more-deserving cousin!").