Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father

Rodriguez sinks his teeth into the juicy apple of race and somehow pulls off enlightening concrete distinctions between the single extant species of Homo sapiens remaining on earth. Essentially (and we allow here for the purposes of discussion some generalities) Rodriguez asserts that Americans/Northern Europeans are divorced psychologically from their historically inseparable neighbors, the Mexicans/Indians, because the Americans/Northern Europeans represent masculine, aggressive, individualistic, Protestant, optimistic, or "comic" values. The passive, Catholic, communal, familial, feminine value systems of the Mexicans/Indians he terms "tragic." (The tragic race, incidentally, is much happier and less medicated, etc., it's so substantially less destructive and selfish.) I grew up in Southern California, lived in Mexico for a few years, and three years ago married a Mexican woman, so I epitomize the fabulous collision of opposite worlds that this book describes (and really helped me to understand). Gorgeously composed, arrogantly honest, and a whole lot more. Intellectually one of the ten most important books of the last two decades. When I admire a book I immediately read it again. I read this one three times.

In this and his other collection of personal essays, "Hunger of Memory," Richard Rodriguez describes how becoming an American has been an experience much like Alice's trip through the looking glass. It has distanced him from his Mexican-born parents and separated him almost entirely from his Mexican roots. The central idea running through many of these thoughtful, earnest essays is a heightened awareness of the differences between our public and private lives. They also focus on the impact of education on himself and his siblings as children of Spanish-speaking immigrants. After reading his books, nothing about becoming American seems as simple as it's often represented in popular fiction and movies. You see, for example, how learning English and the way Americans use it immediately create cultural conflicts. Rodriguez' parents had valued education as a way to get ahead in America. Ironically, the greater success he experienced in school, the further he became removed from the world of his parents. Still a boy, he lost the ability to converse in Spanish. Becoming a public figure in the English-speaking world, he seemed to betray his ethnic background, which valued privacy and separateness from the English-speaking (gringo) world. Ironically, for all his achievements as an "American," Rodriguez learns that because of his background, he remains in many ways an outsider. Lacking a middle class upbringing, he has passed through the educational system as a "scholarship boy." This term, borrowed from Richard Hoggart's book "The Uses of Literacy," describes the son of working class parents who is granted the privilege of a middle class education, but while rising above his humble origins, never fully transcends them. The political positions Rodreguez takes as an adult flow as a logical extension from the experiences that shaped him -- especially the benefits of the education he received in a private school. Later there were the benefits that came to him as a "minority student" -- advantages he considered unwarranted. Concerned by poverty in America and the underfunding of schools that would help end poverty, he takes positions that have been unpopular among many educators. In these essays, he challenges the assumptions underlying both affirmative action and bilingual education. Rodriguez writes with great clarity, and his sentences seem crafted with considerable care. He wants very much to say precisely what he means. And this cannot have been always easy, as many of his ideas grapple with both irony and paradox. Often you read paragraphs that seem to have been thought through deeply, then carefully written and rewritten. The care that he takes in writing these essays reflects a wish to be read carefully. Those who have found reason to be offended, angered, or "bored" by his ideas are evidence that he touches on a great many sensitive issues.

Richard Rodriguez is a gifted writer. He words are almost lyrical at times and at points, Days of Obligation is simply a beautiful experience to read. In Days of Obligation, Rodriguez struggles with so many facets of himself -- notably, his ethnic heritage, his sexuality, his sense of guilt at the chasm between who he is and who he has been told to be by parents and his church. I believe there is a universal element to Rodriguez' struggles. They are the challenges that all human beings encounter in becoming their own unique selves. The added dimension of Rodriguez' Mexican heritage, makes this story all the more fascinating. A wonderful book to have us think about being ourselves in a world full of others expectations as well as an opportunity to get a closer view of Mexican ethnic influences and the related struggles in a United States where far too many people forget they themselves are immigrants or children of immigrants. A highly enjoyable book from many perspectives. James J. Maloney Saint Paul, Minnesota USA

Days of Obligation: An Argument with my Mexican Father is an excellent testimony of a life caught in, between, behind, and ahead of two (and one and many) worlds. The two major themes of this peculiarly beautiful book, those of comedy and tragedy, parallel each other as in a fugue, one theme high, piercing and begging, the other, low, somber, and measured. They find themselves manifested in the interplays between optimism and pessimism, Protestantism and Catholicism, between youthful (and naive) faith in possibility and middle-aged pessimism and the knowledge that, in the final analysis, "death is the vantage point from which life must be seen." In Rodriguez' essays, the United States is the land of youthful optimism, imbibed with Protestantism, whereas ancient Mexico, carriers of the knowledge of Original Sin, is a land of cynicism. However, the author skillfully exposes the paradoxes of this dichotomizing assumption. Ironically, the United States is suffering from loneliness and moral decadence as a result of its uncompromising individualism, while Mexico, a country in which the majority of the population will soon be under the age of 15, will abound with youth. This is a beautiful book about California, America, Mexico, and the complexity of life in these slowly disuniting States.

Richard Rodriguez is a Californian in the best sense of the word, and his book, Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father rises to writing's challenge of explaining the inexplicable-- describing the indescribable. What does it mean to be of two worlds...or three, or four, or several? Rodriguez in a dialogue with his father-self struggles with the dualism/duelism of being someone who lives between/among several worlds/states of mind /socio-economic srata/cultures/etc. He does this with prose which incorporates enough historic detail and insight to make even the most miserly readers feel that their time with this book was well spent. If you haven't read Rodriguez before I'd describe his writing as that of an intellecutal Caen, a non-fiction Tan/Allende, or a less profane Capote/Sedaris. You can catch Rodriguez on the The News Hour where his essays and commentary are a cut above the ususal beltway banter. Although his contributions to The News Hour are substantial, I wish he'd set aside the time to write another book as good as this one.