Richard Rodriguez’s slim volume Days of Obligation: An Argument With My Mexican Father is a veritable fruitcake of metaphors, allusions, and paradoxes. What exactly does this excerpt mean? “Uncle Sam has no children of his own. In a way, Sam represents necessary evil to the American imagination. He steals children to make men of them, mocks all reticence, all modesty, all memory. Uncle Sam is a hectoring Yankee, a skinflint uncle, gaunt, uncouth, unloved…”
To catch the major message (or the host of little related messages), one has to consider the man himself and where he came from. He is a 49-year-old son of Mexican immigrant parents; he is strongly Roman Catholic, strongly gay, and strongly opposed to multicultural education. He was raised in a predominantly Anglo neighborhood of Sacramento, California, and schooled by Irish nuns who left him with vicarious nostalgia for the Emerald Isle. He is one of those people who delight in reconciling (or at least finding common denominators in) seemingly contradictory ideas.
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In a nutshell, here’s what I gathered he’s saying: American culture today–as it has evolved or devolved–is individualistic (me first), optimistic (the sun’ll come up tomorrow), practical (just get the job done), future oriented (the sky’s the limit), and decidedly Protestant (God helps those who help themselves). In California, he notes in his book, “it is still possible…to change your name, change your sex, get a divorce, become a movie star.”
The joke, he writes in Days of Obligation, is that “Spain arrived with missionary zeal at the shores of contemplation. But Spain had no idea of the absorbent strength of Indian spirituality…. Catholicism has become an Indian religion. By the twenty-first century, the locus of the Catholic Church, by virtue of numbers, will be Latin America, by which time Catholicism itself will have assumed the aspect of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Brown skin.”
“If I am a newcomer to your country, why teach me about my ancestors? I need to know about seventeenth-century Puritans in order to make sense of the rebellion I notice everywhere in the American city. Teach me about mad British kings so I will understand the American penchant for iconoclasm. Then teach me about cowboys and Indians; I should know the tragedies that created the country that will create me.”
