Reviews

"A lyrical essayist who can match... Albert Camus for sheer talent." -Los Angeles Times Book Review

"An important voice, saying something new, something profound about the American experience...Here is a writer who can make words riot." -Vogue

Book Description

America is browning. As politicians, schoolteachers, and grandparents attempt to decipher what that might mean, Richard Rodriguez argues America has been brown from its inception, as he himself is. In his two previous memoirs, Hunger of Memory and Days of Obligation, Rodriguez wrote about the intersection of his private life with public issues of class and ethnicity. With Brown, his consideration of race, Rodriguez completes his "trilogy on American public life."

For Rodriguez, brown is not a singular color. Brown is evidence of mixture. Brown is a shade created by desire-an emblem of the erotic history of America, which began the moment the African and the European met within the Indian eye. Rodriguez reflects on various cultural associations of the color brown-toil, decay, impurity, time-arranging dazzling juxtapositions for which he is justly famous: Alexis de Tocqueville, Malcolm X, minstrel shows, Broadway musicals, Puritanism, the Sistine Chapel, Cubism, homosexuality, and the influence on his life of two federal figures-Ben Franklin and Richard Nixon ("the dark father of Hispanicity").

At the core of the book is an assessment of the meaning of Hispanics to the life of America. Reflecting upon the new demographic profile of our country, Rodriguez observes that Hispanics are becoming Americanized at the same rate that the United States is becoming Latinized. Hispanics are coloring an American identity that traditionally has chosen to describe itself as black and white.

About the Author

Richard Rodriguez is an editor at Pacific News Service, and a contributing editor for Harper's Magazine, U.S. News & World Report, and the Sunday "Opinion" section of the Los Angeles Times. He appears regularly as an essayist on the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer on PBS. He has published numerous articles in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The American Scholar, Time, Mother Jones, and The New Republic, as well as other publications. He has also written two books: Hunger of Memory and Days of Obligation: An Argument With My Mexican Father, as well as two BBC documentaries. Rodriguez received a 1997 George Foster Peabody Award for his NewsHour essays on American life. The Peabody Award is designed to recognize "outstanding achievement in broadcast and cable," and is one of television's highest honors. His other awards include the Frankel Medal from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the International Journalism Award from the World Affairs Council of California.

This event is cosponsored by UCSB Arts & Lectures and the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center.