Reason: You suggest in your book that Mexico itself and Mexicans in America have become the comic side, the optimistic side, and that it is actually blond California that is getting pessimistic.
Rodriguez: That's part of the great irony. We've always assumed that America somehow belonged on this land. Well, maybe you can put America in a suitcase and take it to Hong Kong. Maybe you can take it to shanghai. And maybe what our Scandinavian ancestors of the 19th century would recognize as America, or as an American city, they would see more clearly in Tijuana now than they would in San Diego.
Reason: What do you mean by the America that you could take it to Hong Kong?
Rodriguez: The notion of self-reliance. The notion of re-creation. More and more I'm sensing that that kind of optimism belongs now to immigrants in this country--certainly to Mexicans that I meet--and less and less so to the native-born.
Americans seem to be tired. They talk about a lot of problems. I'm not depressed about the problems on the horizon, because I think that's where you get solutions. We'll start growing our spinach in space only when we run out of space. What I worry about is that when you talk about zero population growth and that sort of thing you are really talking about a sort of stopped time, where the whole process of evolution gets called into question.
Reason: Why do you think people today talk so much about culture?
Rodriguez: Because there is an enormous sense of discontinuity in our lives. A friend of mine who was writing a book on Orange County once took me to this enormous shopping center--South Coast Plaza--where there were Iranians and Mexicans and everybody, and I said to him, "Do you feel flattered that the whole world has come to where you used to bicycle across open fields?" And he said. "Of course I feel flattered. It s an extraordinary idea that the entire world would come to your playground. But at some other level I feel enormously besieged, and in some sense displaced, that here they're coming and they have no memory that I was here." We may become some new tribe of American Indians, who remember a California once upon a time and now are in the presence of rude people whose memory doesn't extend that far.
So we start asking questions about what our culture was and what their culture seems to be. Most people tend to use culture in a static sense--he represents this culture and I represent this culture. I think culture is much more fluid and experiential. I belong to many cultures. I've had many cultural experiences. And the notion that I've lost my culture is ludicrous. because you can't lose a culture. You can change a culture in your lifetime. as in fact most of us do. I'm not my father. I didn't grow up in the state of Colima in Western Mexico. I grew up in California in the 1950s. The notion that I've lost his culture is, of course, at some level true, but not interesting. The interesting thing is that my culture is I Love Lucy.
Reason: Are there political implications to this view of culture versus the static view
Rodriguez: The interesting thing about America, the risky thing about America, is that when it opened itself up to immigrants, it opened itself to the possibility that it was going to become fluid and a stranger to itself. The great 19th-century argument against immigrants was not racial or ethnic but primarily religious. The argument against the Irish migration was a very interesting one, and one I've always taken seriously: whether or not an Irish Catholic can become a good American. Because in some way, as a Catholic in this country, I m at odds with America. There is a prevailing ideology, a culture, which we change and adapt and resist and in various ways ignore and become part of. But in some sense it's not an easy relationship for the outsider, nor is it an easy relationship for those who are within the culture to know what to do with these outsiders.
The argument ends in the 19th century with this remarkable reversal from the anti- immigrant biases of the 1850s. Americans start talking about themselves as belonging to the tradition of the immigrant--we are all immigrants. And we see ourselves in the disheveled figure of the woman loaded down with the suitcase and garlic and crucifix. Who knew what she was saying? But we recognize in that movement away from her past that there was some great American drama that we saw ourselves as part of.
Reason: How do you account for the fact that in the beginning of the 20th century, as we were accepting the myth of the immigrant as the true American, the first broad-based re- strictions on mass immigration started to be discussed in an active way?
Rodriguez: How do I account for the fact that, at a time when black and white relationships are so difficult in America, blond kids are listening to rap? Within what is desired is also what is feared. The stranger is the figure of the American but also the threat to American stability. Surely there is some part of us that wants to settle down, that doesn't want to keep moving.
Reason: You've written, "Protestantism taught Americans to believe that America does not exist--not as a culture, not as a shared experience, not as a communal reality. Because of Protestantism, the American ideology of individualism is always at war with the experience of our lives, our culture. As long as we reject the notion of culture we are able to invent the future." Isn't the paradox of American culture that it emerges out of the living of individualism?
Rodriguez: What I was arguing in that paragraph is that it is possible to share the experience of individuality but that it is always paradoxically so. And that there is an anti-in- tellectual bias in America based upon a constant rejection of the elder, of authority, of the past. There is in the American experience continually this notion that we have sort of stumbled upon experience, that we have discovered sex, that we have discovered evil. I quote a woman at Columbia University who said, in the 1970s, "After Vietnam I will never believe that America is the good and pure country that I once thought it to be." I thought to myself. "Where has she been all this time? Did she miss the part about the slaves? Did she miss that page about the Indians? Where does that notion of innocence come up?" We are innocent of history, of memory.
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Oh oh ok! I can't find anyone to talk to about this! Here you are! When do you come to Austin Texas next? I finally found someone on the same page as myself! Born in 1956, in Chicago, raised in Ohio and living for goodness sakes in Texas (God have mercy on me...) I don't agree with all you say but you have my attention! Would love to know when you might speak at University of Texas? Sylvia