The New, New World

Richard Rodriguez on culture and assimilation

Nick Gillespie & Virginia Postrel from the August/September 1994 issue

(Page 3 of 4)

What I' m arguing is that there is a tradition that immigrants should be taught as much as native-born Californians. A tradition of America which connects us to one another, despite the fact that the strongest thing that we could say about one another is that we are disconnected. But the woman I know in Berkeley who drives her red Volkswagen around to this day with a bumper sticker that says "Question Authority." There is not a more conventional American ideal than "Question Authority."

Reason: In the context of immigrants. you've said that America is irresistible, that parents think that their children can pick and choose but that you can't resist it. Does that mean that the concern about assimilation is needless?

Rodriguez: Some part of it will be natural and inevitable. But no one is more American than the person who insists that he's not. I said to these kids in Corpus Christi the other day, "I don't mind that you go around pretending that you live in Mexico, and wear sombreros and so forth. I just want you to know that that's an American thing to do--that insistence that I can decide whether I'm going to be Mexican or not."

I was doing a documentary for the BBC a few years ago on American teenagers, and there was this girl in North Carolina who was telling us about how she wanted to become more Scottish. She was going to bicycle that summer in Scotland and get in touch with her Scottish ancestors. And my film crew, these Brits, said, "This idea of becoming more Scottish. That's a very American idea, isn't it?" Nobody in Scotland talks that way. And that's exactly the point, that the American arrogance has always been that the individual is in control of the culture. In some way, the people who are most individualistic, and most insistent on their refusal to assimilate, are the people who are most deeply assimilated.

The joke on Mexican Americans is that Mexicans now are Americanizing themselves at probably a faster rate than we are, and we may turn into British Columbians. You go up to British Columbia, and there are these more British-than-the-British Canadians, with their picture of the queen in their dining room and tea cozies and so forth. My fear is that Mexican Americans may turn into people who are in some kind of bubble in history, while these new Mexicans are going back and forth.

Reason: You talk a lot about two things that are related. One is intimacy, and the other is the tension between the public and the private. How do you reconcile the public and the private, the communal and the individual life?

Rodriguez: I don't have any large scheme for that settlement. I do think that we go in cycles as a society. Remember Reinhold Niebuhr wrote a book called Moral Man and Moral Society about 40 years ago, 50 years ago? If one were to write a book like that today you would have to almost reverse the title, Immoral Man and Moral Society. Dealing with a problem like the homeless, we have almost no sense that as individuals we can make any difference. We seem not to believe that we can change the condition of the American household. which is in disrepair--mothers unhappy, mothers being beaten by papa, the children being abused by somebody. We refer our problems to agencies or to the public realm because we sense more and more that some intimate circle has been fragmented.

Maybe Hillary Clinton's generation is the great generation of this belief that if you can reorganize the public realm all will be well, that the public can redeem the private. I'm beginning to sense among the young today that there is some reversal now in the other direction, that the kids I talk to--I'm talking about the children we would normally describe as troubled children--are more and more looking for more intimate ways of organizing themselves and restoring themselves.

Reason: Like?

Rodriguez: Like Nation of Islam. Victory Outreach. The most successful rescue structures in this society are not governmental but are cases of one person taking another person. There is a man named Joe Marshall in San Francisco who has something called the Omega Boys Club. He used to be a junior-highschool teacher. and he realized that these kids basically did not have a home. He was expecting them to study a geography lesson. and they hadn't had breakfast. They were without such preliminaries in their intimate life that they had no way of living in the public life. So he committed himself as an individual to becoming their father essentially and to relating to them one on one--"I will be here for you." And he's had enormous success. He's sent over 100 kids to college--kids who would not normally fall under any umbrella of the ideal student. I'm more and more taken with that possibility. that what we are looking for now is some way to redeem the house.

I write in the "Late Victorians" chapter [in Days of Obligation] about the homosexuals who do not have a family, whose deepest secret was not held against the city but was held against their own parents. And they came to San Francisco in the 1 970s and moved into the Victorian houses. They loved those symbols of 19th-century domestic stability. with four generations raised one story upon the other --behind this great wooden door. This woman came up to me the other day and said, "The only happily married people I know are gay couples." I said to her "Maybe that's part of the irony of our time, that people who didn't have that intimacy have been spending more time on it." I sense that there are very large groups of people who are without intimate life and who are looking for it now. And increasingly these looking are not looking to government.

That's partly the reason for the rise of certain sorts of religious fundamentalism. which has within it a deep communal assurance and intimate assurance. There is down the block in my yuppie neighborhood this Filipino evangelical church. If you do not come tonight they will come looking for you. I don't want to say that ominously. because that's not the way they would describe it. But they miss you. And they eat together. They are there in the morning--I go jogging at 6:30 some mornings and they're coming out of church, and I think to myself, "This is insane. What have they been doing? When did they sleep?" Clearly something is going on in there that's not liturgical, or is so powerfully liturgical that it engages the re-creation of community in a city that is otherwise oblivious and hostile to them.

Reason: What do you think about the attraction of Latin Americans. both here and in Latin America, to evangelical Protestantism?

Rodriguez: Catholicism is a religion that stresses to you constantly that you can't make it on your own, that you need the intercession of the Virgin Mary, and the saints, St. Jude, and your grandmother--candles and rosaries and indulgences and the pope. There are all these intermediaries, because you facing God would be hopeless.

Suddenly, into the village comes this assurance that you don't need padrecito. You can read the bible yourself--you don't need someone to tell you what it says. You don't need the Virgin Mary, you don't need the saints, you don't need anybody. God is speaking to you. And just because your father beat your mother, just because your grandfather was poor, doesn't mean it has to happen to you. You can change your whole life around. This is all based on the Easter promise and not, as the Catholic church has always based it, on some Good Friday suffering.