The New, New World

Richard Rodriguez on culture and assimilation

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

(Page 4 of 5)

Reason: Protestants always have empty crosses.

Rodriguez: It is an enormously powerful motif, the notion that Christ just got off the cross and walked away somewhere--went off to L.A.--and you could do it too. I think Prot- estantism is most successful in those cases where people are beginning to taste and sense discontinuity. And they begin to make sense out of it as providential. Protestantism also establishes, in a time of social change, the memory of the village. Within the storefront church, you can hold hands and remember what it was like in another time.

It will be one of the great changes of Latin America, the Protestantization of Latin America. and I think in some way that it will change the United States. The relationship of the evangelicals in places like Texas where there are rednecks and Mexicans together is really very interesting. The new Mexican who is now appearing in places like police departments--this is a new face of Latin America, and it is not necessarily one that we want.

Reason: How so?

Rodriguez: I think there has always been a charm to Latin America as being sort of morally lazy. We've always used it as a place where we could go to after dark and do whatever we wanted that we couldn't do here. We never really expected that Latin America was going to become a moral Clorox for our society, and maybe there's a ferocity there that we don't expect.

Reason: Aside from the desire to have this Latin America of easy virtue. are there bad consequences to that?

Rodriguez: How shall I put this? Mexican cops have never been cops I like to deal with. And there can be this ferocity--you see it in New York now with a lot of Puerto Rican and Hispanic households, the ferocity against the gay movement, the Rainbow Curriculum, for example. I see myself as a homosexual man--much freer in America than in Latin America.

Reason: So that the danger is that in adopting a sort of American Protestantism, a religious version of individualism, they will not, do not, adopt the tolerant individualism, the political individualism?

Rodriguez: We're talking about a low-church Protestantism. It is part of the paradox of the Protestant tradition that there has been this intolerance within a religion otherwise powerfully concerned with the individual. It is a paradox within Catholicism that a religion so communal would otherwise be so individualistic--in the sense that people are so private.

Reason: The association of immigration with welfare in the political discourse, particularly in California, has become very tight, and yet of course everywhere you go in L.A. all you see are immigrants working. What do you make of that?

Rodriguez: It may have something to do with some Anglo-Saxon prejudice about the South--that these people really are not workaholics. In fact. every Mexican I've ever known has been haunted by a kind of work lust that is just extraordinary to me--it terrifies me.

It may also be that, well fine, this generation is going to scrape the dishes and wipe your grandmother's ass when she's an invalid, but that's not what their kids are going to do. When they start becoming American, we're going to have to pay for the kids, who are not going to do that work; and who are going to be bitter. There is some logic in that. Ironically so. Isn't it interesting that we find that their Americanization is meaning that they would work less?

There is also this fear of the workaholic, which expresses itself especially against Asian immigrants. That they're working too hard. I've quoted that man who said to me. "Asians are unfair to my children because they work too hard." For a lot of people, the complaint about Asians is that not only do they work very hard but their work is multiplied- -that it is entire families working, while I'm working here as a solitary being.

There is not a great deal of praise given to these immigrants, who have sometimes two and three jobs. A lot of these people are maintaining the quality of life in California. They're the ones who are planting the trees, mowing the lawns, cooking the Italian food in the yuppie restaurants. They are the ones who are maintaining what's left of the California dream, and of course they are the ones who are accused of destroying it.

Reason: Where do you think this backlash against immigrants is going?

Comments

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منتدى العرب|3.9.11 @ 9:07PM|#

Thank you

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rezultate live|3.29.11 @ 5:09PM|#

really nice interview

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|12.10.11 @ 11:12PM|#

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

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