I write about race in America in hopes of undermining the notion of race in America. — Richard Rodriguez Copy Share Image
We're looking at complexity. We're looking at blond kids in Beverley Hills who can speak Spanish because they have been raised by… — Richard Rodriguez Copy Share Image
You learn in America to speak two ways. You learn in public discourse not to be very specific about your religious life.… — Richard Rodriguez Copy Share Image
There is San Diego - this retirement village, with its prim petticoat, that doesn't want to get too near the water. San… — Richard Rodriguez Copy Share Image
I don't deny people their fantasy life, but I do think that we desperately need to start realizing just how complicated our… — Richard Rodriguez Copy Share Image
The myth of the dead Indian goes back to the Protestant settlement of the U.S. The Pilgrims wanted to start a new… — Richard Rodriguez Copy Share Image
Cultures, when they meet, influence one another, whether people like it or not. But Americans don't have any way of describing this… — Richard Rodriguez Copy Share Image
The genius of American culture and its integrity comes from fidelity to the light. Plain as day, we say. Happy as the… — Richard Rodriguez Copy Share Image
Mexicans who come to America today end up opposing assimilation. They say they are "holding on to their culture." To them, I… — Richard Rodriguez Copy Share Image
Those people who say that America is finite are some sense right. The environmental movement, for example, has a great wisdom to… — Richard Rodriguez Copy Share Image
In some ways I consider myself more Chinese, because I live in San Francisco, which is becoming a predominantly Asian city. I… — Richard Rodriguez Copy Share Image
Mexico is sex and Canada is mind. There is much about Canada that I find admirable - the treatment of immigrants, for… — Richard Rodriguez Copy Share Image
fter the O.J. Simpson trial there was talk about how the country was splitting in two - one part black, one part… — Richard Rodriguez Copy Share Image
I had an Indian face, but I never saw it as Indian, in part because in America the Indian was dead. The… — Richard Rodriguez Copy Share Image
America has never had a very wide vocabulary for miscegenation. We say we like diversity, but we don't like the idea that… — Richard Rodriguez Copy Share Image
But America isn't a country of family values; Mexico is a country of family values. This is a country of people who… — Richard Rodriguez Copy Share Image
In the Sacramento of the 1950s, it was as though White simply hadn't had time enough to figure Brown out. It was a busy… — Richard Rodriguez Copy Share Image
Books should confuse. Literature abhors the typical. Literature flows to the particular, the mundane, the greasiness of paper, the taste of warm beer, the… — Richard Rodriguez Copy Share Image
Mexico is sex and Canada is mind. There is much about Canada that I find admirable - the treatment of immigrants, for example, particularly… — Richard Rodriguez Copy Share Image
My decision was sparked by affirmative action. There was a point in my life when affirmative action would have meant something to me -… — Richard Rodriguez Copy Share Image
Who knows what Yale thought it was getting when it hired Richard Rodriguez? The people who offered me the job thought there was nothing… — Richard Rodriguez Copy Share Image
I have a good black friend who is a doctor, but he didn't become a doctor because he saw other black men who were… — Richard Rodriguez Copy Share Image
In some ways I consider myself more Chinese, because I live in San Francisco, which is becoming a predominantly Asian city. I avoid falling… — Richard Rodriguez Copy Share Image
I think the universities have co-opted the intellectual, by and large. But there is an emerging intellectual set coming out of Washington think tanks… — Richard Rodriguez Copy Share Image
You don't know Mexico, man. You have trivialized Mexico. You are a fool about Mexico if you think that Mexico is five blocks. That… — Richard Rodriguez Copy Share Image
After the second chapter of Days of Obligation, which is about the death of a friend of mine from AIDS, was published in Harper's,… — Richard Rodriguez Copy Share Image
What has happened in the last generation is that Tijuana has become a new Third World capital - much to the chagrin of Mexico… — Richard Rodriguez Copy Share Image
