I came from a white middle class neighborhood. Was I expected to go back there and teach the woman next door about Renaissance sonnets? The embarrassing truth of the matter was that I was being chosen because Yale University had… — Richard Rodriguez Copy Share Image
But very early in life I became part of the majority culture and now don't think of myself as a minority. Yet the university said I was one. Anybody who has met a real minority - in the economic sense,… — 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
