Thursday, March 26, 2009

Richard Rodriguez on NPR

Inspiration for Latin American scholars everywhere, Richard Rodriguez discusses Cosmic Race & Age Beyond Race (from Feb '09)
Never a disappointment, Rodriguez espouses the age of Americans wanting to be 'multiple'. Conceptually, this interests me, but practically, I can see where this might be appropriated by 'the rhetoric of the end of racism'. "The notion of being of several things" sounds an awful lot like the myth of the melting pot. Something in me wonders if he's just stoking the fire when he says things like "I don't want to be Mexican" and goes on to say all of the ethnicities that he wants to be; it's true that he's arguing against mono-culturalism, but does he do so in a conscious attempt to be controversial by infusing his arguments with digs that feed into his contrarian ethos as a self-loathing minority?

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