Latest Richard Rodriguez Quotes from Interviews

• If you want to live in Tennessee, God bless you, I wish for you a long life and starry evenings. But that is not where I want to live my life. I want to live my life in Carthage, in Athens. I want to live my life in Rome. I want to live my life in the center of the world. I want to live my life in Los Angeles.

  Richard Rodríguez

  Rome, Long, Wish

  Fuente: www.teachingbooks.net

• We're looking at complexity. We're looking at blond kids in Beverley Hills who can speak Spanish because they have been raised by Guatemalan nannies. We're looking at Evangelicals coming up from Latin America to convert the U.S. at the same time that L.A. movie stars are taking up Indian pantheism.

  Richard Rodríguez

  Stars, Latin, Kids

  Fuente: www.teachingbooks.net

• We're looking at such enormous complexity and variety that it makes a mockery of "celebrating diversity." In the L.A. of the future, no one will need to say, "Let's celebrate diversity." Diversity is going to be a fundamental part of our lives. That's what it's going to mean to be modern.

  Richard Rodríguez

  Mean, Diversity, Needs

  Fuente: www.teachingbooks.net

• Mexico is sex and Canada is mind. There is much about Canada that I find admirable - the treatment of immigrants, for example, particularly those from Central America during the recent civil wars there. But there is confusion too: I know of Croatian Nazis who are subsidized by the Canadian government to maintain their racist culture. There is Canada, trying to sustain diversity without knowing exactly what it's doing.

  Richard Rodríguez

  Sex, War, Knowing

  Fuente: www.teachingbooks.net

• I find L.A. very interesting, partly because I think something new is forming there, but not in a moment of good fellowship as you might think from all this "diversity" claptrap. It's not as if we'll all go down to the Civic Center in our ethnic costumes and dance around.

  Richard Rodríguez

  Thinking, Diversity, Interesting

  Fuente: www.teachingbooks.net

• 'm constantly depressed by the Mexican gang members I meet in East L.A. who essentially live their lives inside five or six blocks. They are caught in some tiny ghetto of the mind that limits them to these five blocks because, they say, "I'm Mexican. I live here." And I say, "What do you mean you live here - five blocks? Your granny, your abualita, walked two thousand miles to get here. She violated borders, moved from one language to another, moved from a sixteenth-century village to a twenty-first-century city, and you live within five blocks?"

  Richard Rodríguez

  Block, Mean, Ghetto

  Fuente: www.teachingbooks.net

• 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 is not Mexico; that is some crude Americanism you have absorbed.

  Richard Rodríguez

  Block, Men, Thinking

  Fuente: www.teachingbooks.net

• Mexicans who come to America today end up opposing assimilation. They say they are "holding on to their culture." To them, I say, "If you really wanted to hold on to your culture, you would be in favor of assimilation. You would be fearless about swallowing English and about becoming Americanized. You would be much more positive about the future, and much less afraid. That's what it means to be Mexican.

  Richard Rodríguez

  Mean, America, Mexican

  Fuente: www.teachingbooks.net

• Most American Hispanics don't belong to one race, either. I keep telling kids that, when filling out forms, they should put "yes" to everything - yes, I am Chinese; yes, I am African; yes, I am white; yes, I am a Pacific Islander; yes, yes, yes - just to befuddle the bureaucrats who think we live separately from one another.

  Richard Rodríguez

  Kids, Thinking, White

  Fuente: www.teachingbooks.net

• The fact that we're all hyphenating our names suggests that we are afraid of being assimilated. I was talking on the BBC recently, and this woman introduced me as being "in favor of assimilation." I said, "I'm not in favor of assimilation." I am no more in favor of assimilation than I am in favor of the Pacific Ocean. Assimilation is not something to oppose or favor - it just happens.

  Richard Rodríguez

  Ocean, Names, Talking

  Fuente: www.teachingbooks.net

• Jose Vasconcelos, Mexico's great federalist and apologist, has coined a wonderful term, la raza cósmica, "the cosmic race," a new people having not one race but many in their blood.

  Richard Rodríguez

  Race, Blood, People

  Fuente: www.teachingbooks.net

• The Census Bureau is thinking of creating a new category because so many kids don't know how to describe themselves using the existing categories. I call these kids the "Keanu Reeves Generation," after the actor who has a Hawaiian father and a Welsh mother.

  Richard Rodríguez

  Madre, padre, hijos

  Fuente: www.teachingbooks.net

• But lots of emerging racial tensions in California have nothing to do with whites: Filipinos and Samoans are fighting it out in San Francisco high schools. Merced is becoming majority Mexican and Cambodian. They may be fighting in gangs right now, but I bet they are also learning each other's language.

  Richard Rodríguez

  School, Fighting, California

  Fuente: www.teachingbooks.net

• Cultures, when they meet, influence one another, whether people like it or not. But Americans don't have any way of describing this secret that has been going on for more than two hundred years. The intermarriage of the Indian and the African in America, for example, has been constant and thorough. Colin Powell tells us in his autobiography that he is Scotch, Irish, African, Indian, and British, but all we hear is that he is African.

  Richard Rodríguez

  Years, Two, America

  Fuente: www.teachingbooks.net

• fter the O.J. Simpson trial there was talk about how the country was splitting in two - one part black, one part white. It was ludicrous: typical gringo arrogance. It's as though whites and blacks can imagine America only in terms of each other. It's mostly white arrogance, in that it places whites always at the center of the racial equation.

  Richard Rodríguez

  Country, Two, White

  Fuente: www.teachingbooks.net

• Those people who say that America is finite are some sense right. The environmental movement, for example, has a great wisdom to it: we need to protect, to preserve, to shelter as much as we need to develop. But I think this always has to be juxtaposed against the optimism of old, which is now represented in part by immigrants. I would like to see America achieve a kind of balance between optimism and tragedy, between possibility and skepticism.

  Richard Rodríguez

  Thinking, America, Optimism

  Fuente: www.teachingbooks.net

• America has never had a very wide vocabulary for miscegenation. We say we like diversity, but we don't like the idea that our Hispanic neighbor is going to marry our daughter. America has nothing like the Spanish vocabulary for miscegenation. Mulatto, mestizo, Creole - these Spanish and French terms suggest, by their use, that miscegenation is a fact of life. America has only black and white. In eighteenth-century America, if you had any drop of African blood in you, you were black.

  Richard Rodríguez

  Daughter, Black And White, Blood

  Fuente: www.teachingbooks.net

• It is not simply that these two cities are perched side by side at the edge of the Pacific; it is that adolescence sits next to middle age, and they don't know how to relate to each other. In a way, these two cities exist in different centuries. San Diego is a post-industrial city talking about settling down, slowing down, building clean industry. Tijuana is a preindustrial city talking about changing, moving forward, growing. Yet they form a single metropolitan area.

  Richard Rodríguez

  Moving, Talking, Cities

  Fuente: www.teachingbooks.net

• Maybe the American Dream is too rich for us now in the U.S. Maybe we're losing it because we are not like our Swedish grandmother who came across the plains, hacked down the trees, and took the Spanish words she encountered and made them hers. Now her great-great-grandchildren sit terrified, wondering what to do with all these Mexicans. The American Dream is an impossible affirmation of possibility. And maybe native-born Americans don't have it anymore. Maybe it has run through their fingers.

  Richard Rodríguez

  Running, Dream, Grandmother

  Fuente: www.teachingbooks.net

• There is San Diego - this retirement village, with its prim petticoat, that doesn't want to get too near the water. San Diego worries about all the turds washing up on the lovely, pristine beaches of La Jolla. San Diego wishes Mexico would have fewer babies. And San Diego, like the rest of America, is growing middle-aged.

  Richard Rodríguez

  Baby, Beach, Retirement

  Fuente: www.teachingbooks.net

• La edad media en Estados Unidos es ahora de treinta y tres años, mientras que México es cada vez más joven, se repliega cada vez más en la adolescencia. México tiene quince años. México lleva una camiseta del Hard Rock Cafe y deambula por Tijuana en busca de trabajo, de una cita, de algo que ponerse en la cara para quitarse el acné.

  Richard Rodríguez

  Jobs, Average, Rocks

  Fuente: www.teachingbooks.net

• Lo que ha ocurrido en la última generación es que Tijuana se ha convertido en una nueva capital del Tercer Mundo, para disgusto de Ciudad de México, que cada vez es más consciente de lo poco que controla Tijuana política y culturalmente. Además de prostíbulos y discotecas, Tijuana tiene ahora fábricas coreanas e industriales japoneses y refugiados centroamericanos, y una nueva burguesía mexicana que aprende de la televisión por cable.

  Richard Rodríguez

  Cities, Mexican, Mexico

  Fuente: www.teachingbooks.net

• Suddenly the land is haunted by all these dead Indians. There is this new fascination with the Southwest, with places like Santa Fe, New Mexico, where people come down from New York and Boston and dress up as Indians. When I go to Santa Fe, I find real Indians living there, but they are not involved in the earth worship that the American environmentalists are so taken by. Many of these Indians are interested, rather, in becoming Evangelical Christians.

  Richard Rodríguez

  Christian, New York, Real

  Fuente: www.teachingbooks.net

• Of course, San Diego chooses not to regard the two cities as one. Talk about alter ego: Tijuana was created by the lust of San Diego. Everything that was illegal in San Diego was permitted in Tijuana. When boxing was illegal in San Diego, there were boxing matches in Tijuana; when gambling was illegal, there was always Tijuana.

  Richard Rodríguez

  Cities, Two, Gambling

  Fuente: www.teachingbooks.net

• The Indians had to be either killed, or herded into reservations, which were essentially concentration camps, and forgotten. Their history had to be absolutely obliterated so that we could believe that we were living on virgin soil.

  Richard Rodríguez

  Believe, Soil, Forgotten

  Fuente: www.teachingbooks.net

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