Collection 1: "'Blaxicans' and Other Reinvented Americans" by Richard Rodriguez

Just when Americans think we know who we are—we are Protestants, culled from Western Europe, are we not?—then new immigrants appear from Southern Europe or from Eastern Europe.

In another 40 years, we will be prepared to say to the Vietnamese immigrant that he, with his breakfast tray, with his intuition for travel, with his memory of tragedy, with his recognition of peerless freedoms, he fulfills the meaning of America.

I was supposed to attach myself to one side or the other, without asking the obvious questions: What is this perpetual dialectic between Europe and Africa?

You might wonder about the complexity of historical factors, the collision of centuries, that creates Richard Rodriguez.

In Mexico what one finds as early as the 18th century is a predominant population of mixed-race people.

America has so readily adopted the Canadian notion of multiculturalism because it preserves our preference for thinking ourselves separate—our elbows need not touch, thank you.

For “Hispanic” is a gringo contrivance, a definition of the world according to European patterns of colonization.

Such a definition suggests I have more in common with Argentine Italians than with American Indians; that there is an ineffable union between the white Cuba
and the mulatto Puerto Rican because of Spain.

And, indeed, the year 2003 has arrived and the proclamation of Hispanic ascendancy has been published far and wide.

To compare blacks and Hispanics, therefore, is to construct a fallacious equation.

But Hispanic is an ethnic term. It is a term denoting culture.

I notice immigrants are the archetypal Americans at a time when we—U.S. citizens—have become post-Americans, most concerned with subsidized medications.

Newcomers brought letters of introduction from sister evangelical churches in Latin America.

There is now a north-south line that is theological, a line that cannot be circumvented by the U.S.

There is now a north-south line that is theological, a line that cannot be circumvented by the U.S.

I was on a British Broadcasting Corporation interview show, and a woman introduced me as being “in favor” of assimilation.

I am not in favor of assimilation any more than I am in favor of the Pacific Ocean or clement weather.

Some Chinese American people in the Richmond and Sunset districts of San Francisco sometimes paint their houses (so many qualifiers!) in colors I would once have described as garish: lime greens, rose reds, pumpkin.

Some Chinese American people in the Richmond and Sunset districts of San Francisco sometimes paint their houses (so many qualifiers!) in colors I would once have described as garish: lime greens, rose reds, pumpkin.

And they’re already moving into a world in which tattoo or ornament or movement or commune or sexuality or drug or rave or electronic bombast are the organizing principles of their identity.