SOURCE: Alarcón, Norma. “Tropology of Hunger: The ‘Miseducation’ of Richard Rodriguez.” In The Ethnic Canon: Histories, Institutions, and Interventions, edited by David Palumbo-Liu, pp. 140–52. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995.

[In the following essay, Alarcón discusses Rodriguez's exploration of what it means to be an “American” in Hunger of Memory and Days of Obligation.]

The historical condition of our times is to have “ethnicity,” albeit reconfigured and remapped in the aftermath of the civil rights movement in the United States. The Marxist mandate to acquire a class consciousness has been too limited to account for all the elements in the formation of raced ethnic groups in the context of the Americas. It increasingly appears as well that in the Euro-American terrain the formation of a proletarian class consciousness has become more of a step on the way to the formation of an unstable bourgeois liberal subject, given the hegemony of the ideology, than to becoming the “subject of history.” Consequently, the contemporary entwinement of modernism (in the guise of aesthetics, positivism, enlightenment capitalist liberalism, and their conditioned Marxist contestations) and postmodernism (marking the refractedness and sinister side of the enlightenment project of progressive rationality, the multiplicity of life-world group formations, and the crisis of the male-biased liberal, political subject) gives rise to complex questions with respect to the cartography of culture and politics pertinent to the so-called ethnic canon, especially in its currently subordinated position to the nation and its canon (Harvey 1989; Jameson 1991; Laclau and Zac 1994). Thus, the primary questions before us are, What is an American? What is America? What are the Americas?

It is not enough to assume ethnic identity in the context of the nation. One must pursue the conditions of its production and constitution and the structural and rhetorical forms engaged in the process. The extent to which ethnicity (raced or not) and gender can or cannot be refused is also of paramount importance given the constitutive contradictions to which the speaking/writing subject is subjected with respect to questions of identity-in-difference (Trinh 1989; Anzaldúa 1987; Spivak 1988). For the “aesthete” like Richard Rodríguez, contradictions emerging from sociopolitical inequalities and spheres of institutional power may be turned into biting, (un)witty, and playful ironies as he insists in the too absolutist separations of the public and the private in classical liberal terms. The boundaries and traffic between the aesthetic and the political are a debatable nexus of analysis and discourse through the structures produced.¹

Perhaps no other U.S. writer of Mexican descent has simultaneously embraced and undermined the political subject of bourgeois classical liberalism as has Richard Rodríguez. Indeed, Rodríguez's salient critical apparatus entails the deployment of the extremely dichotomized political categories of the private and the public, such that the private pertains to culture and experience, and the public to the (unquestioned) institutional or public political sphere of the nation-state. It is clear that his anti-affirmative action and antibilingual education positions assume a bourgeois classical liberal understanding of the public sphere. In the words of Nancy Fraser, such understanding of the public sphere assumes “that it is possible for interlocutors in a public sphere to bracket status differentials and to deliberate ‘as if’ they were social equals … and that a single, comprehensive public sphere is always preferable to a nexus of multiple publics” (Fraser 1994, 80). The call for “as if” they were social equals requires the construction of a “public persona” with a greater or lesser degree of dissonance with the “private” one. Under these conditions, the demand for group representation as people of Mexican descent (that is, as an ethnicized group) in the public sphere makes no sense, must be subsumed under the private and thereby rendered irrelevant—along with non-English languages—to the public sphere. English becomes, then, the common denominating language of the public sphere and all differences may be erased. The mandate, under these conditions, is for the formation of bourgeois classical liberal political subjects devoid of difference, devoid of (produced or constructed) “ethnic” trappings, indeed of gender and sexuality. In the liberal political context of Euro-America, then, it is no accident that the most sustained critique and challenge of the domains of the private and the public continue to emerge from feminist theorists, since it is what counts as private and/or public that becomes a salient issue in contemporary politics and demands for radical democracy (Pateman 1989; Fraser 1994; Eisenstein 1994).²

In a sense, then, Rodríguez's deployment of these political categories in his work is part of a noncritically acquired education that in effect leads him to the (unsustainable) refusal of ethnicity, except as a private phenomenon that is then opposed to his construction of a public persona. Notwithstanding the historical naïveté of his political positions—which make him a popular public speaker in neoconservative spheres—it is the structural and rhetorical traffic between experienced culture and politics, which he cannot neatly sever into the private and the public, that undermines the political public persona to which, in his view, we should all aspire.

Rereading Hunger of Memory and other of his works from the hierarchical structure and discourse generated through the pivotal scene in the section “Complexion” enables us to track the double binds, which are often played for ironic effects, and the political economy's constitutive contradictions, which become inescapable for people of Mexican descent in the United States on the one hand, and for the (im)migrant's location on the other. A simultaneous reading of the constitutive contradictions of (im)migrants from the point of view of a Mexican location requires a reading of the displacement of campesinos/Indians from the economy and their exclusion from forming a public persona under Mexican conditions. In effect, the Chiapas neo-Zapatista movement is a recent dramatic example, in Mexico, of the political economy's productive processes and the displaced people's claims to citizenship in the Mexican nation-making history (Burbach 1994).

The section titled “Complexion” in Rodriguez's Hunger of Memory may be said to be structured by the mediating category of (im)migration. This analytical maneuver enables the displacement of a reading of the work as “merely” that of an emblematic passage into a self-making, self-determining Anglo-American political liberal subject and brings into relief the salient constitutive contradictions that (im)migrants of Mexican descent undergo as they cross and recross the geopolitical border Mexico-United States (Rouse 1991). Moreover, it offers the possibility of reading Rodríguez's “ironic” mapping since his clear intentions are often enunciated by marking his privileged difference from (im)migrants, whom he wittily calls los pobres. (The only other Spanish term used is los gringos.) He points to his entry into the public sphere as a citizen-subject who “could act as a public person—able to defend my interests, to unionize, to petition, to speak up—to challenge and demand” (138). On the other hand, Rodríguez situates the (im)migrant as silent: “Their silence is more telling, they lack a public identity. They remain profoundly alien. Persons apart. People lacking a union obviously, people without grounds” (138). As (im)migrants subject to the waged-work realm of private capital and cultural spaces, Rodríguez underlines their lack of a “public identity” through which to defend their “rights” as workers. If they have a “public persona” at all it is as collectivized (im)migrants, displacing the possibility of individualized “rights” claims, thus highlighting the liberal justice system's vexed question of the rights of individuals versus the rights of (raced, gendered, and ethnicized) groups, as groups, a tension that is deeply implicated in the formation of the nation. As if proximity to (im)migrants bespoke a contagious disease, Rodríguez claims his “rights” as citizen-subject, reconfirming liberal ideology, and declares, “I would not shorten the distance I felt from los pobres with a few weeks of physical labor. I will not become like them. They were different from me” (135–36).

By marking the economic difference in Spanish-language terms, the (im)migrants are not just any (im)migrants but Mexican ones (or Latino ones), making as much the point that citizenship is as dependent on economic well-being as on speaking English. As a result, through the substitution of los pobres for (im)migrants, Rodríguez undermines the liberal “as if” proposition of social equality; that is, economic inequality becomes a sociopolitical one as well. By reversing the substitution of the ideological romanticization of the U.S. formation, (im)migration narrative is put on trial as it is revealed that (im)migrants are impoverished people with virtually no rights. In this scenario, los pobres as (im)migrants are constituted as the other of the bourgeois classical liberal political subject. Thus the political economy's constitution of this grouping (i.e., immigrants) is rejected for the pleasures of the hyperindividualized citizen-subject. On the one hand, it is precisely the tension between groupings (via the processes of the political economy) and individuals that historically overdetermined minoritized subjects put in evidence; on the other hand, Rodríguez's “refusal” to recognize this tension leads him to forget his (im)migrant status via the father, which, interestingly enough for us as readers, produces the unintended “irony” that undermines his claimed grounds. Moreover, the very “Complexion” that produces the relationality to the (im)migrants (discussed shortly) and undermines his separationist politics may well have the effect of turning him into an alien in Governor Pete Wilson's California. The separatist's politics are double and simultaneous (1) from (im)migrants, (2) between the private and the public, such that (im)migrants become part of the private sphere and silenced. (See note 2.)

Yet Rodríguez's marking of his difference works not only in the direction of the (im)migrant worker but also in the direction of the “authentic” (i.e., Anglo-American) nonalien, without much grasp of the production of an alie(n)ation insofar as the (im)migrant has no “grounds” for a “public persona.” The autobiographical impulse moves toward dis-alie(n)ation through the desire not to be ethnicized as “Chicano” or “Mexican American” but rather one who is an “American,” as Rodríguez claims in his essay “An American Writer.” Terms such as Mexican American often function in his work as “merely” sociological categories unrelated to the practice of aesthetic writing—which again is a hyperindividualized project in Rodríguez—and bound to compete as aesthetic object in the aesthetic sphere of debate.

Euro-American liberal “rhetoric, in its Americanizing power to interpolate selfhood along consensual lines of upward mobility, social regeneration, and affirmative self-making,” has often been the critical reading par excellence of autobiography (Wilson, 118). Given the fact that such is the salient self-identity narrative in Hunger of Memory, the work implicitly falls in line with the “Americanist discourse, which no matter how critical it gets of existing society, only is granted professional legitimacy and social currency if it can evoke an affirmative relation to ‘America’ as the process of national self-affirmation and international self-assertion” (ibid., 124). This form of critical reading becomes the corresponding partner to notions of the public and the private in liberal political discourse, which calls for the homogeneous making of the citizen-subject. Rodríguez follows the ideology of what Wilson refers to as “the master-narrative of Americanization” (ibid., 109), through the mediating categories of the public and the private, thus promoting the (hyper) individuation of liberal political philosophy, which has often found its ideal discursive genre in autobiography on the one hand, and capitalist formation on the other (Sprinker 1980).

Nevertheless, as mentioned earlier, Rodríguez is aware of his undeniable, metonymically articulated relation to the (im)migrant via racialization and language. Through this evident relation, “White America” would want him to “claim unbroken ties with [the] past” (Hunger of Memory, 5). What he would relegate to the past is constantly present in the figure of the dark-complected (im)migrant. A “clean” break with the past becomes impossible in a nation whose very formation has been constituted through racializations. Thus, he is actually trapped in-between the “past” that is not past and the “future” that is not present. Desire, which is ever the future, is “misrecognized” by Rodríguez in the salient ideology of “Americanization.” It has been the “misrecognition” of choice for many (prima facie male) (im)migrants. Rodríguez, however, does not consciously seize the historical entrapment, which is the one that often pertains to minoritized intellectuals in the United States.

Wit, with its concomitant use of inversions, irony, sarcasm, parody, and contradiction, is even more salient in Rodríguez's more recent work. Having learned the difference in socioeconomic class from the British, who until recently believed themselves a pale island, he has also learned the racist difference in Anglo-America, but he is too polite to say so. Mexico, whose “melting-pot” ideology has called for miscegenation, becomes, in his wit-producing grammar, an assimilationist country, while the United States, with its myth of assimilationism, becomes the country of criminalized miscegenation. He does not have to use an imaginary past—which in any case he cannot remember—as a shield because he carries it on his face—“Look at this Indian face!” (“An American Writer,” 10). Indeed, he is not supposed to remember, since just about the time of the Anglo-America of Manifest Destiny Mexicans began to make much of their mestizaje, or what Rodríguez calls their assimilationist policy. Thus, if the Anglo-American nation-state formation is murderously manifested, the Mexican one is forcefully miscegenated and vice versa. One can very well ask what might be Rodríguez's aim through this baroque wit, characterized in literature by complexity of form and bizarre, ingenious, and often ambiguous imagery; characterized as well by grotesqueness, extravagance, or flamboyance.

The cover of the November 1991 issue of Harper's promotes Richard Rodríguez's essay “Mexico's Children” (subsequently collected in Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father), as “The end of cultural and racial purity: Mixed Blood—a celebration of our mestizo world.” Between covers, Rodríguez proclaims: “I have come at last to Mexico, the country of my parents' birth. I do not expect to find anything that pertains to me” (51). (A Mexican national anonymous reader said he did not read much that pertained to him; in fact, the essay seemed to him a form of “Chicano” writing!) Rodríguez, however, concludes his tourism by remarking that “the Indian stands in the same relation to modernity as she [sic] did to Spain: Willing to marry, to breed, to disappear in order to ensure her inclusion in time; refusing to absent herself from the future. … I take it as an Indian achievement that I am alive, that I am Catholic, that I speak English, that I am an American” (56). Indian, Catholic, English, American are four trope-producing terms that Rodríguez employs for the concatenation of his cultural and political persona. To round out the visit to Mexico, he states: “Mexico City: Europe's lie. … Each looks like mine. … where, then, is the famous conquistador? We have eaten him … we have eaten him with our eyes. I run to the mirror to see if this is true. It is true” (56). (Rodríguez plays here with a Mexican idiom applied to those that look too directly at another: “Comérselo con los ojos.”) These observations bind two transformative effects—masculine into feminine and conquistador into Indian, respectively—turning through the consuming eyes.

In this later work, where he works tropes through the Indian face, Rodríguez contradicts an earlier position. In “Late Victorians,” for example, he had elected—“barren skeptic” that he is—to be a “reader of St. Augustine, curator of the earthly paradise, inheritor of the empty mirror.” As curator, he administers by and large a rhetorical museum, and the mirror is empty. He has chosen the role of spectator, “shift[ing] my tailbone upon the cold, hard pew” (66). This “American Writer” does not fail to remind us that he too is a professional (ironic) Aztec: “God it must be cool to be related to Aztecs” (“An American Writer,” 10). In the course of everyday transactions the body is textualized by others. He observes to his Anglo-American audience, “I am one of you” (11), as he exclaims, “Look at this Indian face!” (10). He is told by both San Francisco and Berkeley liberals, as well as his grandmother, to maintain his culture, “whatever that means” (10). Americans end up sounding like one another, he observes, and “We do not, however, easily recognize our common identity” (4). But he claims to retain “aspects of culture, the deepest faiths, and moods of my ancestors, an inheritance deeper sometimes than I dare reveal to you, formal you” (11). The theme of secretive, in this instance, privatization continues, and the clue to the put-down of his Anglo-American audience is in that “formal you.” If Americans do not differentiate linguistically between an informal “private” you and a formal “public” you, he begs the privilege to invoke the Hispanic usage, albeit embroiled in the baroque effects of colonization. He distances himself from “you” through linguistic practices that are alien to the “egalitarian” linguistic mask of Anglo-America.

Rodríguez's baroqueness is not book-learned from Indo-Hispanic America but from his orally rooted and disenfranchised father who learned the proper grammatical address, and from the British from whom he learned about manners, socioeconomic class, and the forms appropriate to it—especially those that deploy the wit/conceit of the upper classes or the aristocracy. The implication is that the colonized servants learn “conceit” from the aristocrats or upper classes and subsequently hold up a mirror, albeit rhetorical. In a sense, this accounts for Rodríguez's fondness for the pastoral, the form of impersonation “felt to imply a beautiful relation between rich and poor,” where the elite get to be shepherds for a day and conduct a “courtship between contrasted social classes” (Burke, 123). According to Burke, William Empson's Some Versions of Pastoral, which Rodríguez read, was a “response to a vogue for ‘proletarian’ literature,” and thereby “profoundly concerned with the rhetoric of courtship between contrasted social classes” (ibid.). Thus, it should be no surprise that Rodríguez would use the conceits of the form as the devices to propel his rejection of self-proclaimed Chicano “proles” on the one hand, and the “egalitarian” mask of Anglo-America on the other, through the very fulcrum of middle-class America, the “universal” class and its bourgeois liberal subject.

In many ways, Rodríguez places in question those who are fond of claiming citizenship by saying “I am an American” and think they know what they mean. To this Rodríguez replies implicitly, “so am I”—though most of his book learning has been English/British through education (recently he has added Octavio Paz and Carlos Fuentes to the list), his socio-economic and political life is (Anglo) American, and his affective life is represented through working-class Mexican Spanish (which he cannot write). If the aristocrats can play at being shepherds, Rodríguez can play at being an aristocrat. He acts the aristocrat and simultaneously courts him. But he can also play at being an American and fly east from California, “against the grain of America, into the dark” (“An American Writer,” 3). Rodríguez's rhetorical impersonations involve what Butler has called a complex “double inversion that says appearance is an illusion” (Butler, 337). In Rodríguez's vocabulary, the outside appearance is Indian/feminine but the “essence” inside the body is aristocratic/masculine. At the same time, it symbolizes the opposite: the appearance outside is aristocratic/masculine but the “essence” inside is Indian/feminine, operating via the tropes produced as a result of “eating through the eyes.” Enacted impersonations place the truth of identity in question while simultaneously producing other possibilities as in the case of “neoethnicity” gambits. For example, a book by Danny Santiago (Famous All over Town), an Anglo whose name was James, won a Casa de las Américas Prize as a Chicano book. More recently, the Cherokee tale The Education of Little Tree was discovered not to have been written by a Cherokee but by Asa (Ace) Carter, a white supremacist who wrote speeches for former Alabama governor George C. Wallace and worked for the Ku Klux Klan.

The complicity between the demand for authenticity and its subsequent commodification, and the ease with which we can pass as “authentic” by learning the “right” things, come with the territory of having “ethnicity” in the Americas today. In a sense it is an additional aspect of its production in advanced capitalist nations. Richard Rodríguez says with Trinh T. Minh-ha “Like you/not you,” the “in-between zones are the shifting grounds on which the (doubly) exiled walk” (Trinh, 70). And to mark this duplicity, Rodríguez translates the style of the drag queen through the rhetorical museum of the Indian. Much, one might say—as Derrida's Nietzsche in Spurs—translates the style of the man through the rhetorical museum of the feminine. In the Trinh T. Minh-ha citations, the exile is double because the Insider is Outsider, the Outsider is Insider, “Outside in Inside Out.” Further in the never-ending play of the rhetorical, Rodríguez reveals his “ethnicity” because he is an American, and he reveals his Americanness because he is an “ethnic.” “I suspect,” he says, “ethnicity is only a public metaphor, like sexuality or age, for a knowledge that bewilders us” (“An American Writer,” 9). But in the United States, for example, those that continue to be “ethnic” (or in Mexico, “Indians”) are those who are unable to miscegenate, that is, they could not actually pass for or impersonate an “Anglo-American.” Manifest Destiny is the move of Anglo-America against the grain: “Undercutting the Inside/Outside opposition, her intervention is necessarily that of both a deceptive insider and a deceptive outsider” (Trinh, 70). In the rhetorical museum of (wo)man, the impersonator is virtually always feminine (ibid., 74). Yet this baroque wit, which we insist on calling “postmodern,” is an inversion of the pastoral for Rodríguez, for we have the “shepherd” playing at the “aristocrat,” or, shall we say the Caliban playing at Prospero: “I have taken Caliban's advice. I have stolen their books. I will have some run of this isle” (Hunger of Memory, 3). Rodríguez's performance of raced ethnicities finds resonance in the Supreme Court's nation-defining statement in the Bakke decision, which claims that “all groups in the United States are a minority, each of which so far as ‘racial and ethnic distinctions’ go is rooted in our Nation's constitutional and demographic history” (Regents of University of California v. Bakke, 1221). According to this vision, the United States is a “nation of minorities,” each of which had to struggle “to overcome prejudices not of a monolithic majority, but of a ‘majority’ composed of various minority groups of whom it was said—perhaps unfairly in many cases—that a shared characteristic was a willingness to disadvantage other groups” (ibid.). Since the civil rights movement puts in crisis the myth of the “melting pot” of nation-making Anglo-America, ethnic raconteurs and “disadvantaging majorities” from all academic disciplines including jurisprudence are all now embroiled in “identity” formation discourses.

Is a bourgeois pastoral subject all a “true” American can have? Rodríguez's fascination with the pastoral is due to the paradigmatic and ideological function that he saw in the form. However, since the form itself is ironically mannered, he is drawn deeper into its wit, very self-conscious of the fact that not all is as is, perhaps a variation on the ser/parecer theme of the Spanish baroque itself. Tomás Rivera observed of Hunger of Memory that Rodríguez's use of the verb to be is one of locatedness, of place, rather than of predication. Rivera gets at this by nothing that in Spanish there are two verbs to signify to be, ser and estar (contrast this with ser/parecer—that is, ser pivots two contrastive verbs). Rivera theorizes that the first reflects interiority and the second exteriority, and that the core of “our” life is the family, the interiority, the intimate—completely the reverse of what Rivera assumes that Rodríguez claims. Rivera sees Rodríguez as claiming that the core of his life is the “public” one because he silences his immediate family, refusing to educate himself on Hispanic culture, his genealogical family as well. I think Rivera is preliminarily on the right track on his observations of the use of to be—as being and as situatedness. It is the play between those possibilities, including ser/parecer, that Rodríguez puts into play through his usage of tropes in the English language. However, Rivera glides too easily from individual interiority to the family to the private and presumes that they correspond in too symmetrical a fashion to ser, leaving estar to designate the “public.” No assessment has been made of Rivera's linguistic claims on Hunger of Memory; at this point this becomes an instance of the traffic between Spanish and English.

For Rodríguez the use of the Spanish language is something to savor. The contrast of Spanish and English is a contrast between gliding and stumbling, mellifluous sliding and screeching. He sentimentalizes the working-class users of Spanish (shepherds?) from the point of view of English usage (aristocrats?). Spanish, for Rodríguez, represents his parents, who betrayed him by insisting that he do as the nuns say and learn English. He does so with a vengeance (as we have come to learn) in order to hurt his parents—and, in a childish way, both to keep the intimacy of what his parents offered and to distance himself from them. Through this emotionally charged relationship, he privatizes Spanish, relegating it to the domestic sphere, and severs it (unsuccessfully) from English, which is relegated to the public sphere. His rage at the break—the discontinuity between home and school, past and present that every Spanish-speaking child experiences in the United States—is displaced toward Chicanos who demand bilingual education. Moreover, he refuses to claim, as Rivera would want him to, a heritage that is not his, playing on the finer point of possession/dispossession—the political displacement and dispossession of his father from Mexico. To claim a heritage is to use it as a shield, yet simultaneously he relegates his (im)migrant father to silence.

Insofar as judicial affirmative action narratives have hitched constitutional consistency and coherence to the privileged rights of the individual who is above “political and social judgments” pertinent to groups, Rodríguez is in complete agreement with the system. According to the Supreme Court, “Nothing in the constitution supports the notion that individuals may be asked to suffer otherwise impermissible burdens in order to enhance the societal standings of their ethnic groups” (Regents of University of California v. Bakke, 1223). It will not be suffered that the individual's worth be tarnished by “stereotypes of groups”; moreover, “innocent individuals should not be forced to bear the burdens of redressing grievances not of their making” (ibid.). The pursuit of self-possessed individuality in Richard Rodríguez takes place according to the Constitution of the United States as coded in the Fourteenth Amendment. Yet he also demonstrates, unwittingly, the limits of the refusal to play the Anglo-American ethnic game. Anglo-America's politics continue to be predicated on acquiring visibility through ethnicity, not race, a factor that makes the justices shutter as it may imply a “two-class theory.” It was the incorporation of race into the Constitution that henceforth made denial impossible, yet that is eroded through the ethnic dance. In my view, the hidden episteme in Rodríguez's pastoral is the rage at our embodied history, for while his wit may pass muster, his face does not. As a result, the face becomes a weapon along with wit. How else can he tell us that his body is as textualized as his speech? Yet he knows what he is about as he asserts, “There are those in America who would anoint me to play out for them some drama of ancestral reconciliation. … But I reject the role” (Hunger of Memory, 4). Who are the ancestors? Who are those?

Richard Rodríguez's “bad faith,” if I may use such an antiquated existential phrase, and even on occasion his egregious politics, lie in the silencing of the disenfranchised—(im)migrant labor. He does so politically by continuing to allow his bioexemplum to serve as the preferred citation of right-wing liberals. In some sense, Rodríguez demonstrates that neoconservative liberal cynicism knows no bounds, as it rhetorically feeds its own trope machine by the selective filtering of the discourses of emancipation. In Hunger of Memory, as George Yúdice has observed, “arguments against affirmative action and bilingual education, because these policies construct a certain minority identity, are a significant indictment of liberal morality (or hypocrisy to be more exact)” (Yúdice, 222). Rodríguez's unsustainable refusal of a minoritized identity blunts the edge of his anger, as he prefers to advance his “public” and “scholarship boy” persona, which has become a carbon copy of the literate dominant even as he admits that such an obedient and imitative persona voids him of critical thinking. He has discovered, however, that totalizing self-construction is elusive.

Caught within the limitations of a self-avowed spectatorship, the demands of participatory democracy, the textualization of the body, and the will to conserve some notion of the “American” way, Rodríguez has been as much silenced by some criticism as he has silenced the Mexican (im)migrant. Displacement and dislocation are at the core of the invention of the Americas. However, it is not the dispossessed (im)migrant laborer or Indian as presence but her absence from the public sphere, as citizen-subject, that continues to drive the nation-making processes. Rodríguez's major unintended question may well be, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (Spivak 1988). To which his answer is no because she lacks a public persona. Yet he would deprive her of the possibility of a public persona by insisting on an identitarian figuration of the public sphere, while simultaneously performing the tropology of differences as aesthetic project closed off from the sociopolitical sphere. Thus, in Rodríguez's writing trajectory, difference is aesthetic and private, identity is political and public and must be subordinated to prevailing hegemonic views of the public sphere. One might well say, from this point of view, that not even the Supreme Court justices agree completely!

Notes

1. It is interesting to note that Richard Rorty's Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity relegates irony to privatized aesthetic spheres, blocking off questions of its sociopolitical implications. For further comment on Rorty, see also Honi Fern Haber's Beyond Postmodern Politics: Lyotard, Rorty, Foucault. I would question, however, the feasibility of leaping to beyond. In his work Chicano Narrative: The Dialectics of Difference, Ramón Saldívar also pursues the too absolute a separation between the private and the public in Rodriguez's work and attendant problems.

2. The political twists and turns of the private and the public are being played out in California through its Proposition 187, which was passed in the 1994 elections. The Proposition would have schools report undocumented (im)migrant children to the Immigration and Naturalization Service, which goes against children's protected educational rights under the Family Educational and Privacy Act. See the San Francisco Chronicle, August 13, 1994: A1, A15.

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