[In the following essay, Schilt studies the pastoral qualities of several of the essays in Days of Obligation.]

The tender soul has fixed his love on one spot in the world; the strong man has extended his love to all places; the perfect man has extinguished his. From boyhood I have dwelt on foreign soil, and I know with what grief sometimes the mind takes leave of the narrow hearth of a peasant's hut, and I know, too, how frankly it afterwards disdains marble firesides and paneled halls.

—Hugo of St. Victor, from Didascalion¹

In the prologue to his 1982 book Hunger of Memory, Richard Rodriguez defines himself as a specifically middle-class pastoralist. As did Raymond Williams, Rodriguez suggests that the position from which one identifies with rustic life is all-important to the nature of the compensations that this complicated structure of feeling can provide:

Upper-class pastoral can admit envy for the intimate pleasures of rustic life as an arrogant way of reminding its listeners of their difference—their own public power and civic position. (“Let's be shepherds … Ah, if only we could.”) Unlike the upper class, the middle class lives in a public world, lacking great individual power and standing. Middle-class pastoral is, therefore, a more difficult hymn. There is no grand compensation to the admission of envy of the poor. The middle class rather is tempted by the pastoral impulse to deny its difference from the lower class—even to attempt cheap imitations of lower-class life. (“But I still am a shepherd!”)

(6)

Even as he outlines the middle-class pastoral, Rodriguez maintains a suspicious relation to it. The emphasis on his middle-class status is meant to deny any easy access to the intimate world of his Spanish-speaking, working-class childhood. To pretend otherwise would, he suggests, blur “the distinction so necessary to social reform” (6). Here Rodriguez is insisting, as he will throughout Hunger of Memory, on a measure of irreconcilability between the private world of the immigrant family and the public world of citizenship and education. The necessity of loss in the transition from one realm to another is key to his attempted intervention in debates over American education. Ironically, some of the most attractive (and marketable) moments in Hunger of Memory are precisely Rodriguez's depictions of the embracing, close-knit, Spanish-speaking family. Thus, as he positions himself in the opening pages of his memoir, he must be clear that his book is not “a drama of ancestral reconciliation”: “Caliban won't ferry a TV crew back to his island, there to recover his roots” (5).

In the introduction to his second book, Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father Rodriguez first appears with TV crew in tow, as the presenter for a BBC documentary on the United States and Mexico. However, Rodriguez remains the uneasy observer of his familial and cultural background. Indeed, if Hunger of Memory announces itself as a heavily qualified pastoral, Days of Obligation opens with an image that might be called “anti-pastoral”: “I am on my knees, my mouth over the mouth of the toilet, waiting to heave” (xv). Richard Rodriguez introduces his second book with the image of himself, not in the intimate folds of the Mexican American family, but in Mexico itself, vomiting like a tourist. Clearly, this is no return to Eden. His Mexican sojourn had begun, Rodriguez explains, with looking for a village he had never seen, the village of childhood imagining and parental memory. Here the vision of an authentic, communal past is recognized as a nostalgic dream, mediated by myth and memory. Rodriguez allows the reader to savor the irony implicit in the BBC's choice of himself, “a man who had spent so many years with his back turned to Mexico,” to “introduce Mexico to a European audience” (xvi). The status of Mexico as an authentic and accessible origin for Mexican Americans is in question here, as it is when Rodriguez imagines himself regurgitating “badly pronounced Spanish words” (xv). Throughout Days of Obligation Rodriguez devotes himself to correcting pastoral visions of Mexico as the natural and provincial past. However, in spite of his attempts to provide a more sophisticated picture of Mexico's position in a cosmopolitan, international future, Rodriguez's narrative remains within what is essentially a pastoral structure, separated from any meaningful engagement with the complex individuals and situations he observes.

In The Country and the City Raymond Williams construes pastoral broadly as a “structure of feeling” organized around “the contrast of the country with the city and the court: here nature, there worldliness” (46). Significantly, the idealized life of the country is most often located in the past. In its most general form, pastoral is “a conventionalized pattern of retrospection that laments the loss of a ‘good’ country, a place where authentic social and natural contacts were once possible” (Clifford, 113). Williams is concerned with the pastoral both as an imaginative response to change and fragmentation, and, simultaneously, as an ideology of expanding capitalism, in which the structure of contrast and retrospection works to obscure specific historical relations between the wealth of the city and modes of ownership and production in the country. The historical disconnection between the commercial, ambitious, changing city and the vanishing virtues of an older way of life constructs a distinct position of observation: when community and authenticity are located definitively in the past, the pastoral observer can only intervene by conjuring these values in an idealized landscape of memory: “Thus a humane instinct was separated from society; it became a sympathy and a pity after the decisive social events” (83).

Critics of historiography and ethnography, interrogating, in Hayden White's phrase, “the content of the form,” have found pastoral a problematic trope for historical and cross-cultural representation precisely because of its dissociating and dehistoricizing tendencies. Most relevantly, in an article on Chicano autobiography, Ramón Saldívar comments that “in relying upon the pastoral form,” Hunger of Memory constructs a homogenous vision of public, rhetorical life, while “the purely private side of the individual is huge, abstract, schematized, and tends to produce archetypal images” (28). Saldívar suggests that the pastoral constructs an exclusive relationship between private (intimate, authentic) and public (mediated) selves, one which forecloses an understanding that “the ‘private’ is always already a familial institution and a linguistic network that form a person” (29). Because specifically Mexican and Mexican American experiences are located within the private, Rodriguez cannot engage with them as “existing social practice, the life of the collective folk (of la raza),” for alternative versions of the self in society (33). There is no sense that histories and identities can be interrogated and reformulated. Thus, Rodriguez cannot conceive of his entry into the English-speaking public world as anything other than a stark break, a loss of the nurturing, communal family world. Saldívar interrogates the pastoral as a means of putting the ideological content of narrative strategies on the table, then moves on to ask what other modes of figuration could allow for the sociohistorical complexity of personal experience, and hence conceptualize enculturation as an ongoing process in which “the possibilities for identity are complexly dispersed” (32)

The limitations of pastoral as a trope for representing the cultural encounter of migration and acculturation, its inability to do justice to the complexity and historicity of private or folk experience, are also at issue in another literature of cultural encounter: ethnography. In “On Ethnographic Allegory,” James Clifford suggests that pastoral tropes have historically informed cross-cultural representation. Clifford notes a persistent tendency to construct encounters with cultural otherness as a search for lost human origins or “uncorrupted” human nature. Insofar as this “conventionalized pattern of retrospection” laments the loss of authentic community and union with nature, it presents multiple problems for cross-cultural representation. Pastoral ignores the extent to which “primitive” or “pre-literate” communities are already mediated by language, narratives, and rituals (117). Moreover, because ethnographic pastorals situate cultural otherness as prior to the time of Western history, they deny the history and resiliency of unfamiliar cultures. Without a recognition of their past, unfamiliar societies are reified, frozen just as they are at the moment of “discovery,” and the entrance into Western history and Western-style progress is conceived as disintegration (112). Thus, Clifford notes, pastoral narratives locate the ethnographic observer beyond the demands of a response to a viable society (114). Like Saldívar, Clifford suggests that a heightened awareness of the narratives “implicitly or explicitly at work” in ethnography will open up a self-conscious space to develop new tropes of cross-cultural representation. Among others, Clifford suggests “syncretism” as a structure that might allow ethnographers to conceive of cultures as changing without losing their traditions.

The transition from Hunger of Memory to Days of Obligation echoes the different generic concerns of Saldívar and Clifford. Although it is still structured around autobiographical insights, in Days of Obligation Rodriguez offers himself as an observer of the cultures of California and Mexico. Three of the essays in that volume, “India,” “Mexico's Children,” and “In Athens Once,” deal at length with visits to Mexico. Throughout these essays Rodriguez depicts himself as a tourist, a stranger who, like the gringos, dares not drink the water. In all three, he warps and redeploys the trope of pastoral in order to call into question some of the same ideas that Saldívar and Clifford find problematic: human origins, authenticity, cultural purity, the primitive, and native passivity. Yet although he flirts with notions of mestizaje, syncretism does not replace pastoral as Rodriguez's narrative for conceiving of either cultural circulation between the Europe and indigenous Mexico or the acculturation of Mexican immigrants in the United States. Rodriguez dismantles the pastoral vision of Mexico as rural, indigenous, provincial, and static because he feels it is inadequate to represent the complexities of Mexican history and modern-day Mexican life. He is particularly critical of Mexican and Chicano nationalist attempts to construct Mexican and Mexican American identities out of a reified, simplistic version of Mexico's past that denies the influence of Catholicism and colonialism. But in the place of a nostalgic, pastoral identity, he offers not a vision of specific and creative cultural mixture, but an understanding of certain cherished Mexican values as universal. The Mexican (and Mexican American) subject is worldly, receptive, mobile—not limited by ties to blood, land, or specific histories.

By constructing himself as just such a dislocated, cosmopolitan subject, Rodriguez is able to move fluidly between subject positions, to represent the U.S. and Mexico from a number of contradictory points of view. However, severed from conventional filiations, this observer does little more than hold these contradictory realities up to one another; his vantage point is detached, ironic. In positioning himself beyond specific cultural and historical connections, he attempts to transcend the ethical relationships implicit in seeing and seeing through others. Thus, while his anti-pastoral engages and complicates simplistic versions of Mexican and Mexican American experience, it remains within the pastoral structure of the observer positioned beyond any significant response to the scene he observes. And yet Rodriguez's text maintains an uncomfortable sense that vision is both implicated (in power relationships) and implicating (in relationships between seer and seen). His attempts at transcendent, mobile vision are haunted by the relationships he refuses and a desire for connection made to seem impossible by his totalizing vantage point.

The first essay in Days of Obligation, “India,” begins with a quotation from the Spanish traveler Cabeza de Vaca about an encounter with a group of Indians who “sent their women and children to look at us” (1). This reference to the Indian gaze announces the beginning of an attempt to reverse the conventional-looking relations embedded in European travel literature, which naturalized European projects of dominance and appropriation by emptying the imperial landscape of any returning gaze, any sign of resistance (Pratt, 52). Rodriguez is critical of Mexican discourses on “Indian passivity” and American textbooks that consign Indians to extinction. In an encounter with an Indian beggar outside Mexico's magnificent Museo Nacional de Antropologia, he notes the paradox of a society that marginalizes Indian people and yet constructs its self-image out of the glory of its Indian heritage. The function of this indigenous heritage as a kind of anticolonial pastoral is made explicit:

The rhetoric of [the tour guide], like the murals of Diego Rivera, resorts often to the dream of India—to Tenochtitlan, the capital of the world before conquest. “Preconquest” in the Mexican political lexicon is tantamount to “prelapsarian” in the Judeo-Christian scheme, and hearkens to a time when Mexico feels herself to have been whole, a time before the Indian was separated from India by the serpent Spain.

(13–14)

It is not just official Mexico, however, that attempts to construct an identity through a romanticized Indian past. Rodriguez tells the story of his friend who searches for signs of Indianness in his mother's propensity for gardening:

Because the Indian has no history—that is, because history books are the province of descendants of Europeans—the Indian seems only to belong to the party of the first part, the first chapter. So that is where the son expects to find his mother, daughter of the moon.

(10)

Rodriguez's answer to the “daughter of the moon” is the “living Indian,” who can be found on the streets of Mexico City or London. Working-class Mexican men like Andrés, the driver for Rodriguez's Mexico City hotel, are “eager for the world,” Rodriguez notes. “He speaks two languages. He knows several cities. He has been to the United States” (22). Rodriguez compares such men to Indian guides and translators in European annals who facilitate and “preserve Europe's stride.” He continues, “These seem to have become fluent in pallor before Europe learned anything of them” (22). Here Rodriguez disrupts the conventional portrayal of the Indian as the passive victim of colonization and replaces it with the image of the attentive observer, eager for cosmopolitan knowledge. In another such twist on the translator figure, Rodriguez portrays the infamous La Malinche as “the seducer of Spain,” who draws near out of active curiosity (22). Later, Rodriguez represents himself as the active, curious, “living Indian.” On the way to a performance at the Queen's Theatre in London, he catches a glimpse of a culturally revealing conjunction:

The last time I was in London, I was walking toward an early evening at the Queen's Theatre when I passed that Christopher Wren church near Fortnum & Mason. The church was lit; I decided to stop, to savor the spectacle of what I expected would be a few Pymish men and women rolled into balls of fur at evensong. Imagine my surprise that the congregation was young—dressed in army fatigues and Laura Ashley. Within the chancel, cross-legged on a dais, was a South American Shaman. Now, who is the truer Indian in this picture? Me … me on my way to the Queen's Theatre? or that guy on the altar with a Ph.D. in death?

(10)

Again, the logic of “India” inverts the traditional significations of Indianness, reversing the tendency to equate Indianness with fixity or passivity.

In place of the nostalgic, preconquest Indian mother as a symbol of Mexican national identity, Rodriguez offers the Virgin of Guadalupe as a figure who “symbolizes the entire coherence of Mexico, body and soul” (16). But the Virgin is not offered as an image of the syncretic and resistant blending of Indian and Christian religion. Rodriguez directly addresses and dismisses this familiar explanation for the success of Christianity in Mexico:

The superstition persists in European travel literature that Indian Christianity is the thinnest veneer covering an ulterior altar. But there is a possibility still more frightening to the European imagination, so frightening that in five hundred years such a possibility has scarcely found utterance.

What if the Indians were converted?

(23)

If the Indians were converted, as Rodriguez clearly believes, then the unspeakable truth is that the legacy of Christianity and European culture is being played out in Mexico. Catholicism is not a mask for Indian religion, “Catholicism has become an Indian religion” (20). Moreover, the Western tradition has become an Indian tradition: “The Indian eye becomes a portal through which the entire pageant of European civilization has passed. … The baroque is an Indian conceit. The colonial arcade is an Indian detail” (23). Rather than equating Mexico with folk art or the primitive, Rodriguez constructs the Indian as the heir and rejuvenator of an elite Western civilization, thereby contesting representations of Mexico as a place of stasis, death, and decay.

Rodriguez develops his critique of the desire to cherish and maintain a specific cultural past understood as Indian and rural in the essay “Mexico's Children.” The essay begins with typical pastoral imagery. In his childhood, Rodriguez notes, Mexican farmworkers commuted between past and present. But he immediately undercuts this image of disjuncture, arguing that the geography of the American Southwest so resembled Mexico that it mitigated “the sense of dislocation otherwise familiar to immigrant experience” (49). On one page Rodriguez calls Mexico a country “where things are not necessarily different from when your father was your age,” but on the next he imagines Mexican teenagers watching Dallas on TV, being filled with American ambition (51–52). The construction of Mexico as the uncorrupted, traditional antithesis of the commodity-ridden, amnesiac, modern United States is continually invoked only to be undermined. Similarly, Rodriguez lyrically constructs the Mexican family as the realm of intimacy, the realm of tú:

At the heart there is tú—the intimate voice—the familiar room in a world of rooms. Tú is the condition, not so much of knowing, as of being known; of being recognized. Tú belongs within the family. … Usted, the formal, the bloodless, the ornamental you, is spoken to the eyes of strangers. … Usted is open to interpretation; therefore it is subject to corruption, a province of politicians. Usted is the language outside Eden.

(54)²

The “Eden” of the Mexican family is contrasted to the slipperiness and inauthenticity of both usted and the American pan-usted, “you.” However, Rodriguez juxtaposes his idealized portrait of the Mexican family with an image of how the Mexican government manipulates this very conception of familial Mexico in order to legitimate its own power: “REMEMBER. THE STRENGTH OF MEXICO IS THE FAMILY. (A government billboard)” (62). The paradise of the Mexican family is revealed as already invaded, corrupted by the public sphere. The family life Mexicans cherish is in fact a construct mediated by advertising, politics, the media. There is no authentic relationship to this “private” realm.

Throughout “Mexico's Children,” Rodriguez is concerned with what might be labeled performances of Mexicanness or Mexican heritage like the PRI's performance of Mexican family unity. In the United States context he examines how the Chicano movement appropriated images of Mexican rural life: “We are people of the land, we told ourselves. Middle-class college students took to wearing farmer-in-the-dell overalls” (65). Rodriguez suggests that there is something inauthentic in this attempt to claim a rural, indigenous past. Like the Mexican national enshrinement of the indigenous, this constructed Chicano identity does not face up to the complexities of Mexican American identity. That Rodriguez sees the reified symbols of the Chicano movement as inadequate to the modern, cosmopolitan reality of Mexican American life is evident in his treatment of Cesar Chavez. Rodriguez describes the United Farm Workers' 1966 “Lenten Pilgrimage” through California's Central Valley:

Lines of men, women, and children passed beneath the low, rolling clouds, beneath the red and black union flags and the flapping silk banners of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Their destination was the state capital, Sacramento, the city, Easter. They were private people praying in public. Here were the most compelling symbols of the pastoral past: life on the land (the farmworker); the flag, the procession in song (a people united, the village); the Virgin Mary (her consolation in sorrow).

(68)

Rodriguez subtly questions the authenticity of the pastoral display by showing how this private, religious, rural realm is being mobilized for public, secular, metropolitan ends. Perhaps even more important, however, is the claim that this reified heritage is irrelevant to the lives of Mexican Americans, who live largely in cities and who have achieved a measure of American success. Rodriguez calls Chavez “Gandhi without an India,” a leader without a constituency (68). In the midst of the modern complexity of Mexican American life, Chavez's continual invocation of the past can only remind Mexican Americans of “who our grandparents used to be” (70). In contrast, “[Henry] Cisneros reflected our real lives in the America of usted” (68). Cisneros's image may be just as constructed, just as inauthentic, but its contradictions correspond to the contradictions of Mexican American reality.

The explosion of the Mexican pastoral is carried to its extreme in Rodriguez's portrayal of his trip to a Mexico City nightclub. Over dinner one night, a group of Mexicans (headed, ironically, by the curator of the National Anthropology Museum) chide him for his old-fashioned, Catholic, reactionary vision of Mexico. As the antidote to his obsession with “memory and faith,” they take him to see a stage show, complete with canned music, dry ice, and a blonde singer. Rodriguez emphasizes the technological, artificial, and performative aspects of this version of modern Mexico: “The goddess's microphone is so revved up, her voice rides over our skulls like a metal lathe. Mid-routine, the goddess hesitates, evidently overcome with nostalgie de la boue” (76). Ironically, this technologically enhanced goddess sings a song about memory: “Vete pero no me olvides.” This repulsive being makes her way over to Rodriguez, and he is forced to participate in her performance of memory:

I sing to her of my undying love and of rural pleasures. Tú. Tú. The ruby pendant. Tú. The lemon tree. The song of the dove. Breathed through the nose. Perched on the lips.

Anything to make her go away.

(77)

This is perhaps the most self-reflexive moment in the entire essay; Rodriguez is forced to parody his own nostalgic construction of Mexican intimacy. But Rodriguez is not willing to embrace this performance as a symbol of the mixture of past and present, rural pleasures and technology. Like the UFW pilgrimage, it is at once inauthentic (the “goddess” is bored as she sings) and not broad enough (the Mexicans who bring him here revile the Catholic and colonial history of Mexico).

The alternative to this sordid image of degraded Mexicanness is Rodriguez's Mexican American nephew. Rodriguez stands in his sister's backyard and surveys “all his compliant toys fallen where he threw them off after his gigantic love-making. Winnie-the-Pooh. The waist-coated frog. Refugees of some long English childhood” (71). Unlike Rodriguez, who learned Mexican nursery rhymes, this nephew will sing about “Banbury Cross.” The child has light hair but dark eyes in which Rodriguez believes he can discern a trace of Mexico, “the unfathomable regard of the past,” as well as the vistas of Sesame Street. Although it too contains elements of pastoral (the English country garden), this image of cultural mixture is valued differently than the “corrupted” Mexican pastoral. Rodriguez positions his nephew as the inheritor of multiple cultural traditions: “What will he know of his past except that he has several? What will he know of Mexico, except that his ancestors lived on land that he will never inherit?” (71). Rodriguez treasures this worldly child, alienated from any particular territory, yet able to claim the cultures of the world as his birthright.

In his celebration of a worldly, dislocated heritage, Rodriguez perhaps resembles the early-twentieth-century writers who inaugurated modern conceptions of the humanistic scholar. Edward Said suggests that figures like T. S. Eliot, frustrated or disillusioned with familial and national ties, what Said calls filial relationships, turned to “institutions, associations, and communities whose social existence was not in fact guaranteed by biology, but by affiliation” (614). The move from filiation to affiliation was conceived as a move from nature to culture, from the parochial to the transcendent. In the humanities, under the influence of Eliot, affiliation has taken the form of initiation into the company of scholars through knowledge of a literary tradition defined, explicitly or implicitly, as European (Said, 616). Similarly, Rodriguez, dissatisfied with a parochial construction of Mexicanness and finding the relationship between Mexico and “Mexico's children” in the U.S. problematic, positions his nephew as a member of an affiliational community that he belongs to not by virtue of blood, but by virtue of upbringing. Significantly, this affiliational community, which supposedly transcends any particular territorial ties, is signified by the symbols of a specifically European tradition. For Rodriguez the imaginative appeal of certain images, certain texts, transcends national boundaries in such a way that, although they may originate in England, they can delight a Mexican American child in California. They may even contribute to his personal history and his sense of himself.

Rodriguez is able to champion both a universal cultural tradition and a specifically Mexican sense of history because the values that he associates with Mexico actually transcend national boundaries. The Mexican sense of history that Rodriguez invokes is not the reverence for a rural past that he deplores in the Chicano movement and parodies in the nightclub scene. Nor does it consist in claims to a particular piece of land: Rodriguez makes light of Mexican Americans' claims to “the mythic northern kingdom of Atzlan” and celebrates his own nephew's lack of a land-based tie to Mexico (66, 71). Rather, “the knowledge Mexico bequeaths” to the child is the same knowledge that has stayed with Rodriguez's father in his life in the United States (71). This knowledge, as it is revealed throughout Days of Obligation, involves memory, but not necessarily the memory of a specific history. In the last essay in the book, “Nothing Lasts a Hundred Years,” Rodriguez describes this knowledge: “My father knew what most of the world knows by now—that tragedy wins; that talent is mockery. … My father remains Mexican in California. My father lives under the doctrine, under the very tree of Original Sin” (219). This knowledge “that most of the world knows by now” might be better described as Catholic or “Old World” rather than specifically Mexican. To make this point, Rodriguez ascribes the same kind of knowledge to the Irish nuns who taught him that “The story of man was the story of sin, which could not be overcome with any such thing as a Declaration of Independence. … We all must die” (221). Thus, to maintain a Mexican sense of history is not to maintain a parochial and separate cultural identity but to partake of a sensibility that stretches across historical time periods and territorial boundaries.

This particular understanding of a Mexican knowledge is present also in Rodriguez's exploration of the city of Tijuana in the essay “In Athens Once.” Here Rodriguez continues to deconstruct familiar representations of Mexico. If Americans fear Mexico as a source of contamination, chaos, and death, “Mexico has a more graceful sense of universal corruption,” bequeathed by Spanish Catholicism (88, 90). This sense has been both Mexico's weakness, in terms of tolerance for political graft, and the strength of a city like Tijuana, which does not respect rigid boundaries or restricting notions of Mexican identity. Tijuana is open to change. People move back and forth in Tijuana, but what is perceived in Mexico City as a dangerous dilution or corruption of Mexicanness (“Mexico City worries about a cultural spill from the United States”) is actually a productive encounter, creating the possibility of innovation (83). In contrast, San Diego attempts to maintain a rigid sense of boundaries, guarding itself from corruption: “On the American side are petitions to declare English the official language of the United States; the Ku Klux Klan; nativists posing as environmentalists, blaming illegal immigration for freeway congestion” (84). Rodriguez reverses the conventional temporal configuration of Mexico and the United States: San Diego, desperate to enshrine its quality of life, is the past, while Tijuana, open to change and productive contamination, is the future (84). With its burgeoning assembly plants Tijuana may not look like “traditional” Mexico, but Tijuana is the worldly, international citizen that Rodriguez's nephew may someday be:

Tijuana is an industrial park on the outskirts of Minneapolis. Tijuana is a colony of Tokyo. Tijuana is a Taiwanese sweatshop. Tijuana is a smudge beyond the Linden trees of Hamburg. There is a complicity between businessmen—hands across the border—and shared optimism.

(94)

Tijuana is a place where Old World cynicism and American optimism meet to make progress and profits, but still do not completely reconcile. In Tijuana, Rodriguez has a sense of the endurance of poverty (the poverty that is the condition of economic growth), while San Diego seems an oblivious “Twelfth Night” of spandex and Frisbees (95).

The hint of the ethical dilemmas of Tijuana's maquiladoras can serve to introduce an important question: how is Richard Rodriguez, traveler, positioned in relation to the things he observes in Tijuana and in Mexico at large? I have already pointed out how Rodriguez parodies and undercuts his own sentimental construction of Mexico in the nightclub scene, but I would like to examine the ways in which Rodriguez constructs his own observing subjectivity in Mexico through play with the “looking conventions” of European travel literature, a genre which has historically been implicated in the appropriation and exploitation of Third World resources. In Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, Mary Louise Pratt describes how both eighteenth-century natural history writing and nineteenth-century sentimental travel writing about Africa and Latin America attempted to construct observation as an essentially passive and innocent activity, unrelated to “conquest, conversion, territorial appropriation, and enslavement” (39). In natural history writing about non-European lands, human presences are minimized, creating the impression that “European authority and legitimacy are uncontested” (52). Moreover, the travelers themselves are “chiefly present as a kind of collective moving eye on which the sights/sites register; as agents their presence is very reduced” (59). This posture of passivity works to deny the imperial power relations which both authorize and are authorized by the traveler's explorations. Still, the European desire for appropriation and domination is apparent in sweeping descriptions from promontory heights that imply a mastery of the landscape and in language which portrays the alien landscape offering itself up to the knowledge of the traveler: “The eye ‘commands’ what falls within its gaze; mountains and valleys ‘show themselves,’ ‘present a picture’; the country ‘opens up’ before the visitors” (60).

In contrast to the passive gaze of the natural scientist, Rodriguez's presence in Mexico is not innocent or uncontested. In the preface he depicts his BBC film crew as thoughtlessly disrupting a rural Mexican funeral with its blaring, inappropriate music. These not-so-intrepid explorers are silenced and chased away by the “village idiot” (xviii). In “India,” Rodriguez thematizes the active indigenous gaze and explores how the construction of indigenous people as passive legitimized European projects of “discovery”:

In European museums, [the Indian] is idle, recumbent at the base of a silver pineapple tree or the pedestal of the Dresden urn or the Sevres tureen—the muse of European adventure, at once wanderlust and bounty. … Filled with the arrogance of discovery, the Europeans were not predisposed to imagine that they were being watched, awaited.

(9)

Justifying their own endeavors through the perceived passivity of the Indians, the European explorers could not conceive of indigenous people as interested observers able to “consume” European culture and to create the sophisticated Mexican culture that Rodriguez celebrates in Days of Obligation.

In the midst of this critique of imperial looking relations, Rodriguez abruptly positions himself in the role of explorer:

I had a dream about Mexico City, a conquistador's dream. I was lost and late and twisted in my sheet. I dreamed streets narrower than they actually are—narrow as old Jerusalem. I dreamed sheets, entanglements, bunting, hanging larvaelike from open windows, distended from balconies and from lines thrown over the streets. These streets were not empty streets. I was among a crowd. The crowd was not a carnival crowd. This crowd was purposeful and ordinary, welling up from subways, ascending from stairwells. And then the dream followed the course of all my dreams. I must find the airport—the American solution—I must somehow escape, fly over.

(21)

This vision might be more accurately labeled a conquistador's “nightmare.” In the place of limitless vistas there are narrow streets, filled with signs of incipient life (larvae). Moreover, this landscape is already heavily peopled. In the face of such a challenge to his presence, the conquistador dreams of the air, of distance and mastery. The joke of the dream is, of course, that the scene is not inherently threatening: this is not the chaos of carnival, these are working people going about their business. And if the conquistador's desire for the air is a desire for separateness and discrete identity, Rodriguez's next words deny the possibility of separation: “Each face looked like mine. But no one looked at me” (21). This American conquistador cannot fully separate himself from the crowd, his presence is not remarkable. Still, Rodriguez wishes for mastery, “As the plane descends into the basin of Mexico City, I brace myself for some confrontation with death, with India, with confusion of purpose that I do not know how to master” (21). But what he finds in Mexico City is not death but “living Indians,” not confusion but the cultural complexity of the latest stage in the Western tradition. The quest for separateness and mastery is ultimately discarded for the comfort of recognition, familiarity. The conquistador has been absorbed, consumed by the “Indians” of Mexico City.

Initially, Rodriguez's foray to Tijuana seems to be constructed around a similar dynamic of the gaze. Upon entering Tijuana, Rodriguez tells us, offers of Chiclets and taxis “teach the visitor the custody of his eyes,” lest he be implicated in an economic exchange (81). It would seem that the gaze is not innocent. Looking has the power to create relationships, responsibilities. But at the same time that Rodriguez presumably fends off gum merchants, he notices a Mexican boy up on a ledge, observing the crowd: “He is surveying; his eyes are slits, appraising, rejecting; his eyes slide like searchlights, but do not rest on me” (81). This gaze from up above is apparently impersonal; Rodriguez cautions himself not to imagine that he has been singled out. This tension between the responsibility-provoking, implicated gaze and the distanced, impersonal gaze is played out in two parallel vignettes from “In Athens Once.”

In the first vignette, Rodriguez accompanies a Jesuit priest to a poor section of Tijuana for a special mass on Holy Thursday. As he approaches the place where he will meet Father Lucas, Rodriguez notes, “Because Mexico is brown and I am brown, I fear being lost in Mexico” (96). This fear of being lost intensifies when, after the mass, Rodriguez is supposed to hand out day-old pastries to the children. The giveaway goes awry, and he is swarmed by a “zombielike” crowd of Mexicans (98). Rodriguez avoids contact with the mob by throwing the packages of pastry to the “edge of the crowd,” away from himself. Later, when some teenagers attempt to get his attention, he looks the other way. But in spite of these attempts to remain separate and unconnected, his fears of being lost in Mexico are seemingly realized when he and Father Lucas become literally lost on the way back from the mass. As they finally emerge from a baffling hive of unlit dirt roads, Rodriguez is rewarded with a vision of the lights of San Diego. “It was a sight I never expected to see with Mexican eyes,” he says, implying that his refusal to make eye contact (and thus make relationships) has finally ceded to identification with a Mexican point of view (99). However, in the vignette that follows the Holy Thursday mass, it becomes clear that the nature of this identification is transitory and nonbinding. Rodriguez has not entered into any responsibilities by virtue of this Mexican vision.

The parallel to Holy Thursday is a vignette about Good Friday, which Rodriguez spends on the U.S. side, at a border patrol station. As a journalist he is assigned to a patrolman. Like Rodriguez, the patrolman is also Mexican American, a fact which marks Rodriguez's commitment to portraying the complexity of Mexican American life, his refusal to portray Mexican Americans as innocent victims of Euro-American oppression. In the course of the night, Rodriguez is offered binoculars and a night vision telescope with which to survey the border. Rodriguez represents these offers as a seduction: “It is as though I am being romanced at a cowboy cotillion” (101). This is the seduction of omniscient vision, of knowledge and mastery. At times, Rodriguez himself begins to sound like one of Pratt's European travel writers, downplaying his own agency in this surveillance operation, making it seem as if he is merely being swept along: “In the dark, I do not separate myself from the patrolman's intention” (102). And yet, however comforting the notion of passivity might be, Rodriguez does acknowledge his participation in the relations of power embedded in border surveillance. When the patrolman arrests a group of Mexicans, he offers Rodriguez a chance to take pictures: “I stare at the faces. They stare at mine. To them I am not bearing witness; I am part of the process of being arrested. I hold up my camera; their eyes swallow the flash—a long tunnel, leading back” (103). This is not an unpopulated scene that passively offers itself up to be seen. The faces stare back. What is more, it is an exercise of power, the arrest, which makes Rodriguez's look possible.

It is in the difference between “bearing witness” and “observing” that the essay's construction of Rodriguez's subjectivity can best be understood. As the passage above suggests, the author rejects the notion of a look that does not implicate the seer in relationships. At the same time, however, the passage suggests that Rodriguez refuses any responsibilities incumbent in those relationships. His refusal to bear witness, to take responsibility for what he sees, is elaborated in the final pages of “In Athens Once.” These pages include yet another promontory vision, this time from the fashionable Tijuana neighborhood of Chapultepec. Rodriguez notes that the architecture here is not Spanish-Colonial, but rather a kind of “international eclecticism” (104). The picture windows of these houses face the United States, and Rodriguez names this view “the modern vision of California” (104). “International eclecticism” might also serve as a label for Rodriguez's fluid, cosmopolitan spectator position. His parable about Athens epitomizes this position:

In Athens once, I remember sitting in an outdoor café, amid sun and cheese and flies, when a hearse with a picture window slid by, separated from its recognizing mourners by rush-hour traffic—an intersecting narrative line—which, nevertheless, did not make mourners of us, of the café.

(106)

This image of the spectator who sees and yet remains separate, unimplicated, is offered as a symbol of city life. Insofar as Rodriguez's visit to Tijuana has been a tour of radically different points of view, this story works to link Tijuana to the other “great cities of the world,” where people live “separately, simultaneously” (105).

And yet, this position of separateness is haunted by what it disavows. On the last day of his visit, Easter Sunday, Rodriguez refuses an invitation from Father Lucas to return to the impoverished colonia of Flores Magon. He maintains his fluid positioning, moving from his hotel in San Diego to mass in Tijuana and then to brunch in La Jolla in a couple of hours. At brunch, however, the priest's tale of searching the previous day for a coffin in which to bury an infant returns to him. “In Athens Once” is both a tale of movement and a tale of interrelatedness, a story about the impossibility of forgetting Tijuana in San Diego. This is not, however, a story of mutual responsibility or connectedness. Taken together, the two cities form one city, but it is a “city of world-class irony” (106). Incongruity is the foundation of irony, and the perspective necessary to recognize incongruities and to hold them in suspension is distance, restraint. Rodriguez realizes that innocent vision is a myth, that he is transformed and implicated by the things he sees, but he struggles to remain the cosmopolitan café sitter, savoring contradictions between the U.S. and Mexico without attempting to reconcile them, maintaining “custody of his eyes” in order to refuse inconvenient relationships. The essay ends with a view of hang gliders drifting over the sea like “angels,” an image of the transcendence that the mobile, but earth-bound, Rodriguez is not able to attain.

During his visit to the fashionable Chapultepec district, Rodriguez finds an American-style shopping mall, a symbol of modern day Tijuana. His only purchases are five bottles of Liquid Paper correction fluid, which we might read as the tools with which he will correct previous, disingenuous, pastoral visions of Mexico. Throughout the travel essays Rodriguez explodes conventional depictions of Mexico as rural, isolated, authentic, and static. In “Mexico's Children,” he critiques the Chicano movement for constructing a confining ethnic identity out of romanticized memories of a rural, Indian past. Rather than basing identity on the claims of land or blood, Rodriguez imagines an identity sundered from specific territories or local histories. In this model, the subject can transcend the specificity of birth to lay claim to the history and traditions of the world. Rodriguez reconceptualizes Mexican identity as a universal, ironic, Catholic knowledge of futility, a persistent sense of Ubi Sunt. Armed with this worldly identity, he constructs a narrator who can move between the living Indian and the conquistador, from the poorest section of Tijuana to a U.S. border patrol station. But the price of a belief in the fleetingness of earthly life is detachment, and the price of this subjective mobility is sympathy, connection: if Rodriguez becomes too involved with the poor of Tijuana, he cannot make brunch in La Jolla. He is allowed to travel with the border patrol as an “objective” journalist; he cannot become an advocate for the people he photographs. Sophisticated enough to realize that seeing is situated both in space and in relations of power, Rodriguez's tour of Mexico is haunted by the relationships he disavows in order to maintain his fluid, ironic spectatorship.

To critique Rodriguez's construction of a universal, mobile identity is not to fall into the limitations of essentialist identities based on blood or culture. Similarly, to critique Rodriguez's version of multiperspectival spectatorship is not to deny the possibility of multiple perspectives and identifications. In thinking about vision and epistemology, Donna Haraway suggests “embodied vision” and “situated knowledges” as alternatives to objectivity conceived as “transcendence of all limits and responsibility” (190). Embodied vision does not lead to solipsistic knowledge based on one-dimensional narratives of identity. The notion of situated knowledge recognizes the specific and multifaceted nature of individual identities, and thus opens up the possibility of identification:

The topography of subjectivity is multi-dimensional; so, therefore, is vision. The knowing self is partial in all its guises, never finished, whole, simply there and original; it is always constructed and stitched together imperfectly, and therefore able to join with another, to see without claiming to be another.

(193)

If we can imagine a traveling subject who sees, not from a guilt-ridden promontory height, but from a partial, specific, and embodied locale, we can imagine the possibility of provisional, critical understanding. We can imagine narratives that bridge, without flattening, difference.

Notes

1. Quoted in Edward Said, “Secular Criticism.”

2. As José Limón has pointed out to me, Rodriguez's sentimental construction of family language here omits the use of “usted” within the family as a marker of age and status.

Works Cited

Clifford, James. “On Ethnographic Allegory.” In Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Edited by James Clifford and George E. Marcus, 98–100. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.

Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991.

Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge, 1992.

Rodriguez, Richard. Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father. New York: Viking Penguin, 1992.

Said, Edward. “Secular Criticism.” In Critical Theory since 1965. Edited by Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle, 605–24. Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1986.

Saldívar, Ramón. “Ideologies of the Self: Chicano Autobiography.” Diacritics 15:3 (1985): 25–34.

Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973.