London: Do you consider yourself more Mexican, or more American?

Rodriguez: In some ways I consider myself more Chinese, because I live in San Francisco, which is becoming a predominantly Asian city. I avoid falling into the black-and-white dialectic in which most of America still seems trapped. I have always recognized that, as an American, I am in relationship with other parts of the world; that I have to measure myself against the Pacific, against Asia. Having to think of myself in relationship to that horizon has liberated me from the black-and-white checkerboard.

London: Do you think of yourself as an Indian?

Rodriguez: Yes, although it was something I did not know about as a child. I had an Indian face, but I never saw it as Indian, in part because in America the Indian was dead. The Indian had been killed in cowboy movies, or was playing bingo in Oklahoma. Also, in my middle-class Mexican family indio was a bad word, one my parents shy away from to this day. That’s one of the reasons, of course, why I always insist, in my bratty way, on saying, “Soy indio!” — “I am an Indian!” I think it’s an important thing for a Mexican to say, especially now with the rebellion in Chiapas. Mexico has to confront her Indian face, and yet she refuses to do so. When you turn on Mexican television, it’s like watching Swedish TV: everyone is blond.

London: That’s true in the U.S. as well. What you see on television is a very distorted picture of American life.

Rodriguez: That’s right. I don’t deny people their fantasy life, but I do think that we desperately need to start realizing just how complicated our reality is in America. Sitcoms just don’t show us that. I keep trying to tell people that Los Angeles is already the largest Indian city in the U.S., that there are Toltecs playing Little League baseball in Pasadena, Mayas making beds at the Marriott in Westwood, and Chichimecs driving buses in LA. Los Angeles is a majority-Indian city. Of course, since we don’t see the Indian as a living figure — having turned the Indian into a kind of mascot for the ecology movement, a symbol of prehistory — we can’t see the Indian among us. But what really terrifies Americans right now is the prospect that the Indian is very much alive, that the Indian is having nine babies in Guatemala, and that those nine babies are headed this way. This is one reason why Americans hold on so dearly to the myth of the dead Indian.

London: At the same time, we turn our backs on real Indians.

Rodriguez: Yes. The myth of the dead Indian goes back to the Protestant settlement of the U.S. The Pilgrims wanted to start a new life in America. They wanted to believe that in some sense they had come to a new Eden and that they could leave history behind in Europe. So they convinced themselves that this land had no history, that this was “virgin” land. This made the Indians’ presence inconvenient. The Indians had to be either killed, or herded onto 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.

London: Another place the Indian turns up today is in books about spirituality and native wisdom.

Rodriguez: 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.

London: In Days of Obligation you write about spending a week in the “twin cities” of Tijuana and San Diego. It occurs to me that, if you take the two cities as one, the combination offers a glimpse of what America might look like in the twenty-first century.

Rodriguez: Absolutely. 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, when drinking was illegal, when whores were illegal, there was always Tijuana. Mexicans would say, “We’re not responsible for Tijuana; it’s the Americans who created it.” And there was some justification for that. But, in fact, the whore was a Mexican, the bartender a Mexican. Tijuana was this lovely meeting of Protestant hypocrisy with Catholic cynicism: the two cities went to bed and both denied it in the morning.

To this day, you will see American teenagers going to Mexico on Saturday nights to get drunk. Mexico gives them permission. The old Southern Catholic tradition gives permission to the Northern Protestant culture to misbehave. But what has happened in the last twenty-five years is that Tijuana has become a new Third World capital — much to the chagrin of Mexico City, which is more and more aware of how little it controls Tijuana politically and culturally. In addition to whorehouses and discos, Tijuana now has Korean factories and Japanese industrialists and Central American refugees, and a new Mexican bourgeoisie that takes its lessons from cable television.

And then 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. The average age in the U.S. is now thirty-three, whereas Mexico gets younger and younger, retreats deeper and deeper into adolescence. Mexico is fifteen. Mexico is wearing a Hard Rock Cafe T-shirt and wandering around Tijuana looking for a job, for a date, for something to put on her face to take care of the acne.

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 postindustrial 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.

London: During every election in the U.S., there is a lot of rhetoric about “restoring the American Dream.” But the American Dream seems to be alive and well in Tijuana.

Rodriguez: Very much so. 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.

Those people who say that America is finite are in 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.

London: Why do we always talk about race in this country strictly in terms of black and white?

Rodriguez: America has never had a very large 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.

After 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. 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. 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. But it’s never described in history books. 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.

London: The latest census figures show that two-thirds of children who are the products of a union between a black and a white call themselves black.

Rodriguez: 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. Most American Hispanics don’t belong to one race, either. I keep telling kids that, when filling out forms, they should answer 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.

London: There is a lot of talk today about the “hyphenating” of America. We no longer speak of ourselves as just Americans — now we’re Italian-Americans, African-Americans, Mexican-Americans, even Anglo-Americans.

Rodriguez: 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.

London: Time magazine did a special issue on the “global village” a couple of years ago. The cover photo was a computer composite of different faces from around the world. It was a stunning picture — neither male nor female, black nor white. That is the kind of assimilation that many worry about — the loss of things that make us separate and unique.

Rodriguez: José 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.

But the 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.”

I’m constantly depressed by the Mexican gang members I meet in East LA who essentially live their lives inside five or six blocks. They are caught in some tiny little 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 abuelita, 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? 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.”

London: You mentioned Canada before, and now Mexico, and it reminds me of a comparison someone made between the countries of North America and Sigmund Freud’s three levels of mind: Canada represents the superego, or the higher self; the United States is akin to the ego, or the personality self; and Mexico, of course, is the id, or unconscious self.

Rodriguez: Yes, that’s quite accurate. And isn’t it curious how it corresponds to the topography of the body, too? 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.

London: You have described Los Angeles as the “symbolic capital” of the United States.

Rodriguez: I find LA very interesting, partly because I think something new is forming there, but not in a moment of good fellowship, as you might expect 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.

After the LA riots in 1992, my sense was not that the city was dying, as expert opinion had it, but that the city was being formed. What was dying was the idea that LA was a city of separate suburbs and freeway exits. What burned in that riot was the idea that the east side was far away from the west side. People went to bed that first night watching television, watching neighborhoods they had never seen before, streets they had never been on, burn, and they were chagrined and horrified by what they saw. Sometime in the middle of the night they could hear the sirens and smell the smoke, and realized that the fire was coming toward them — that the street they lived on, the boulevard they used every day, was in fact connected to a part of town where they had never been before, and that part of town was now a part of their lives.

That moment of fear, of terror, of sleeplessness, was not a death, but the birth of the idea that LA is a single city, a single metropolitan area; that Tijuana is not some other planet, but right down the freeway; that Santa Barbara and the east side are part of the same world. I believe that was the birth of LA. What we have seen in the last three or four years is, if not optimistic, at least something very young and full of possibility. Women have been telling men forever that childbirth is painful, that life begins with a scream, not with little butterflies and tweeting birds; life begins with a scream. In 1992, LA came to life with a scream.

London: If LA represents the future, does that mean we’re looking at more riots?

Rodriguez: We’re looking at complexity. We’re looking at blond kids in Beverly 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 LA movie stars are taking up Indian pantheism. We’re looking at such enormous complexity and variety that it makes a mockery of “celebrating diversity.” In the LA 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.

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.

PRINT

E-MAIL

SHARE

WRITE TO THE EDITOR

SUBSCRIBE