Content area
Full Text
Richard Rodriguez. Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father. New York. Viking. 1992. xix + 230 pages. $21.
If genres were household accessories, autobiography would be a gilded mirror; and readers of Richard Rodriguez's Days of Obligation, the right-leaning, gay, Chicano curmudgeon's second autobiographical essay collection, will peer often into Rodriguez's mirror, an existential toilette of sorts. The subtitle misleads, "Argument" positing contentious dialogue. The collection, however, is less dialogue than monologue. Accordingly, Johnny Carson appears as motif.
Ostensibly a walk among tragedy, comedy, Catholicism, ethnicity, and education, Days of Obligation speaks of and to Latinos/Latinas (especially Californians). A savory memoir filled with curious erratic takes, Rodriguez's "book" sutures essays which appeared in Time and Harper's among others (and on TV on the BBC), continuing where Hunger of Memory left off: moody "Ricardo" laments his indigenous physiognomy while spewing right-wing annotations of U.S. decay--E. D. Hirsch in brownface: "No one in my family had a face as dark or as Indian as mine. My face could not portray the ambition I brought to it." Rodriguez's alienation here is painful and poignant, but we need not let it silence our critical intervention. Angst has ofted shrouded the bitter piquancy of the iron animus.
The irony of Rodriguez as spokesperson for Mexican and Latino issues is almost too obvious:...