“Brown” states in the front jacket of the book that Richard Rodriguez’s writing is more about America in the broadest sense than as a book about race.
Although Rodriguez’s book is about America in a very broad sense–sometimes his range of subjects is so broad and interspersed so numerously that you can’t keep track of the subject in a single paragraph–I would have to argue also that it is a novel singularly about race.
No matter how many subject turns he takes, he always comes back to some aspect of race and the impact and history of it on the United States as a country and as a people, even if it is a different aspect each time.
Rodriguez’s organization of his thoughts–or rather, lack thereof–contributes to a sense of dilution throughout his entire book, which severely downgrades the effect and level of elegance that his writing could have.
That aside, Rodriguez does have some thoughts that I thoroughly agree with, the first being that America has always been a country filled with brown, not just black and white. It started with the Native Americans and the indigenous people of Latin America (think Mayans and Aztecs) and has been that way ever since, or since the beginning.
Rodriguez defends this statement by describing all of the things in America that are brown and thus make America brown, an effort which takes a multitude of pages and of which I am not sure is worth it.
A bold declaration Rodriguez also makes is that Americans do not speak English. We speak American. Now, any linguist would jump to disagree with him, which leads me to the observation that he doesn’t mean language as in words spoken, but rather as actions and way of life.
Saying Americans speak English is like saying all Hispanics speak Spanish, something he hesitates to do because of the presumption then that all Hispanics are from Spain and all Americans are from England. Obviously not many people would be inclined to agree with that line of thought.
Rodriguez also delved into the history of America being so categorized in terms of ethnicities, which dates back to the Nixon administration. Nixon determined that on the census, citizens would have to choose which best described themselves: white, black, or Hispanic. Other choices were quickly added.
This has led to the further categorization of America and further division within the races, which not many would choose to disagree with.
Although I find his writing unclear and unorganized, I think that Rodriguez has many valid points throughout his book, some obvious and some not.
I especially appreciate his perspective–I feel as though our culture (using ‘our’ loosely) does not hear enough from the Hispanic viewpoint. But Rodriguez would be the first to point out that he does not describe himself as Hispanic. So where does that leave us?