Brown: The Last Discovery of America Read online

  The other day I read a survey that reported a majority of Americans believe most Hispanics are in the United States illegally. Maybe. Maybe there is something inherently illegal about all of us who are Hispanics in the United States, gathered under an assumed name, posing as one family. Nixon’s categorical confusion brings confusion to all categories.

  Once the United States related millions of its citizens into the family Hispanic—which as a legality exists only within U.S. borders—then that relation extends back to our several origins and links them. At which juncture the U.S.A. becomes the place of origin for all Hispanics. The illegal idea now disseminated southward by the U.S. is the idea that all Latin Americans are Hispanic.

  The United States has illegally crossed its own border.

  Chapter Six

  THE THIRD MAN

  A CHINESE OR AN ESKIMO OR A COUNTERTENOR COULD PLAY this role as well. Anyone in America who does not describe himself as black or white can take the role. But the reason I am here, on this dais, in a hotel ballroom, is numerical.

  Our subject today is the perennial American subject: Race Relations. You understand, by this time, I am not a race. I do not have a race. To my left, standing at the microphone, is an African-American academic who refers to himself as “black.” To my right sits a journalist who calls himself “white.” My role is the man in the middle, the third man; neither.

  Situated thus, between black and white—occupying the passing lane in American demographics—the Hispanic should logically be gray or at least a blur.

  Americans dislike gray. Gray areas, gray skies, gray flannel suits, mice, hair, cities, seas. Moscow. Hera’s eyes.

  But I am not gray, I am brown as you can see, or rather you can’t see, but my name on this book is brown. Rodriguez is a brown name—or gray—halfway between Greenwich and Timbuktu. I am brown all right—darkish reddish, terra-cotta-ish, dirt-like, burnt Sienna in the manner of the middle Bellini.

  At the microphone, the African-American professor refers (in one breath) to “blacks-and-Latinos,” his synonym for the disadvantaged in America—the dropout, the lost, the under-arrest. The professor’s rhetorical generosity leaves me abashed.

  In truth, African Americans are in fierce competition with Hispanics in this country. We compete for the meanest jobs or for the security of civil service positions or for political office or for white noise. If I were an African American I would not be so generous toward Hispanics, especially if I had to read every morning of their ascending totals. The Wall Street Journal, March 8, 2001: NUMBER OF HISPANICS BALLOONED IN 1990S; GROUP IS ABOUT TO BECOME BIGGEST MINORITY. I would resent the incurious gabble of Spanish invading African-American neighborhoods; Hispanics demanding from the federal government the largest slice of black metaphor; and this—my brown intrusion into the tragic dialectic of America, the black and white conversation.

  Not so long ago, Hispanics, particularly Mexicans and Cubans, resisted the label of “minority.” In a black-and-white America, Hispanics tended toward white, or at least tended to keep their distance from black. I remember my young Mexican mother saying to her children, in Spanish, “We are not minorities,” in the same voice she would use decades later to refuse the term “senior citizen.” One day in the 1980s, my mother became a senior citizen because it got her on the bus for a nickel. One day, in the 1960s, the success of the Negro Civil Rights movement encouraged Hispanics (along with other groups of Americans) to insist on the coveted black analogy, and thus claim the spoils of affirmative action.

  Today you will see us listed on surveys and charts, between Black and White, as though Hispanics are necessarily distinct from either Black or White; as though Hispanics are comparable to either Black or White.

  Out of mischief or stupidity, federal demographers have taken to predicting that Hispanics are destined to replace African Americans as “America’s largest minority.” The Census Bureau manages both to trivialize the significance of Hispanics to our national life, and to insult African Americans by describing Hispanics as supplanters. To date, the nation’s Hispanic political leadership has remained silent about the Census Bureau’s grammar.

  The notion of African Americans as a minority is one born of a distinct and terrible history of exclusion—the sin of slavery, later decades of segregation, and every conceivable humiliation visited upon a people, lasting through generations. To say, today, that Hispanics are becoming America’s largest minority is to mock history, to pervert language, to dilute the noun “minority” until it means little more than a population segment.

  This is exactly what Hispanics have become—a population segment, an ad-agency target audience, a market share. Not coincidentally, it was an advertising agency that got the point of Hispanic totals as early as the 1980s. It was then that Coors Beer erected billboards throughout the Southwest that flattered “The Decade of the Hispanic.”

  By telling you these things, I do not betray “my people.” I think of the nation entire—all Americans—as my people. Though I call myself Hispanic, I see myself within the history of African Americans and Irish Catholics and American Jews and the Chinese of California.

  When citizens feel themselves excluded, it is appropriate that they lobby, petition, attract the interest of government and employers. But when Americans organize into subgroups, it should be with an eye to merging with the whole, not remaining separate. What was the point of the Negro Civil Rights movement of the early twentieth century, if not integration?

  The trouble with today’s ethnic and racial and sexual identifications is that they become evasions of citizenship. Groups beget subgroups: Last week in Atlanta there was a meeting of Colombian Americans, their first convention. In parody of Hispanics nationally, Colombian Americans declared themselves to be “America’s fastest-growing minority.”

  At Yale University, I was recently trailed by a white graduate student—truly Hispanic—who kept boasting that she was the “first Latina to win” and the “first Latina named.” The moment we sat down to talk, this white Hispanic referred to herself as “a person of color” and I realized she had no idea.

  Alone among the five (White, Black, Asian, et cetera) options placed at one’s disposal on affirmative action applications, Hispanic is the only category that has no reference to blood. One can be an Asian Hispanic or an Indian Hispanic, et cetera. Indeed, I know Hispanics who are of a complexion most Americans would call black but who elect to name themselves Hispanic. I know Hispanics who are blithe as daffodils.

  Here is what I will say when it is my turn to get up and speak: Hispanicity is culture. Not blood. Not race. Culture, or the illusion of culture—ghost-ridden. A belief that the dead have a hold on the living.

  What I will not say, when I get up to speak, is that from childhood I have resisted the notion of culture in Spanish. There was not another noun in my childish Spanish vocabulary that made me more uneasy than the word “cultura” (which was always used against me, but as indistinguishable from me—something I had betrayed). I did not shrink from culture’s cousin-noun, “costumbre”—custom, habit—which was visible, tangible, comestible, conditional.

  In Spanish, culture is indissoluble; culture is everything that connects me to the past and with a sense of myself as beyond myself. When I was a boy and refused to speak Spanish (because I spoke English), then could not speak Spanish from awkwardness, then guilt, Mexican relatives criticized my parents for letting me “lose it”—my culture, they said. (So it was possible to lose, after all? If culture is so fated, how could I have lost it?) Many years later, complete strangers—Hispanic readers and academics, even non-Hispanic readers and academics—picked up the taunting refrain. As if culture were a suitcase left too long unclaimed. I had lost my culture. The penalty for my sin was a life of inauthenticity. Then they commenced hurling coconuts—all those unchivalric taunts that are the stock of racial and sexual and patriotic bullies.

  The audience is bound to misunderstand what I will tell them. There is
nothing fateful about the notion of culture in American English. (The English word means exactly the opposite of the Spanish word.) The word “culture” in America comes equipped with add-on component jacks. The word “culture” in America pivots on a belief in the individual’s freedom to choose, to become a person different from her past. Culture in American English separates children from grandparents, the living from the dead, this moment from what I believed only yesterday. “Culture gaps” and “culture shocks,” “cultural pride” and “counterculture” are American specialties, presupposing obsolescence.

  Insofar as I remain culturally influenced by Latin America, I must notice the fallacy that supports the American “I”: American individualism is a communally derived value, not truly an expression of individuality. The teenager persists in rebelling against her parents, against tradition or custom, because she is shielded (blindfolded, entranced, drugged) by American culture from the knowledge that she inherited her rebellion from dead ancestors and living parents.

  But insofar as I am culturally American, my gringo eye sees only diversity among the millions of people who call themselves Hispanic. The songwriter from Buenos Aires, the Bolivian from a high mountain village, the Mayan Indian who refuses Spanish, the Mayan Indian who exaggerates Spanish, the Salvadoran evangelical Protestant, the Cuban anticommunist, the Cuban communist, the green criminal, the Catholic nun, the red poet, the city dweller, the inhabitant of the desert, the swimmer from the tropics, the agnostic scientist with a German surname—Hispanics all! In no sense can so many different lives be said to inhabit a singular culture. Save one sense: Hispanics in the United States are united in the belief (a Latin American belief) that culture is a more uniform source of identity than blood.

  The African-American professor has concluded his speech. He catches my eye as he sits. We smile conspiratorially. He assumes we plot the same course. Then the white journalist rises to speak. The journalist says, “Racism has not gone away, it haunts our streets, it haunts our courtrooms, it haunts our boardrooms, it haunts our classrooms . . .”

  When Americans speak about “race” they remind me of Latin Americans speaking of “culture.”

  Culture in Latin American Spanish is fated.

  Culture in American English yields to idiosyncracy.

  Race in American English is fated.

  Race in Latin American Spanish yields to idiosyncracy.

  I hardly mean to imply racism does not exist in Latin America. Latin America predictably favors light over dark. Certainly in Mexico, the Latin American country I know best, white ascends. Certainly, the whitest dinner party I ever attended was a Mexico City dinner party where a Mexican squire of exquisite manner, mustache, and flán-like jowl, expressed himself surprised, so surprised, to learn that I am a writer. One thought he would never get over it. Un escritor . . . ¿Un escritor . . . ? Turning the word on a lathe of tooth and tongue, until: “You know, in Mexico, I think we do not have writers who look like you,” he said. He meant dark skin, thick lips, Indian nose, bugger your mother.

  No one in the United States has ever matched the confidence of that gentleman’s insult. I believe it would not occur to the deepest-dyed racist in the United States to question whether I am a writer. The racist might say I look like a monkey, but he would not say I don’t look like a writer.

  The dream of Mexico is an apotheosis of bleach. Nevertheless, Mexico has for centuries compiled a ravishing lexicon of brown because in Mexico race is capricious as history is capricious. From the colonial era, the verbal glamour of Mexico has been to entertain a spectrum of brown—of impurity—as rich and as wet as a Hollander palette: mestizo, castizo, alvina, chino, negro torno atras, morisco, canbujo, albarrasado, tente en el aire, canpa mulato, coyote, vorsino, lobo . . .

  By contrast, white and black discussions of race in America are Victorian; leave out the obvious part. In light of postmodern America’s obsession with sex, it is remarkable how reluctant we are to sexualize American history. In an American conversation, where there is no admission of brown, the full meaning of the phrase “New World” lies always out of sight.

  In eighteenth-century Mexico there was a popular genre of paintings on the subject of las castas—descriptive not of social caste, but of racial admixture. The paintings were illustrations of racial equations: If mama is negra and papa is indio, then baby is . . . An auxiliary convention of these paintings is that they catalog and display fruits and fauna of the New World—dogs, lizards, parrots, as well as costume, fabric. Both words and paintings describe domestic bliss or comic discord. In one panel, la negra is about to brain her Spanish spouse with an indigenous frying pan—à la Maggie and Jiggs—and the entire adventure and preoccupation of the New World is seen as genetic. But comically so. This, despite Latin America’s fame for a tragic disposition. This, despite the fame of the United States for optimism.

  In American English, mulatto traces the distance from a contaminant. In eighteenth-century Latin America, mulatto was only one pinion on a carnival wheel. In the United States of the eighteenth century, the condition of being a mulatto was an offense when it was thought to issue from black male desire. When mulatto was the issue of white male desire, mulatto was unspoken, invisible, impossible.

  Brown made Americans mindful of tunnels within their bodies, about which they did not speak; about their ties to nature, about which they did not speak; about their ties to one another, about which they did not speak.

  This undermining brown motif, this erotic tunnel, was the private history and making of America. Brown was the light of day. Brown, the plain evidence. Fugue and funk. Brown, the color of consort; brown, the color of illicit passion—not blue—brown, the shade of love and drawn shades and of love children, so-called, with straight hair and gothic noses; secret cousins; brown, the stench of rape and of shame, sin, slippage, birth.

  After several brown centuries, I sit on a dais, in a hotel ballroom, brown. I do not hesitate to say into a microphone what everyone knows, what no one says. Most American blacks are not black. The erotic history of America kept pace with segregation. From the inception of America, interracial desire proceeded apace with segregated history. (The biological impulse of creatures is stronger than any cultural impulse, apparently.) Desire and sympathy, as well as cruelty and revulsion, undermined and propelled America’s New World experiment from the beginning. In spite of dire social prohibitions, white slave owners placed their ancestors in the bodies of their slaves.

  We know from the gossip outside books that generations before Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemmings, black female and white male pairings existed, some lasting from youth till death did them part. But the issue of such white-black eroticism was not recognized as being brown, or both. Mulattos, quadroons, octoroons, tracing distance from the contaminant, were ultimately an irrelevance under the dictum of the American racial theory called the “one-drop” theory.

  In the American musical Showboat, a backwater sheriff boards the Cotton Blossom, or whatever that showboat was called, to declaim, in cadences of Racine (and to make himself plain to the second balcony), One drop o’ nigger blood ’sall it takes . . .

  To make a nigger. Here was an anthropology, a biology, indeed an alchemy, that allowed plantation owners to protect their investment, to preserve the assumption of racial superiority, to accommodate, as well, their sexual curiosity and to redouble their chattel.

  A child of black-and-white eroticism remained “black” in the light of day, no matter how light her skin, straight his hair, gothic her nose; she was black as midnight, black as tar, black as the ace of spades, black as your hat. Under the one-drop theorem, it was possible for a white mother to give birth to a black child in America, but no black mother ever gave birth to a white child. A New World paradox.

  One of the first lessons in America, the color-book lesson, instructs that color should stay within the lines. The river should not flood its banks. The tree should not smear the sky.

  It is interesting t
o note the two American fictions of the nineteenth century that continue to romance us were about interracial relationships, exclusively male. I mean The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Moby-Dick—both dreams of escape from convention and family. At a time when America was preoccupied with land and settlement, with cultivating the land, Twain and Melville wrote of water, of suspension, of being carried outward. The river cares nothing for its bank, the ocean cares nothing for the shore, each consorts with the sky. In the first, a white boy and a runaway slave abandon town and the constriction of the shore for the freedom of the river. In the latter, a crew of men from every corner of the world board a ship in search of a ghostly whale. In both stories there are only undomesticated men or boys. And the male pairings are odd, interracial, even homoerotic; violations of the town’s conventions.

  After the Civil War, in American places where water seduced or penetrated the landscape, the promiscuity of the horizon encouraged African Americans who lived near those places to speak the truth about themselves. In New Orleans and Charleston, African Americans often described themselves as “Creoles” or “mulattos”—washes, watercolors—some Latin influence, perhaps. But the landlocked places kept to the shackle of blood-as-fate; color within the lines.

  The notion that a brown is black—a paucity of choice—created segregated drinking fountains and schoolrooms and colored platoons in the Second World War. But that same notion—the one-drop notion—also undermined segregation in America by forging a solidarity among African Americans over and above any extenuations such as occupation or age or income or complexion.

  My friend Darrell. Darrell says he is black. Darrell says he is black because that is what the white cop sees when he looks at me.

  If it is fair for me to notice that the white Latina at Yale is not objectively a person of color, is it fair to notice you are not exactly black? Darrell?