Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father

Hardcover was awesome.

Must to read!Especially for Californians!We are being a witnesses of the new classics created.Despite the tough vocabulary and not an easy writing style, author created brilliant and truly remarkable set of essays. They are not related to each other directly, which makes it somewhat easier to read and possible to skip around, moving back and forth according to your own moods and preferences.

"European vocabularies do not have a silence rich enough to describe the force within Indian contemplation. Only Shakespeare understood that Indians have eyes." (p. 23) And how would Mr. Rodriquez know anything about the force of Indian contemplation? He doesn't allow Americans, among whom he numbers himself, to know much of anything. And what's this about Shakespeare? Didn't he just say something about European vocabularies?Informed by his immersion in Elizabethan English, Rodriguez fashions poetry out of absurdity, misanthropy and breathtaking contradiction. He fools high school kids (and it seems a lot have been assigned this book), but the educated, well read adult will be skeptical. How can he complain that he was taught that the Indians were gone, then drag multicultural education through the mud? I'm ANGRY that U.S. history was fed to me divorced from North America. I thought Montezuma was a legend! I defend all efforts at inclusion even when some ridiculous stuff comes along with it. Keep those ideas coming!And why is it that the people who have benefited most from affirmative action spit in its face? It's especially odd coming from a man whose parents moved to the U.S. for the express purpose of bettering their children.Rodriguez is entertaining on the topic of alienation, but he's the perfect example of why I've yearned for a minority gripe: It gives the human soul a hook on which to hang the cloak all mortals wear, the weight of an elegiac separation from God and other people. It's not about being Mexican/American, it's about the human condition: Read the poetry of the precortesian Mexican philosopher Nezahualcoyotl, who, as King of Texcoco, was hardly a stranger in a strange land.Warning to readers: Rodriguez saves all his personal attacks for women. If you find man-hating literature tiresome, which I do, beware misogyny from a man who waxes lyrical about bedpans.Rodriguez strives valiantly to be Octavio Paz, and is even trotted out as our answer to Mexico's Nobel laureate. (See, we Americans can search our souls in inscrutable, contradictory ways, too!) My advice? READ OCTAVIO PAZ INSTEAD. At least he loved life.

What an opportunity to own this collection of autobiographical essays by the most prolific Hispanic nonfiction writer of our time.

A beautiful work.

not the usual type of book i would read but had to for an ap class, there is no arguement instead it is a 10 part flow of everything Richard feels about our culture. I am 17 so i prefer more thought provoking books

In this and his other collection of personal essays, "Hunger of Memory," Richard Rodriguez describes how becoming an American has been an experience much like Alice's trip through the looking glass. It has distanced him from his Mexican-born parents and separated him almost entirely from his Mexican roots. The central idea running through many of these thoughtful, earnest essays is a heightened awareness of the differences between our public and private lives. They also focus on the impact of education on himself and his siblings as children of Spanish-speaking immigrants.After reading his books, nothing about becoming American seems as simple as it's often represented in popular fiction and movies. You see, for example, how learning English and the way Americans use it immediately create cultural conflicts. Rodriguez' parents had valued education as a way to get ahead in America. Ironically, the greater success he experienced in school, the further he became removed from the world of his parents.Still a boy, he lost the ability to converse in Spanish. Becoming a public figure in the English-speaking world, he seemed to betray his ethnic background, which valued privacy and separateness from the English-speaking (gringo) world. Ironically, for all his achievements as an "American," Rodriguez learns that because of his background, he remains in many ways an outsider. Lacking a middle class upbringing, he has passed through the educational system as a "scholarship boy." This term, borrowed from Richard Hoggart's book "The Uses of Literacy," describes the son of working class parents who is granted the privilege of a middle class education, but while rising above his humble origins, never fully transcends them.The political positions Rodreguez takes as an adult flow as a logical extension from the experiences that shaped him -- especially the benefits of the education he received in a private school. Later there were the benefits that came to him as a "minority student" -- advantages he considered unwarranted. Concerned by poverty in America and the underfunding of schools that would help end poverty, he takes positions that have been unpopular among many educators. In these essays, he challenges the assumptions underlying both affirmative action and bilingual education.Rodriguez writes with great clarity, and his sentences seem crafted with considerable care. He wants very much to say precisely what he means. And this cannot have been always easy, as many of his ideas grapple with both irony and paradox. Often you read paragraphs that seem to have been thought through deeply, then carefully written and rewritten. The care that he takes in writing these essays reflects a wish to be read carefully. Those who have found reason to be offended, angered, or "bored" by his ideas are evidence that he touches on a great many sensitive issues.