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Old 10-23-2009, 06:16 PM
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Old 10-14-2009, 10:06 PM
ilbegone ilbegone is offline
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Here are some more Rodriguez quotes (five posts).

I don't like to quote so extensively, but it's the whole meat of the issue.

Rodriguez 1)

Quote:
...Consider my father: when he decided to apply for American citizenship, my father told no one, none of his friends, those men whom he had come to this country with looking for work. American citizenship would have seemed a betrayal of Mexico, a sin against memory. One afternoon, like a man with something to hide, my father slipped away. He went downtown to the Federal building in Sacramento, and disappeared into America.

Now memory takes her revenge on the son...

I once had the occasion to ask a middle class Mexican what he admires about the United States, (a provocative question because, according to Mexican history and proverb, there is nothing about the United States to admire). He found only one disembodied word: “organization”. When I pressed the man to anthropomorphize further, he said, “Deliveries get made, phones are answered, brakes are repaired” (indirect constructions all, as if by the construction of unseen hands)...

Mexico, mad mother. She still does not know what to make of our leaving. For most of this century Mexico has seen her children flee the house of memory. During the Revolution 10 percent of the population picked up and moved to the United States; in the decades following the Revolution, Mexico has watched many more of her children cast their lots with the future; head north for work, for wages, for life. Bad enough that so many left, worse that so many left for the gringo...

I would see them downtown on Sundays – men my age drunk in Plaza Park. I was still a boy at 16, but I was an American.

Or they would come into town Monday night for the wrestling matches or on tuesday nights for boxing. They worked on the ranches over in Yolo County. They were men with time on their hands, They were men without women. They were Mexicans without Mexico...

My parents left Mexico in the twenties: she as a girl with her family; he as a young man, alone. To tell different stories. Two Mexicos. At some celebration - we went to so many when I was a boy – a man in the crowd filled his lungs with American air to crow over all, !VIVA MEXICO! Everyone cheered. My parents cheered. The band played louder. Why VIVA MEXICO? The country that had betrayed them? The country that forced them to live elsewhere?

I remember standing in the doorway of my parents' empty bedroom.

Mexico was a memory – not mine. Mexico was mysteriously both he and she, like this, like my parents' bed. And over my parents' bed floated the Virgin of Guadalupe in a dime store frame. In its most potent guise, Mexico was a mother like this queen...

A true mother, Mexico would not distinguish among her children. Her protective arm extended not only to the Mexican nationals working in the United States, but to the larger number of Mexican – Americans as well. Mexico was not interested in passports; Mexico was interested in blood. No matter how far away you moved, you were still related to her...

In 1959, Octavio Paz, Mexico's sultan son, her clever one -philosopher, poet, statesman - published the Labyrinth of Solitude, his reflections on Mexico. Within his labyrinth, Paz places as well the Mexican American. He writes of the Pachuco, the teenage gang member, and, by implication, the Mexican American. “The Pachuco does not want to become Mexican again; at the same time he does not want to blend into the life of North America. His whole being is sheer negative impulse, a tangle of contradictions, an enigma”.

This was Mother Mexico talking, her good son; this was Mexico's metropolitan version of Mexican Americans. Mexico had lost language, lost gods, lost ground. Mexico recognized historical confusion in us.

When we return to Mexico as turistas, with our little wads of greenbacks, our credit cards, our Japanese cameras, our Bermuda shorts, our pauses for directions and our pointing fingers, Mexico condescends to take our order (our order in halting Spanish), claro senor. But the table is not clear; the table will never be cleared. Mexico prefers to reply in English, as a way of saying:

!Pocho!

The Mexican American who forgets his true mother is a pocho, a person of no address, a child of no proper idiom.

But blood is blood, or perhaps, in this case, language is blood...

And most Mexican Americans lived in barrios, apart from gringos; many still retained Spanish as if in homage to her (Mexico). We were still her children.

As long as we didn't marry...
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