Hunger Of Memoryand Days Of Obligation Analysis

America is browning. As politicians, schoolteachers, and grandparents attempt to decipher what that might mean, Richard Rodriguez argues America has been brown from its inception, as he himself is. As a brown man, I think . . . (But do we really think that color colors thought?) In his two previous memoirs, Hunger of Memoryand Days of Obligation, Rodriguez wrote about the intersection of his private life with public issues of class and ethnicity. With Brown, his consideration of race, Rodriguez completes his "trilogy on American public life." For Rodriguez, brown is not a singular color. Brown is evidence of mixture. Brown is a shade created by desire-an emblem of the erotic history of America, which began the moment the African and the European met within the Indian eye. Rodriguez reflects on various cultural associations of the …show more content…
Consciousness III, as Reich called it, promised a rediscovery of selfhood in which the preciousness of all human life would be affirmed. Within a few months, despite its claim that this “greening” was inevitable, Reich’s book had come and …show more content…
Emphasizing that Benjamin Franklin is one of Rodriguez’s heroes, the latter book shows how profoundly its author has continued to believe in the American Dream of opportunity, mobility, new beginnings, and self-invention. His reasons for doing so include the fact that he has never forgotten the true words that his father impressed upon him. As they polished the secondhand blue DeSoto that was the family car in the 1950’s, Rodriguez’s father would tell him: “Life is hard, boy, even harder than you