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When a society doesn't know what to do with its young, it's in real trouble. When the young don't know what to do with society - at the very least, revolutions start there.
Richard Rodriguez
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Richard Rodriguez
Age: 80
Born: 1944
Born: July 31
Journalist
Teacher
Writer
San Francisco County
California
Least
Start
Society
Doesn
Young
Real
Revolutions
Revolution
Trouble
More quotes by Richard Rodriguez
I think it's an important thing for a Mexican to say, especially now with the rebellion in Chiapas. Mexico has to confront her Indian face, and yet she refuses to do so. When you turn on Mexican television, it's like watching Swedish TV: everyone is blond.
Richard Rodriguez
I write about race in America in hopes of undermining the notion of race in America.
Richard Rodriguez
So, rather than becoming multicultural, rather than becoming a person of several languages, rather than becoming confident in your knowledge of the world, you become just the opposite. You end up in college having to apologize for the fact that you no longer speak your native language.
Richard Rodriguez
Henry Ford didn't just create a cheap way of getting away from your in-laws he basically understood that there was something in us as a culture that wanted to be on the move, that wanted to get out.
Richard Rodriguez
You don't know Mexico, man. You have trivialized Mexico. You are a fool about Mexico if you think that Mexico is five blocks. That is not Mexico that is some crude Americanism you have absorbed.
Richard Rodriguez
So many of my friends tell me they’re not religious. I’m like, Of course you’re religious. You watch Oprah Winfrey, don’t you?
Richard Rodriguez
I came from a white middle class neighborhood. Was I expected to go back there and teach the woman next door about Renaissance sonnets? The embarrassing truth of the matter was that I was being chosen because Yale University had some peculiar idea about what my skin color or ethnicity signified.
Richard Rodriguez
A primary reason for my success in the classroom was that I couldn't forget that schooling was changing me and separating me from the life I enjoyed before becoming a student.
Richard Rodriguez
I find L.A. very interesting, partly because I think something new is forming there, but not in a moment of good fellowship as you might think from all this diversity claptrap. It's not as if we'll all go down to the Civic Center in our ethnic costumes and dance around.
Richard Rodriguez
The average age in the U.S. is now thirty-three, whereas Mexico gets younger and younger, retreats deeper and deeper into adolescence. Mexico is fifteen. Mexico is wearing a Hard Rock Cafe T-shirt and wandering around Tijuana looking for a job, for a date, for something to put on her face to take care of the acne.
Richard Rodriguez
After the second chapter of Days of Obligation, which is about the death of a friend of mine from AIDS, was published in Harper's, I got this rather angry letter from a gay-and-lesbian group that was organizing a protest against the magazine. It was the same old problem: political groups have almost no sense of irony.
Richard Rodriguez
But one does not forget by trying to forget. One only remembers.
Richard Rodriguez
I don't think writers should be convenient examples. I don't think we should make people feel settled. I don't try to be a gadfly, but I do think that real ideas are troublesome. There should be something about my work that leaves the reader unsettled. I intend that.
Richard Rodriguez
I keep trying to tell people that Los Angeles is already the largest Indian city in the U.S., that there are Toltecs playing Little League baseball in Pasadena, Mayans making beds at the Marriott in Westwood, and Chichimecs driving buses in L.A. Los Angeles is a majority-Indian city.
Richard Rodriguez
I had all this anxiety about what it meant to be a minority. My professors - the same men who taught me the intricacies of language - just shied away from the issue. They didn't want to talk about it, other than to suggest I could be a role model to other Hispanics - when I went back to my barrio, I suppose.
Richard Rodriguez
In the Sacramento of the 1950s, it was as though White simply hadn't had time enough to figure Brown out. It was a busy white time. Brown was like the skinny or fat kids left over after the team captains chose sides. You take the rest — my cue to wander away to the sidelines, to wander away.
Richard Rodriguez
There is San Diego - this retirement village, with its prim petticoat, that doesn't want to get too near the water. San Diego worries about all the turds washing up on the lovely, pristine beaches of La Jolla. San Diego wishes Mexico would have fewer babies. And San Diego, like the rest of America, is growing middle-aged.
Richard Rodriguez
I don't deny people their fantasy life, but I do think that we desperately need to start realizing just how complicated our reality is in America. Sitcoms just don't show us that.
Richard Rodriguez
Affirmative action ignores our society's real minorities - members of the disadvantaged classes, no matter what their race. We have this ludicrous bureaucratic sense that certain racial groups, regardless of class, are minorities. So what happens is those minorities at the very top of the ladder get chosen for everything.
Richard Rodriguez
The drama of the essay is the way the public life intersects with my personal and private life. It's in that intersection that I find the energy of the essay.
Richard Rodriguez
