ABSTRACT
In a recent book, essayist Richard Rodriguez (2002) offers a new way of seeing America: not as black or white but, rather, as brown. Working to understand the meaning Hispanics bring to American life, Rodriguez argues from a history of the interpenetration of European (White), African (Black), and American Indian (Red) genes, culture, and language. Latina/os are all of these and, at the same time, none of them. Increasingly, Rodriguez explains, so is America, but what does it mean to describe America in terms of brown? To be sure, the numbers of Brown people in America are growing. Rodriguez means for the reader to see something much less obvious. Specifically, he challenges the reader’s way of thinking that lumps the world into received categories (like black and white), to look at the rich particulars of experience rather than easy generalizations about experience, and to begin seeing the complexity of not only Latina/os, but also of the world.
