 What he didn't say was that we are old friends so that this is the most difficult kind of Conversation where you are suddenly in an auditorium talking in market to a market in a microphone to a friend being overheard by several Strangers and so we are pretending that we have never met before Welcome mr. Rodriguez Thank you. Thank you for the introduction Since this evening is part of a California stories uncovered campaign Which is encouraging? Californians to really consider the significance of their own stories as well as those of fellow Californians I want to begin by asking you a little bit about how you came to write your stories When and why did you begin writing hunger of memory? I began writing hunger of memory. I should tell you that I began writing Even though my my particularly my mother did not want me to write about my life She wrote she wrote me a letter actually in which she asked me to keep family matters Private if you grow up in certain ethnic communities, you know, you know that voice the mother or the father who says you know what happens in the family happens in the family and I was being taught in school to form this other voice The voice to speak to strangers the voice that that belonged to the city and I remember reading Maxine Hong Kingston's first book woman warrior Which I will steal from that the the first sentence of the letter of the first sentence of the book Maxine is close quoting her mother and her mother is saying when I'm about to tell you you must never repeat to anyone else And I and I saw that and saw well this is what a writer does that the writer's business is betrayal and I think I think that that that my impulse to tell stories was come it came most fundamentally from a kind of privacy a long childhood of of living with books of having no one to talk to about those books of of Watching from a distance this incredible Mexican family of mine begin to splinter as middle-class success began to invade the family and Having this prohibition put on me by my by my parents not to write about my life In some way encourage me to do exactly that. I don't I don't mean it to be a bratty thing, but it was It was that I could only say these things to a stranger I could only say these things to you and So in some way it was that process of trying to find my public reader that caused me to want to write I Think readers sometimes assume That books are written in exactly the order in which we read them You know the writer begins on page one and goes all the way through and of course That's not only not usually the case. It's almost never the case though It may be in your case, which is what I'm going to ask. Do you remember the actual? Starting point of hunger of memory that that is the particular story that sort of compelled itself out of you No, I Then that's the truth. I in fact I I didn't the struggle with hunger of memory My first book was trying to find a voice How do you sound? How shall I come to the front of this auditorium and sound my voice? With what kind of tone do I speak to you? With what with what sadness will you allow me to speak? You know that the thing about friends is that they normally think that they know what you sound like and When you begin to sound a different way, they're the first ones who will tell you, you know What get off of it? You know what it what is this that you're doing? So you have to find a voice That that an audience will accept as yours and that really was the hardest part of hunger of memory And the other part of hunger of memory that was difficult was how do I write about this boy is his insecurities? his his difficulties his His bratty-ness without either making him too Hateful or on the one hand or on the other hand trying to justify him too much Who who is the eye that was describing? The the he and that distance between the adult and the boy was crucial and difficult the second shot to the book Got rewritten maybe 30 40 times because I couldn't find the right way to make fun of the boy Without without either Unbalancing your sympathy to too much toward him or or in some sense distinct distancing myself as the man from who he was Wouldn't be too much the bully to the subject that's right. That's right, and I had to acknowledge that I was he and That that that I was I'm merely another version of that boy It's interesting because your writing addresses public issues in a very personal way. That's the only way I can write I can't I don't believe in writing Just about my my personal life my memoir. I believe in writing about affirmative action or about AIDS or about NAFTA or about The Vatican Council. I'm thinking a lot about the Pope today. I think about those issues And then I want to intrude the personal life into these big public issues of our time Can you collide the the they the headline the the the abstract story? With the with the with the pulsing heart. Can you can you can you make those? those two lines Collide in an interesting way the individual story and the the public the public event So I the first chapter is about a firm it is what bilingual education. That's what it's about But it is really also about my experience of speaking Spanish and then losing Spanish and then having my grandmother speak to me Until her death and and that the experience of not being able to translate A friend would come over to play with me and she would stick her head out the window and what she would say to me is something like In Spanish why are you playing in the dirt? But what her voice was saying is why are you playing with him? Why are you playing with a stranger? Why are you playing with this green girl kids get inside and Because you belong to me and so he my best friend Tommy would ask what did she say and There was no way of saying it because literally all she said was don't play in the dirt But what I heard her say What I heard her voice sound Was not a word but the words were saying beyond themselves come back to us and So the chapter becomes Complicated it's no longer simply about bilingual education is a political issue, but my intersection with that political issue Did you did you begin with the issue or did you begin with I began with the issue? I I wrote this book largely just after now our friendship when I was struggling with the issue of affirmative action a Being a minority student We were both at Berkeley together and and suddenly opportunities were coming to me Because of affirmative action and I had to start thinking about that term minority student. What does that term mean? Who was a minority? How do you decide that? Can you write about those issues in a poetic way through writers have something to say to the world? Or are we now in an age of journalism where we merely report what politicians say? Do we have some stake in these conversations? That's what hunger of memory tried to do and in so far it's it if it succeeds it has taken some of those issues away from politicians It's interesting seeing the way others define your work because there's always some intimate work, you know Autobiographical essay personal essay meditation. Yes, these are all kind of private things. Yes, but you're talking about They're public essays too. Yes well, I Think most of us think of writing as a very solitary Occupation, but I've heard some writers say that when they sit down to write The room fills up very quickly with other voices other people. How is it? No, not for me not the UPS man Maybe but that's about it There's nobody in my room when I write I What what's mysterious for me is coming to a room like this and looking at you and Someone will come up and say I'd like I'd like your work very much and I don't believe them I don't I don't believe that they actually read anything that I've said Written and and then they'll read and then somebody a woman will remember a line She said I love that line or a young man said I keep repeating to myself this line You wrote in the book, which I don't even remember And then I think to myself. Oh, they are my reader This is the person I was in correspondence with 20 years ago And it takes me this long to find them or this long for them to find me It's an extraordinary moment very subtle and very quiet and you sign the book and You don't maybe you notice or maybe you don't notice my hand is trembling because I have finally found you I found the person I've been trying to address and what I have not told you until now is that you allowed That voice to sound you allowed me to speak in a way that I could not speak to my friends There's a paradox which I deal with at the end of hunger of memory and that is there are some things so personal You can only say them to a stranger And young young girls for some reason girls know this more easily than boys do But when they address when they get a little diary and they address those private thoughts to dear diary Precisely because they can't say these things to their sisters or their mother or to their brothers God knows And then they locked that that little booklet Those those that moment when you realize that there is a there's a voice within you that has to sound beyond your family Is really a very powerful thing but in many ways I have been looking for you for a long time and you've been sitting in the library Here I should have come by one of one of these nights and found you all sitting here for here you are Because part of what the campaign is trying to do is encourage people to come forward with their stories I've been finding people are very curious about how writers get by the blank page or the blank computer screen Do you have any rituals or times of day or incense that you use or anything that sort of gets because it can be quite intimidating That we used to call the blank page Hemingway used to sharpen 24 pencils No, I don't I don't write every day anymore. I write when I'm compelled to write I'm thinking about religion a great deal right now and I don't know when I'll start writing that book or when it will start writing me In the meantime I do a lot of journalism usually under deadline pressure and so forth I was supposed to do a piece on Cardinal Ratzinger yesterday, but I hadn't really thought about it yet I hadn't thought about him enough to be able to write about him I'm very much interested in the struggle of the desert religions, what I call the desert religions Judaism, Christianity, and Islam that come out of the desert and how the desert landscape informs the theology The landscape of extreme cold nights, hot days, the desert of Mirage, the desert of scarce water The desert of extreme loneliness in that vast sky, how it informs those three religions But I haven't written a single word yet, I'm waiting for it to happen And what you say that it comes every ten years, it doesn't come to me as inspiration It comes to me as this moment, this morning I will come and I will say I have thought about this enough It's time for me to start writing and I trust that that will happen There's a cartoon I think that was in The New Yorker that shows a man standing, I think it's supposed to be Thurber actually Standing in the middle of a party and he just has a kind of a blank stare And his wife is explaining, don't mind him, he's writing Well can I tell you that when I do a lot of journalism I interview people all the time And I'm listening to people all the time and people tell me stories all the time They did it just out here, somebody was telling me a story about coming across the Rockies In this old car that almost didn't make it across with their son And I'm beginning to, I think to myself, can I steal the story? Can I make it mine? There's so much that people give you on airplanes This man was sitting next to me on American Airlines And he wanted to talk and I didn't want to talk and so I kept the newspaper around me like this And then they brought the chicken by and so I had to put the newspaper down And as soon as I put the newspaper down he pounced And then he started talking to me, he said, where are you headed? And I said, I'm at Kennedy Airport, I presume we're both going to the same place And then he told me this extraordinary story As the plane went into darkness and we crossed Kansas and Illinois It was a story about the death of his son His son had died in a boating accident the previous summer or maybe two summers ago And it was one of these stories so raw that you feel maybe he shouldn't be telling me this And then he says to me, you know, my wife and I, we have grieved over the loss of our son But we have still not talked about this to each other And I think to myself, this guy is telling me this story that he has not told his wife And that's when I began, that's when I steal it That's when I steal it, that's when I steal, somebody gave that to me That notion that there are things so personal, you can only say them to a stranger And that's what I keep looking to you to tell me I grew up in California in the 1950s in Sacramento In a neighborhood surrounded by people who'd come from the Midwest And they'd come from Indiana and Iowa and Nebraska I wondered sometimes whether anybody was left back there because there were so many But they were always, they would talk about winters in Nebraska And how the woman said to me, you will never know what cold is, she said to me in California It was in some way as though I grew up in the Midwest So that years later when I finally went to these places, I recognized them immediately Because they had formed the narrative of my childhood The tone of voice, the ironies of the Midwest, the humor It was something I grew up with, I was surrounded by I wasn't surrounded by Mexico, I wasn't surrounded by anything except the stories of other people And then my Mexican aunt married my uncle from India And suddenly there were these stories of India And then the women who shoved the English language down my throat are all from Ireland And there are these extraordinary stories of Ireland and poverty in Ireland And faith in Ireland, devotion to the Virgin Mary in Ireland And the child begins to explore the universe with these stories So when I see these students winning these stories, I want to get the letter I want to get the letter because that's how I form my California too I've been surrounded by stories The embarrassment for me as a native Californian is that you learn very early That the most interesting Californians all came here from somewhere else From the very beginning, Junipero Sera, the father of California Comes here from Mallorca, from Spain And then come the pioneers from wherever they come from The gold rush, every corner of the world There are very few famous Californians who are native to this state Marilyn Monroe is one of the few Walt Disney in my childhood came here from Illinois He created Mickey Mouse on a train coming west And he created Minnie Mouse in Burbank And I've always thought Minnie was much less interesting than Mickey Because Mickey was from the Midwest, Minnie was from here Everybody who was from here was sort of... It was like, you know, Little Ricky Lucille Ball and Desi Arnais, Desi was from Cuba And Lucy was from somewhere, Illinois or some Indiana And then they have Little Ricky in Hollywood And Little Ricky, who knows what happens to him in the world But Lucy and Desi, they're the point of California These people who come with their dream to create a new reality I've always been impressed by how many... How much of California is imported Comes here from China, comes here from India Comes here from Ireland, comes here from New Jersey And it all gets built, building next to building next to building And those of us who are native, we just wander through In Disneyland there's a rule That if you work in one of the five theme parks Main Street, Tomorrowland, Frontierland There are passageways underneath these areas So that if you're dressed up as a cowboy You don't go to... at the end of the day You don't go to the parking lot through Cinderella's Palace You go underneath so that the tourists will never see people From different areas of the park crossing paths You never see Daniel Boone walking down the street with Cinderella Except in California that's what you saw all the time You saw people of completely opposite geographies Completely opposite mythologies walking side by side This is what California meant It was this junction that was so thrilling to this place And so weird, so mysterious It seems like the best moment to ask you to read this passage Because I think you practically were saying it This is from where the poppies grow which was an essay you did I apologize for this essay, this is a difficult essay Like a lot of my most recent essays it has about five or six different parts And the last part of the essay I'm impersonating An elderly woman from Santa Monica who is in despair at how much California is changing And she finds in this museum this Vietnamese girl looking at this picture of California This famous painting of California And it's that layered she sees the painter looking at California And the Vietnamese girl looking at the painter's vision of California And then she is watching the Vietnamese girl watching the painter's vision of California This is from the beginning of the essay All my life I have lived within the irony created by the many Californians Though finally there are only two I mean those who came here from elsewhere and the native born The California natives, a laid back tribe Watched the approach in the distance of Uniparocera, the father of California Paternity thus stalking them with a limping gate Uniparocera had a very bad leg by the time he came to California so he limped all the time I am so thoroughly Californian as to imagine the genesis cinematically The camera shuttling back and forth between distance and foreground Rather between foreground and foreground, two cameras that's the point Obliterating distance, bisecting narrative Eventually making one of twain My own domestic comedy reflected that first splice My parents from Mexico Their children born at the destination, born here in California My parents ambition was California Mine was to seek the greater world to get out of California I didn't get far I live today in a San Francisco Victorian Subdivided by memory Upstairs Arizona lives Across the hall, Tennessee Who often will appear without any clothes I don't know, I don't exactly understand nudist But he often will not wear clothes And I have often brought people to my apartment And he will be vacuuming the hallway Without any clothes, Tennessee Downstairs lives Alabama The sweetest landlord in the world, Alabama My neighbors all seem at home in this city It is theirs I am the uneasy tenant For I was born at St. Joseph's Hospital Less than a mile from where I write these words St. Joseph's Hospital no longer exists It's over by the Castro It's been turned into condos A common early theme of America was the theme of leaving home Almost an imperative for writers and other misfits The subordinate theme was the impossibility of return You can't go home again I always read that theme primarily as East Coastal Or Midwestern I construed from it the gravity of tall cities Rather than the constriction of towns There is a newer American refrain A Western refrain What happens when home leaves you? A few years ago the BBC came to California And they wanted to do a documentary on my life And they wanted to go to Sacramento to see Where I was raised My house on 39th Street And we got to the location And we found out that the house no longer exists It is now a parking lot Typical California narrative And I was telling an audience of this in Sacramento Some years later And the woman raised her hand She said, do you want to see your house? I said, no you don't understand My house no longer exists I was with the BBC crew And we could not find my house It's now a parking lot There are doctors' Mercedes parked Where my bedroom used to be She said it's over on N Street They moved it California's nativist chagrin Is older and louder Because California has for so long Played America's America The end of the road Or a second shot of the future California has served also As Asia's primary port of entry Now to the busiest border crossing From Latin America California's native born children Whatever our color or tongue Realized very early That California takes every impression Our parents on the other hand Are very surprised by how many Californians How many Californias they find When they get here Nothing at all like they expected Nothing like the movie My early intuition as a native son Was that California was Dreamed into being elsewhere I noticed the paradigmatic Californians Were not so by birth Richard Diebenkorn came from Oak, Oregon Cesar Chavez was born in Yuma Willie Mays Louis B. Mayer Jack Kerouac Richard Neutra Lucy and Desi Edward Teller All of them from far away All of them living forever in California On the same street Mickey Mouse was conceived Abort the Santa Fe Westward Bound Many was born from his rib Born here As was John Steinbeck Born in Salinas His house still stands Steinbeck's generosity His generosity Was to invent the Jode family's First view of orange groves To believe that the Oklahoma Jones Were more important to the myth of California Than their native born grandchildren Who live in suburban Bakersfield And who now complain about all the changes But that is remarkable about Steinbeck California's greatest writer Native born writer His greatest book was about people who came To the state from elsewhere His generosity as a writer Is that he could imagine He could imagine the story in reverse He could imagine himself Seen from outside The writer's talent To imagine the story in reverse The states in fact This is something I tend to do in rooms How many of you were born in California? Wow Not half though No Right at this moment I think I used to be able to say That there hadn't been a time since 1850 Where more than half of the people Living in California were born here It's currently 50.2% In whose favor? In native born Just happened about three years ago Well that's why you get proposition 13 I mean you know when the native born Get on the rampage And we start complaining about all of you Coming this way We elect Ronald Reagan For our governor of optimism Can I just say about that Ronald Reagan I mean I know that he's dead and everything But the New York Times called when he died And asked me what I thought of The optimism he gave to this country And I thought I don't remember any optimism Coming with Ronald Reagan I remember it with Pat Brown The real governor Brown The first governor Brown Who created the University of California system Pardon me The University of California system I'll get back to lower taxes in a moment Yes The University of California system Made the water run up the side of a mountain Created the freeway system to California That California was my California The California that was building That believed in the future And then suddenly the native born Start taking over the state We have had enough of Iowa We've had enough of India We've had enough of China We've had enough of Mexico We own the real estate No longer want to pay taxes For those bratty kids at Berkeley Who no longer want the freeway system Which now brings more people into the state And they begin to tighten California I think that there really are two different themes Or two different motifs in this state On the one hand there is still this buoyancy Which I detect now in the immigrant communities In the state This optimism about California Particularly because they're coming to America In many cases I think of the Asians Who are coming to California Exactly in reverse Whereas California was seen mythically As the end of the road Now they are seeing California As the beginning of the road And they're bringing a completely new sense Of the geography of the country To us But they're competing against this Other energy in the state Which has had enough We had too many people We don't want any more The traffic is too bad We're stuck in the Santa Monica freeway It's taking us two hours to get home And so forth and so on These two energies are at play in California As a native born I suppose I'm the one complaining in the freeway But as someone who dreams I think of the people who come to the state From Illinois and from India And I think they completely replenish My life every day With their bravery This is a question I've been asking Of other authors in the anthology What part of the immigrant's story Do you think is most invisible To the board? The pain I think it takes so much pain It takes so much difficulty to leave home And then to establish one's life In a place as difficult as California By which I mean it's confusing By which I mean it's tumultuous By which I mean it's rude By which I mean it's buoyant And brilliant And vulgar and noisy And then to sacrifice your children To this culture To lose your children to California I know a lot of parents Mexican parents who tell me I came here because I wanted to get a better job I wanted something from my children But I did not want American children And I say well it's a little too late You know, it's a little late And I, you know, you hear these stories From kids in the city Their pain Of living between two pronouns You know, we live at home In these immigrant homes Where we have these plural pronouns The we We are family We are Chinese We are Mexican We belong together And then you send your children To a higher school or Lowell And they are taught to be I people there And the child has to learn A kind of bilingualism How do you come back to the house When your teacher has taught you to be I And suddenly there is This necessity to be we in the house This boy I know in San Francisco Who's now, I don't think he's here I can tell the story He complains to me That you know that his teacher In his high school here in town Is always trying to create Huck Finn in him We want American kids to be like Huck Finn We want them to leave home We raise children to leave home in America We want them to be independent We want them to skateboard past The landscape We want them to be cowboys in America So the kid is always being criticized By his teacher for not speaking up We can't hear what you're saying, Michael Get your hands out of your pockets, Michael Speak up with a loud voice So we can all hear what you're saying So all the boys and girls can hear What you're saying And don't look at the ground when you're speaking He goes home His Chinese father is complaining tonight About how much the gringo is becoming That he's learning this slouch Where'd you get that slouch from Your MTV And take that gum out of your mouth And then the Chinese father says to him Michael says Look in your Chinese father in the eye You know there is so I think sometimes in America We are so oblivious as to what this drama is Even though it is one of the great stories Of our country As great a story as emancipation Or the freedom of the poor To become middle class in this country The story of the dislocated migrant Immigrants And how they have to face this drama Of recreating themselves as eye people Is an extraordinary story That pain is very rarely described It's a secret Maybe an Oprah But that's about it You know I wrote hunger That's not an ad But that book is about pain It's about the pain of becoming middle class And I still get letters from kids I get a lot of, I get an email from kids On Trim Paper Nights Which is another story altogether They usually send me email I don't know how they found my email address They'll send it to Dear Dick They'll say you know Our teacher has assigned your book It's a very good book they say This is a question that our teacher has asked What do you think they'll say But every once in a while You get this email from this kid Who is bleeding And it is a he or she Sometimes they're in high school Sometimes they're older Lots of letters from Chinese kids I would guess that if I have My largest ethnic group that I get It's Chinese kids Especially girls I think in some other life I was a Chinese girl Because I know something about them And they know something about me And nobody talks about it That pain Americans are not good on pain Somebody, Anthony Lewis Anthony Lane Lake Movie review in the New Yorker Lane, you know You were talking about some hideous cartoon movie Recently he said it's all about He said it like all of these movies You were seeing these days It's all about destruction But there's nothing about pain Nobody knows how to talk about pain In America Take a leave Take a pill Change the subject Get some therapy I have two questions I'd like to End on in talking about California One is a quotation from Joan Didion's recent Where I was from Which I did not like Can I say that? Oh good You know that Joan Didion was such a She was the first great writer Of my childhood Writing in Sacramento And I was reading her In places like Holiday Magazine I didn't know you could write about California And that the East Coast would pay attention In that way And there was Joan Didion And those California essays That she wrote from the 50s to the early 70s Were the most remarkable essays I still think that I You know I go to these Santa Monica dinner parties And I always get seated next to Joan Didion heroin One of the heroines From one of the novels And she's She doesn't have very much to say And she's like this And I yearn to sit next to Joan Didion The essayist Who is smart And funny And ironical But I always get next to the Joan Didion heroin But go ahead I would interrupt you As someone who's Actually thought about California She said California has remained In some way impenetrable to me A wearying enigma As it has to many of us Who are from there We worry it Correct and revise it Try and fail to define our relationship to it And it's relationship to the rest of the country Do you find California a wearying enigma? No I find it Constantly a challenging place It would be easier to live in New Jersey But I find California Very expensive A very cruel place many times But I don't find it enigmatic in that way No I don't Well the statement I wanted to end with Is one I think you've heard before It's an adaptation Of a quotation that Samuel Huntingdon Made about America And it's this Critics say that California is a lie Because its reality falls so far short of its ideals But they're wrong California is not a lie California is a disappointment But it can only be a disappointment Because it is also a hope Does that resonate? Yes it does No of course it's a Every dream is a lie I mean every dream is Of its very nature Unable to be realized in daylight But the drive The energy that comes from places like California That attract people who don't quite belong In other places Who are uneasy in the places where they grow up And want this other place to reinvent themselves Of course it's going to Will always be this satisfaction That finally it didn't amount to what one wanted I remember telling my father Who had achieved a kind of success in California He had by the time In 30 years He had moved from the working class To a comfortable new class position My mother was working then For Governor Edmund G. Pat Brown As a typist until she got fired For typing one day correctly The wrong word She heard on the dictophone Reference to Urban Guerrillas And she typed Guerrillas G-O-R in the letter And it offended the sensibilities of the people In Sacramento But I remember remarking to him He had this house with five bedrooms Three televisions, two cars Look at all you've achieved I said And he repeated exactly what I said But in this voice it said Look at all of I've achieved Meaning Look at the little I've achieved And there is this There is this sadness in California I tell you it's all over And it's not only in the tender line It is in It's in Bel Air at dinner parties Late at night But it is still the most interesting place To be Because I don't know any other place In the world that accumulates And still attracts so many dreamers And I don't know who would be more interesting Frankly than Howard Hughes and Walt Disney And Lucille Ball These people are very good to have As one's neighbors Thank you very much Richard Rodriguez We have about ten minutes To take questions To take your questions And Joan has already started running Toward someone Your hand was up I'm sorry all the way in the back Pardon me No my brother has seen it And they've repainted the house And slightly changed its details But he assures me that it is still the same house Thank you Please Can I not make a question But make a comment Disagreement You speaking maybe about Well I'll say it another way Coming from California California is the only bearable place In the United States Maybe New York But you really you can be an eighth Well what I'll say I've never heard anybody use the word Of God and so on I decided I have to go to the south And find out who those people are But that's not what I'm trying to say Anywhere in Nebraska Anywhere else Here you can be what you are And sure there's anti-Semitism Anti-that But I don't think because if hypocrisy You don't feel it I think it's really that people Just have to live with each other And if they don't They just stay on the other side Of the street And I think Europeans will agree with you You know when I meet kids I lecture a lot in this country At different universities And when I meet Californians In New Jersey or in Nebraska I ask them what they miss most And they say they miss the world Or burritos Or the sense of otherness Which is part of their everyday life Is really part of being Californian You grow up with that sense Of the cosmopolitan environment And that's as true in Modesto As it is in Santa Monica This is a remarkable place For drawing so much of the world To itself I've been really honored To be part of the discussion group Here in the library Using the book And the issue of hypocrisy Has come up a lot And the wealth versus the pain And poverty And in addition to that hypocrisy As I listened to our governor last night Saying close the borders In Mexico I just feel this contradiction Of that we're celebrating diversity And we're trying to celebrate All these stories through this project And yet this is what's on the news Last night I'm wondering your comments And if you'll do an essay on that Well, this is also California You know that there's this I remember You're not going to like this story Because it's friendly to then Governor Bush of Texas I remember doing a piece some years ago When Pete Wilson was governor And Wilson had this You know we as Californians Mexico is still Very recently One person in three People in San Diego had never been to Mexico Had never gone that extra 30 miles It's not like there is a Mexico There's Tijuana Then there is the desert Whereas Texas has the advantage Of having had a Mexico there And having a long complicated Road However difficult that relationship is Texans know that Mexico is there So I remember at the same time That Pete Wilson was pushing 187 Governor Bush in Texas Said we will never have 187 in Texas And I thought I did a piece on why Tex-Mex, the cooking Is so much better than Cal-Mex Taco Bell That California really is without That dialectic With the south And you still hear it Even though Governor Schwarzenegger Was enormously popular Among young Hispanic male voters They saw in him And in his wonderful pronunciation Of California This wonderful immigrant voice It's too bad that he said what he said He apologized or retracted it today Sir go ahead Joan I was wondering if you found People you know at the mother parts Of Country coming to California Being transformed I'm thinking of my brother-in-law When I first met him This was in Denver And then they moved out to California Then they moved to Florida And I noticed When he came to California And he became more liberal And we had seemed like We had more things to talk about And then he moved to Florida And every time I go to visit Florida he's even more reactionary I saw him the last time I saw him Was on election day And that was a trial In Florida You know what I see a lot Is I see a lot of Californians Who have left California Gone to Phoenix or Vegas Or Florida Looking for another California Because it got too expensive here And so forth And many times they become sort of Phoenix and because they saw Los Angeles expand into Orange County And then Orange County expand into Riverside County They go to Phoenix And they see it all over again And they become sort of doomsday Sort of Old Testament prophets You know, warning everybody That if you keep building this way Along the front range in Colorado You're going to get Bakersfield You know There is a particular transformation Of the Californian as they move elsewhere And it's almost as though we become The opposite of what we are We become this very very sour person Elsewhere What you say I've seen Many times In places like Phoenix and Las Vegas I actually just spent a year and a half In Las Vegas and I was just like What you're describing and I was saying What are you people crazy But I was going to say that I've always noticed that attention In your writing between your Latino identity and your gay identity And I was wondering I've noticed that I've lived in Mexico And I've seen the gay community Among Latinos really grow Especially here It's almost becoming as institutionalized As white gay life With lots of clubs I'm just wondering how you've Reconciled those over the years Is it becoming easier for you Because it seems like you're Wondering has it gotten easier For you to be both Latino And gay at the same time Yes and I mean yes But also not I came out in the 1980s When friends of mine were Dine of AIDS Friends still die I had two friends just last year Dine of AIDS And death is very much a part Of my experience of eroticism It's the question one asks About beautiful bodies Whether they are HIV or not I mean you I'm surrounded by that Nightmare And so in many ways I'm a wounded man I don't know how to say that I know we're supposed to be You know everybody's supposed to be up You're supposed to be I'm proud of being gay I really like being gay I just think it's terrific Being Mexican too And I'm really happy And you know life doesn't feel that way Life feels like There's a stench Will's leg when it was Really corrupt At St. Mary's Hospital It was so diseased That the nurses didn't want to change the bandage He was dying It was close to death And several of us would do that And we would change the bandage And I remember the sight of his leg And remember what that looked like At the end I would sometimes smell that smell In the air Sometimes I'd go buy a bakery And I would get that scent Sometimes it's more mysterious Than that it would just be The exhaust from that car Or something like that Then I'm gay But then I'm very Mexican too Because you know I live in this Golden world Where being gay means You know having biceps And attitude And suffering is not exactly Part of the agreement You know And Mexico has filled me With a sense of tragedy It's just a part of my makeup A sense of the tragic That things come to an end That things come undone So I'm a Mexican And I'm a gay man But as I told Charlie Rose When he asked me if I was a gay writer I said I'm a Maros writer I don't know what it is I cannot imagine What it is like to be a gay writer And I don't think I want to be around One of those people As they write every morning Maybe Ogden Nash was a gay writer I have no idea We have time for one more You choose Joe As a native of New Jersey I appreciate the references You know and I think it's interesting Because New Jersey in some ways Is more like California Because it's got a lot of immigrant Absolutely A lot different than when I was growing up there And one thing I was just curious about Is in a lot of ways I consider myself More San Franciscan Or maybe a Bay Area person Because so much of the Southern California experience And I was really kind of alien To the world that I live in But How so Freeway oriented And Just a very different set of values I think And not just Southern California But it's a central valley Those are like the real boom areas Of the state And I feel like the Bay Area In some ways You know there's more emphasis On environmental values And preserving quality of life And that type of thing And some of those same tensions That you were talking about But what I always wanted to ask you about Is if you live in San Francisco And you're a family Well you can't really live in San Francisco Because it's not affordable If you're looking for a house And also what you have That I think is an interesting phenomenon Is that the suburbs are becoming More diverse than the city That's the word And she's got Hawaiians across the street Blacks next door The other sides are from Zacatecas The ice cream man has a turban And little guys Push plate the carts Suburbs were way different than that When I was growing up in Jersey You didn't have first generation Migrant kind of people there And to me that's just An interesting phenomenon And I didn't know if you had any thoughts No I think that's exactly right In Jersey I go back to Jersey City University In Jersey City On a regular basis Because I'm so fond of the students there And it's a reciprocal relationship But I know what you're talking about New Jersey has become like that Sacramento has become that way too I go to Sacramento And there's this enormous Ukrainian population now In Sacramento And Laotians And Cambodians And it's quite unlike anything I knew as a child Where it was the Braskans and the Iowans Now the world is there I remind you I remind you it was Karl Marx Who predicted this The old Kami predicted this That with the gold rush You would have coming to California For the first time in history People from all over the world He said when they came to the gold Fields in California They had never come to one place They had never come to one place Americans, Australians, Chinese French, German, Yankees Mexicans, Chileans, Peruvians Africans Every corner he said There was all of this conflict As they came together Everybody got locked into this traffic jam But he said From that would emerge a great civilization He was talking about you He was talking about us He was talking about the work in progress Write it Thank you That's a great note I just have some thank yous I want to once again thank the San Francisco Public Library And especially Joan Jasper And Marcia Schneider For being our host this evening I want to encourage you to sign up For the council's free newsletter And the back on the table And please, I know they're pesky But those little evaluation forms that were If you would hand them If you'd fill them out We actually do read them They're vital to us And hand them out in the back We'd be most grateful Books are going to be available for sale And Richard I think is going to be signing some And I want to again thank Richard Rodriguez For a wonderful conversation