From the Archive (2002): Richard Rodriguez

Billy Schraufnagel

English 410b, Stepto

March 10, 2002

Short Essay

Looking Across at You

There are two faces on the front cover of Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father, by Richard Rodriguez. They have the same features, but they are inversions of each other. One looks from the upper left-hand corner down to the bottom right. The other, turned upside-down in the lower right, looks up and to the left. The face on top seems normal, the bottom one strange. Flip the book around, and the opposite becomes true: familiar becomes foreign, and vice versa. Both faces look at each other, but their eyes never make contact.

In his introduction, Rodriguez introduces another pair of famous faces, the classical Greek masks of comedy and tragedy. Both sets of faces– those on the book cover and the classical masks– define the same tension, one that defines the core of Rodriguez’s autobiography. One way he frames this tension is through the lens of Catholicism versus Protestantism, with Catholicism playing the tragic part and Protestantism the comic. Examining the conflict between the two faiths enables Rodriguez to identify strengths and weaknesses in both. He ultimately desires to describe the conflict, acknowledging the impossibility of any real resolution: “I believe the best resolution to the debate between comedy and tragedy is irresolution, since both sides can claim wisdom” (xviii).

The argument begins with what Rodriguez dubs “the sixteenth-century tear of Europe” (xvi). Fittingly, the written word “tear” admits two meanings. Was it a “tear” (/tir/), a drop of saltwater from the eye of a sorrowful Europe? Or was it a “tear” (/teer/), a ripping of Europe’s cloth into two new and independent religions? Whatever the pronunciation, the “tear” gave birth to the Protestant and forever changed the meaning of the Catholic.

Catholicism endured in Southern Europe, and Spain quickly became the foremost bearer of the Catholic faith. Spain sailed across the ocean to convert Indians, “to draw continents together as one flesh” (20). They aspired to extend the Catholic (a word whose Greek root means “universal”)^[1] community around the world, and the Indians provided eager subjects for conversion. In fact, Rodriguez suggests that through time they became even more Catholic than the Spanish missionaries: “By the waters of baptism, the active European was entirely absorbed within the contemplation of the Indian... Catholicism has become an Indian religion” (20). The Catholic faith moved northward from Mexico City, a “communal” impulse that “dragged the gargantuan trap of European civilization in its wake, extending the Great World” (120). Spanish missions sprang up across California, and Californian landmarks were given Spanish names.

Northern Europe “turned its back on the South” (177) and became Protestant. Rodriguez’s emblematic American Protestants are the Puritans who settled in New England. Unlike the Spanish, the Puritans “regarded the Indians from a distance as inimical to their purpose” (115). Their path was west, not north. Every step west meant rejecting (and forgetting) whatever remained in the east: “The Protestant, the westward, the individual impulse favored amnesia; left all behind” (121). When they got to the end of the land, California, they found the place filled with Spanish names and Spanish-speaking Mexicans.

Protestants won California from the Catholics as a result of the Mexican-American War. When they arrived, they found the abandoned remains of twenty-one Catholic missions, missions that had been at the center of Spanish colonial life: “The mission was not only a church, it was a living community... These long rooms are the rooms where the padres taught the Indians the agriculture of Europe or the music of Europe or the mythology of Europe” (108). Four decades later, in the 1880s, Protestant groups began to restore the mission buildings, claiming the interests of “historical preservation.” Mission restoration continued throughout the twentieth century, and up to the time when Rodriguez writes his book.

Rodriguez visits these restored missions at the end of the twentieth century, and he regards them with a cynical eye: a Catholic eye. He sees falseness in these polished caricatures of Spanish colonial life. The churches have become ornaments, he notes, and they are rarely, if ever, used for actual mass. Instead, they have become museums with gift shops and parking lots, adorned with informational plaques and props from an alien culture devoid of their original significance: “A secular altar guild that will not distinguish between a flatiron and a chalice, between a log cabin and a mission church, preserves only strangeness” (125). The Protestants, lacking a history of their own, manufactured a “myth of California” (121). This myth has nothing to do with the actual past or actual memory; it is another example of the Protestant amnesia, Rodriguez writes, “the triumph of history over memory” (125).

Hidden in this need to manufacture history, Rodriguez locates a weakness in the Protestant point of view. A culture that defines itself by destroying the past is bound to eventually face the prospect of its own destruction by the future it is working so hard to create: “It was not sentimentality that recalled the missions; it was not faith. It was fear of oblivion. If the missions were allowed to sink back into the earth, then what hope for the enduring influence of any Californian? Why live here at all?” (123). Protestantism cannot answer these questions unless it creates a history for itself; not the actual history of its true past, for that would be to erase the rebellion of its past. The Protestant instead leans on the romance of crumbled buildings.

Protestants are vulnerable, Rodriguez writes. To cover that vulnerability, they reach towards the ideas of Catholics: “their impulse to preserve was already admitting the Spanish side. The notion that the past implicates the future and that we are not alone on the landscape– these ideas were planted in California by Franciscans” (126). In addition, the past that they longed for was a Catholic past, a myth of community and stability. This longing surfaces elsewhere in the Protestant experience, not just in the attempt to create history. Rodriguez finds the same impulse in the organization of the evangelical Protestant church:

I sense among evangelicals a longing for some lost Catholic village, some relief from loneliness. Perhaps this is inherent in all Protestantism; the reason why Protestants enjoy such intensely communal worship... The small Protestant church revives the Catholic memory of the countryside... In the small church, each soul has a first name again. One hand grips another’s hand against anonymity. Hymns resound over the city, wild with grace, and the world becomes certain and small... (198)

The Protestant whose ideology rejects the past and rejects the community, before long, will find himself desperate for history and hounded by loneliness. Rodriguez finds evidence that Protestants in America are now beginning to realize this, and he suggests that some are now turning, en masse, to Catholic wisdom: “Environmentalists, for example, question the wisdom of unbridled individualism. Environmentalists proclaim the enlightened imperative of a We” (197). Behind the individualistic protestant lies a fervent need for the sense of history and shared experience. Behind the comic mask lurks a yearning for the communal identity engendered by tragedy.

That tragedy is in the books of St. Augustine, whom Rodriguez paraphrases: “we are restless hearts, for earth is not our true home. Human unhappiness is evidence of our immortality” (26). The tragedy is also in the paintbrush of Elizabeth Blake, the Catholic anthropologist and artist who spends a year restoring old paintings on the walls of Mission San Luis Rey. She prefers to work alone, and has no desire to “memorialize herself” (118) for future generations; she would rather be anonymous like the Indians who came before her. The tragedy has always been in Rodriguez’s life, encased within his father’s smile. That smile is ancient, and it belongs to everybody; it represents the deepest dreams of the American Protestants: “My father knew what most of the world knows by now– that tragedy wins; that talent is mockery. In the face of such knowledge, my father was mild and manly” (219). It is the face of Catholicism imagined by Protestant longing, and it rejects everything that Protestants hold sacred.

As attractive as the Catholic tragedy appears to Protestant isolation, Rodriguez reminds us that the gaze across the cover of his book moves both ways. Catholicism is a protective religion, but as an over-protective mother, Rodriguez suggests that “Catholicism would remind men that they are helpless; treats men like children” (182). The church is built upon the past, and it assumes things will always remain the same. It does not adapt to changing circumstances, and it expects the worst in its constituents: “Catholicism is just there, a way of life that need never come to a head... [it] assumes it is the nature of men and women to fail” (182). The result of all this, Rodriguez implies, is a culture of passivity, immaturity, and inaction. He characterizes the Catholic faith as “voluptuous, feminine” (181).

Protestantism, by contrast, is masculine, and he feels its call to action: “I am inclined forward: I want the years coming to improve me, to make my hand a man’s hand and my soul a man’s soul” (184). He recalls reading Milton’s Paradise Lost and being raptured with the figure of Satan, the powerful anti-hero. The advent of Protestantism Rodriguez associates with the rise of the novel, a literary form that probes individual psychologies and describes worlds in which single actions can have sudden impact: “Suddenness is holy!” (183). As opposed to the anonymity and timeless feeling of a Catholic like Elizabeth Blake, Protestantism offers the promise of “man-made history” (187). Protestant leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. give him faith in “heros” (187). Rodriguez writes of his boyhood idol, Larry Faherty, and the activist decade of the 1960s as hallmark examples of Protestant America’s hypnotic power. Protestantism’s most basic appeal for Rodriguez indicts the Catholic faith from whence he comes: “American Protestants... advertise an end to failure” (183).

Even if Protestantism cannot make good on that promise– Rodriguez’s father warns that failure is inevitable– American optimism creates an assertive spark that Rodriguez claims many Catholics are drawn to. “Now Latin America has taken the novel as its genre,” Rodriguez writes, and he explains he himself “craves narrative” (179-180). In other words, he argues that many Catholics want to begin their lives with blind hope. They want freedom from Catholic cynicism, they want to believe without worrying whether that belief is justified. Just as some North American Protestants seem to turn towards a Catholic sense of community, Rodriguez cites evidence that more and more Catholics opt for Protestant optimism: “The rate of conversion leads some demographers to predict Latin America will be Protestant before the end of the next century” (176). The mere possibility of rebirth is enough to convince them.

When Rodriguez attended a Catholic grammar school in America, the bulk of his classes were “exercises of worldly ambition– spelling, reading, writing– in preparation for adulthood in comic America” (221). The school, though, Catholic, realized that children growing up in a Protestant society must learn how to think and act as individuals. They must believe that actions they take may have a public, even historical, impact. After all, that is the self-proclaimed purpose of education in America. However, for thirty minutes a day, the nuns at Rodriguez’s school taught religion class. Religion class dampened the need for spelling, it foreshadowed tragedy: “The story of man was the story of sin, which could not be overcome with any such thing as a Declaration of Independence” (221). These two lessons taught side-by-side every day fed Rodriguez’s developing mind, and he remembers that “The nuns never reconciled the faces of comedy and tragedy and they never saw the need” (221).

As a boy, Rodriguez dreamed of becoming an architect (219). In his book, he does not attempt to reconcile comedy and tragedy as the nuns would never do; rather, like an architect, he designs a structure that holds both. He hangs both masks on a wall next to each other, and allows them to gaze at each other. The comic face, Protestantism, is lonely and drifting. It looks at the tragic face and sees the possibility of community and history. The tragic face, Catholicism, is sluggish and listless. In the smiling face of comedy it sees the possibility of possibility, the certainty of motion. At this point in history, Rodriguez sees the Protestant pulling the Catholic,  and the Catholic pulling the Protestant. Both faces pull Rodriguez; they create him, the architect.

^[1]“catholic” derives from Greek, katholikos meaning “universal or general” according to Meriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary Tenth Edition, 1996