Admission as submission: Richard Rodriguez's autobiographies as an epistemology of penetration

My dissertation is a study and contextualization of the three ethnic autobiographies of Chicano public intellectual Richard Rodriguez: Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (1982); Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father (1992); and Brown: The Last Discovery of America (2002). Since the publication of Hunger of Memory, Rodriguez is identified as being against such political programs as Affirmative Action and as being a "poster boy" for right-wing politics. I argue for a more critical approach to Rodriguez's controversial role in Chicana/o and Latina/o literature and culture. I explore Rodriguez's evolution as an assimilated, American character and author and highlight how his struggles are exemplary of postcolonial subjects' negotiating their Americanization. Assimilation produces discourses that I analyze as particular to a colonized subject's identity that is at once typically American and that is yet always outside the definition of what it means to be "authentically American." Building on Octavio Paz's "penetration paradigm" and expanding the implicitly queer reading of la chingada and el rajado, metaphors defined in Laberinto de la soledad (1950), in my project I articulate how the concepts of penetration, rejection, and ambivalence have become strategies of resistance that postcolonial subjects manipulate in pursuit of (in)authentic Americanism.;Spanning the U.S.-Mexican border, Rodriguez discusses the role that the impure, brown subject assumes in historical and contemporary narratives of nation formation. He presents a colonized American subject who openly defends and explores various ambiguous processes of acculturation and assimilation. Instead of adhering to Paz's notion of an impervious national masculinity, Rodriguez narrates his experiences as prototypical of the life of a culturally mixed, deviant and dark subject who acknowledges the benefits and losses of openly admitting to inhabiting an ambiguous space in American society. Recognizing the ambivalent relationship that nations and individuals have in regards to penetration and rejection becomes crucial in the epistemology of penetration that interprets admission as submission. Through a close reading of Rodriguez's autobiographies, I identify a subtext of desire: a desire for memory and for the creation of alternative narratives and alternative spaces for postcolonial American life and subjectivity.