SOURCE: Stavans, Ilan. “The Journey of Richard Rodriguez.” Commonweal CXX, no. 6 (26 March 1993): 20–22.

In the following review, Stavans offers a negative assessment of Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father.

It is a complex fate to be an American. James Baldwin liked to quote Henry James on the topic: “America's history, her aspirations, her peculiar triumphs, her even more peculiar defeats, and her position in the world—yesterday and today—are all so profoundly and stubbornly unique that the very word ‘America’ remains a new, almost completely undefined and extremely controversial proper noun. No one in the world seems to know exactly what it describes.” The rise of multiculturalism, which perceives the melting pot as a soup of diverse and at times incompatible backgrounds, has made the word “America” even more troublesome, more evasive and abstract. Is America a compact whole, a unity? Is it a sum...