SOURCE: Rodriguez, Richard, and Virginia I. Postrel and Nick Gillespie. “The New, New World: An Interview with Richard Rodriguez.” Reason 26, no. 4 (August–September 1994): 35–41.

In the following interview, Rodriguez discusses American culture, cultural assimilation, and his growing pessimism towards multiculturalism.

Essayist Richard Rodriguez, best known for his 1982 book Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez, is usually classified as an Iconoclastic Mexican-American writer with little patience for political correctness. The description is accurate but incomplete. He is, more broadly, a student of America—a subtle and perceptive observer of the tension between individual and community, self and culture, optimism and pessimism, in contemporary life. He is also deeply ambivalent, especially in his more-recent work, including last year's Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father. In that book, Rodriguez struggles with the loss of optimism, both his and California's, since his youth in the 1950s—the discovery...