States on The Border

By Richard Lacayo

TITLE: DAYS OF OBLIGATION: AN ARGUMENT WITH MY MEXICAN FATHER

AUTHOR: RICHARD RODRIGUEZ

PUBLISHER: VIKING; 230 PAGES; $21

THE BOTTOM LINE: The spiritual divide between the U.S. and Mexico can be harder to cross than the real one.

IN THE 1950S THE YOUNG RICHARD Rodriguez left Mexico with his parents to settle in California. Now the Mexican border runs through his brain. On one side is an old country more imagined than recalled, an ur-land of fatedness and tragic history. On the other is a bright, forgetful America, where every sunset takes the day with it. For years Rodriguez has been negotiating the divide in a mood of deep melancholy. In 1981 he published Hunger of Memory, an account of his longings en route through the parochial schools of Sacramento and the university campuses of Stanford, Columbia and Berkeley. Still puzzling over his mixed identity, Rodriguez has moved on to this book, a suite of loosely joined reflections on Mexico and the U.S. by a man making border crossings in his head.

Now a journalist and essayist for the PBS MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour, Rodriguez knows that Americans grasp their history lightly if at all. In a multiethnic society, it's a cultural disorder that has had its advantages. Historical amnesia has been useful to the 12-step process of national amalgamation. Forget just a bit who you were, and it was easier to become someone else -- an American.

But pressure to put aside the past has also been at the heart of every immigrant's dilemma. Rodriguez knows that too. He finds it harder to accept that some Mexicans have moved into the future themselves. At a restaurant in Mexico City, a young professional woman advises him to stop moping over the Madonnas and lost villages of his parents' generation. Undaunted, he treks to Tijuana, watches illegal immigrants make the nighttime dash across the border, tours the old Spanish missions in California. At home in San Francisco he watches AIDS carve his friends to the bone. The epidemic brings northward a Latin preoccupation with death, but Rodriguez suspects that the greater cultural thrust is on the side of the U.S., "the more powerful broadcaster."

Is this how the two nations will be reconciled, with sitcoms and rock videos flooding south while Mexicans move northward to shed their past in exchange for a line of credit? Regarding his young nephew in California, poised to start life in the shopping-mall civilization, Rodriguez wonders. "I think it is Mexico I see in his eyes, the unfathomable regard of the past, while ahead of him stretches Sesame Street."

The author is not a man for policy proposals. Bilingualism in the classroom and the voting booth he calls "pragmatic concessions to a spiritual grievance." Rodriguez's contributions to U.S.-Mexican relations are memory and mixed feelings. Being a writer, he fashions them into a book, one not unlike D.H. Lawrence's account of his travels in Italy. Both men weighed the Anglo's materialism and will-to-power against the lotusland succulence and tragic sense of the Latin world. But Lawrence, who loved Italy and detested the industrial revolution, was forced to a hard conclusion: "It is better to go forward into error than stay fixed inextricably in the past." Rodriguez stops short of conclusions. His writing drifts into prose poetry, beautiful but exasperating, full of gaudy patches and arabesques that turn in endlessly on themselves. "You are too circumspect," a dying friend tells him. True enough. Yet his book is at its most powerful when Rodriguez is stalled in his lyric misgivings. What reader can say no to suspended judgments that are hung from such bright lines of language?