Converting the church: Richard Rodriguez and the browning of Catholicism.

Walker, Madeline Ruth

Near the close of brown, his 2002 extended autobiographical essay, Richard Rodriguez describes the tension between being gay and being Catholic. First, he notes that to be a gay Catholic is often viewed as paradoxical, or somehow inauthentic:

 I am often enough asked how it is I call myself a gay Catholic. A
 paradox? Does the question betray a misunderstanding of both
 states? No, not really. What you are asking is how can I be an
 upstanding one and the other. When you slice an avocado, the pit
 has to go with one side or the other, doesn't it? Weighting one
 side or the other. A question about the authenticity of the soul, I
 suppose. Or the wishbone--some little tug-of-war; some tension.
 (224)

Rodriguez then goes on to explain that he has come to depend on the tension that results from being gay and Catholic. This irreconcilability is itself a part of his daily experience, constitutive of what he thinks of as "brownness," a capacious term that Rodriguez uses to connote everything from sodomy and impurity to religious syncretism and racial mixing. He writes that he was born Catholic, then asks, "Is homosexuality, then, a conversion experience? No. I was born gay" (224). To be born both gay and Catholic means that Rodriguez must struggle with the contradiction of belonging to a church that rejects his sexual identity--his love for his partner is at odds with the institution that mediates his faith and love for his God.

Rodriguez makes it clear in this quotation that he is an essentialist when it comes to his sexual identity and his religion. In both instances he claims to have been born that way, and the implication is that change is impossible. His essentialism and the resulting irreconcilability (gay Catholic) are not remarkable: Rodriguez uses his "brown identity" (and I borrow from his own connotation of brown as impure, contradictory) as a way of pushing against the Catholic Church. This push from within the controlling institution is a tool that subaltern identities have always used to try to change the forces that oppress them. More than twenty years ago, Chicana lesbians Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua began to push from within their ethnic Catholicism to critique the church's homophobia (in Loving in the War Years and Borderlands respectively), so Rodriguez's impulse is hardly new. What is remarkable, however, is that his essentialism is at odds with Rodriguez's claims, throughout his oeuvre, to be a champion of assimilation, conversion, and change in general. While he often celebrates the gains made by assimilation, conversion, and--by extension--brownness, he stops short at his own ability to change his religious belief. Thus, a contradiction exists between Rodriguez's philosophy and his experience of religion. Why does Rodriguez insist on the essentialism of his own religion, yet celebrate the religious conversion of his Mexican ancestors and call on others to change--swallow--new cultures and religions? Te purpose of this paper is to explore this contradiction, provide a partial answer, and suggest that as Rodriguez cannot himself convert away from his faith, he is converting--or "browning"--the Catholic Church.

After establishing a critical context, I explore this contradiction in Rodriguez's work by charting his thoughts on assimilation and conversion and detailing his experience of Catholicism, following these topics as they develop through his three books and in interviews. What I view as a philosophical contradiction in Rodriguez's work is partially resolved by his unusual understanding of what it means to assimilate or to convert. I notice a significant difference between the usual meaning of being absorbed by the dominant culture and Rodriguez's conception of absorption of that culture. Finally, I demonstrate how Rodriguez uses his own position as gay Catholic to attempt to convert or "brown" the church. In other words, if Rodriguez is unwilling to convert from his essential Catholicism, he is willing and able to exert pressure on the church to change, both through his "lived religion" (David Hall and Robert Orsi) and through his rhetoric. I will show how Rodriguez uses one very effective rhetorical technique to brown the church: he positions himself as a martyr to love and shows himself to be superior to the church fathers.

I. Critical Context

The publication of Brown: The Last Discovery of America crowned twenty years of Rodriguez's celebration of assimilation, a journey he initiated with the controversial Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (1982) and punctuated with Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father (1992). While Rodriguez's books are not religious conversion narratives, they are conversion narratives in a broad sense because they chart not only Rodriguez's assimilation or conversion to Americanness through language and education but also his fascination with America as a nation always undergoing conversion to brownness. Raymund A. Paredes reads Hunger of Memory as a conversion narrative of the old order, in the same league as Mary Antin's The Promised Land (1912), where ethnicity is subordinated so that the autobiographer can become truly American (281). Days of Obligation can be read as a celebration of Mexican Indians' conversion to Catholicism, because Rodriguez interprets that submission as a powerful and empowering ingestion of alterity. Brown explores the trope of brownness as the ongoing accomplishment of erotic mixing in an increasingly miscegenated America. Rodriguez's public voice, then, celebrates assimilation and, with it, impurity, brownness, and change.

Hunger of Memory: Te Education of Richard Rodriguez garnered enormous public attention: praise from mainstream critics and criticism from Chicano/a readers who not only felt betrayed by Rodriguez's stand against affirmative action, bilingualism, and ESL education tracks but were upset by what they perceived as rejection of Mexican American and Chicano culture. Hunger eventually became a standby of freshman courses in American literature/autobiography, as it seemingly advertised the successful assimilation of a bifurcated ethnic self into an American man, its title echoing that quintessentially American autobiography, Education of Henry Adams (1918). Hunger is a series of loosely connected essays, containing Rodriguez's reflections on education, language, class, religion, race, ethnicity, and affirmative action. In this first book, Rodriguez describes his childhood in a Mexican American family, his Catholic upbringing, the experiences of learning English from Irish American nuns in parochial school, of reading hungrily, of attending university and graduate school, and of studying Renaissance literature. He explores his feelings about his body and his ethnic self and his rejection of university job offers because of his feeling that he did not want special treatment as a "minority." Rodriguez once categorized his three books as one on class, one on religion, and one on race. The opening chapter of this first book of the trilogy is titled "Middle Class Pastoral," thus establishing a sense of looking back, nostalgically, at his working-class past.

Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father, Rodriguez's book on religion, follows this pattern of collected autobiographical essays, this time including Rodriguez's travelogue of Mexico and California missions, meditations about Catholicism versus Protestantism, and an essay on aids and homosexuality in San Francisco. Brown: The Last Discovery of America (2002) is Rodriguez's extended discussion of brownness, impurity, and desire as fully materialized in race--or, more specifically, skin colour. From his opening consideration of Alexis de Tocqueville's emblematic scene of a white child, brown Indian, and black slave, meant to represent erotic desire for the other, to his quotation in the final chapter from Jose Vasconcelos's 1925 La Raza Cosmica, which heralds an era of "fusion and mixing of all peoples" (quoted in Brown 225), Rodriguez is interested in America as a nation (thankfully) turning brown.

The publication of Hunger induced a critical backlash by Chicano/a critics who went on the defensive because Rodriguez dared to defy the central expectation of normative ethnic autobiography: that the speaker be a spokesperson for and celebrant of his or her culture. Tomas Rivera faulted Hunger as a "humanistic antithesis": he considered Rodriguez's divorce from his native tongue and culture as "anti-humanistic" (107) and the product of an "inferiority complex" (115). Jose David Saldivar got personal by claiming that Rodriguez suffered from "snobbery and bad taste" ("School" 308), and Norma Alarcon charged Rodriguez with "historical naivete" because of his "refusal of ethnicity, except as a private phenomenon" (142).

Since the first wave of critics faulted Rodriguez for rejecting Chicanismo in Hunger, other critics have been foregrounding Rodriguez's ostensibly postmodern sensibility either by treating him as a writer of multiple identities or troubling the initial assessments that focused on culture and race. Laura Fine, for example, believes that critics have tended to misread Rodriguez because they look for one identity whereas Rodriguez "rights" the idea of a singular identity by "rewriting" a multiplicity of identities. Henry Staten shows that when Rodriguez rejects Chicano identity, he does so for complex reasons that stem both from contradictions in Mexican history and the cluster of class-race beliefs of his parents. Juan de Castro sees Rodriguez as "a theorist of the borderlands" like Gloria Anzaldua and Jose David Saldivar (102), although he also importantly shows that Rodriguez's association with the borderlands does not automatically make him a defender of multiculturalism. (1) Nidesh Lawtoo compares Rodriguez's "epistemology of in-between identities" to Luce Irigaray's This Sex Which is Not One (220).

My own intervention is to tackle what I have identified as a critical gap in scholarship--the exploration of Rodriguez as a religious writer and a writer about religion. While his second book, Days of Obligation, takes its names from the obligatory feast days of the Catholic religion, and one of the essays in Hunger is concerned with Rodriguez's religious development, these three books have not been examined as religious texts. This absence is somewhat surprising, considering Rodriguez's controversial position as a gay Catholic and his strong interest in world religions. (His book in progress, heralded by a January 2008 Harper's article, "Searching for God in the Holy Land," is about the three great religions "of the book" and the vital role that deserts play in these religions.)

Paul Elie, one of the few critics to acknowledge Rodriguez's strong faith, labels Rodriguez--along with Dave Eggers and Czeslaw Milosz--a crypto-Catholic writer (35). But the problem with this formulation is that there is no secret about Rodriguez's Catholicism, nor has he recently made a secret of his feelings about his position as a gay Catholic. His faith figures prominently in all three of his books, as well as in his journalism and interviews. The only secretive aspect of Rodriguez's faith is that it has been downplayed in literary criticism of his work. The literature on Rodriguez was dominated early by interest in his disavowal of Chicanismo and his stand against affirmative action and bilingualism and later by interest in his ostensible representation of multiple or in-between identities. While the mainstream media (Bill Moyers) and religious scholars (Tomas J. Ferraro, Gregory Wolfe) have taken an interest in Rodriguez's religion, for the most part literary criticism has not. Ferraro notes that Rodriguez's writing about Catholicism "went virtually unnoticed in the controversy surrounding its politics of race and language" (7).

II. An Ethos of Conversion

Many critics note that Rodriguez relies on a binary structure in Hunger of Memory, in which the narrative is constructed around the opposing poles of private/public, Spanish/English, Mexican/American, Catholic/ Protestant, working class/middle class, inauthentic/authentic, tragic/ comic, feminine/masculine. Indeed, Hunger is about Rodriguez's conversion from one pole to the other (except for in the case of feminine Catholicism, to which he holds resolutely). Even though Rodriguez acknowledges the pain of loss engendered by such conversion, his is a celebration of assimilation to American-ness and a measure that sees gains outweighing losses. In his second book, Days of Obligation, Rodriguez also celebrates conversion by approving of the gains that Mexican Indians made by submitting to colonialism. In Brown, Rodriguez's sense of polar opposites gives way to an overriding understanding of the inevitably mixed quality in life, instantiated in the culminating trope of brownness which fully represents his ethos of conversion.

But while Rodriguez champions immigrant assimilation to American-ness--with himself as successful example--and also celebrates the gains made by Indians via Spanish colonialism, I argue that Rodriguez's narrative is about the absorption of rather than by as the critical means of cultural and other transformations. To absorb another's culture assumes a robust self that can take on the other and subsume differences, whereas to be absorbed into or surrender to a dominant culture, losing one's differences, assumes a friable self. Rodriguez's views on absorption provide a third term to Americo Paredes and Gloria Anzaldua's ideas. Paredes writes that the Indians of the Southwest "were absorbed into the blood and the culture of the Spanish settlers" (9); thus, he sees the indigenous peoples as fully assimilated by their colonizers. Anzaldua, on the other hand, claims that the Indian, "despite extreme despair, suffering and near genocide, has survived" (30) and rebels against and rejects the oppression of the colonizer. While Anzaldua allows that miscegenation produced the hybrid mestizo/a, she insists on the defiant cultural survival of the Indian in language, religion, and biology. Rodriguez's version is that the Indians absorbed alterity while retaining their own essence. While this may seem only slightly different from Anzaldua (both writers agree that the Indian survives), it is an important difference. Rodriguez's attitude is powerfully conciliatory rather than defiant; it says, "I won't resist you ... In fact I am fascinated by you and attracted to you . Tat being the case, I think I will swallow you before you get a chance to swallow me." And this attitude, in fact, rhetorically reverses the image of assimilation, which is usually that the dominant nation swallows the immigrant. This attitude constitutes an important but subtle theme that emerges in Hunger and is sustained in Days.

Rodriguez's use of three different images illustrates the continuity of his concept of the (positive) absorption of alterity and his subtle resistance to being absorbed by the dominant culture. First, the "scholarship boy" in Hunger represents an undeveloped self that has not yet learned how to fully absorb the other. Second, Caliban stealing the master's books in Hunger and Days exemplifies both Rodriguez's hungry, all-consuming subaltern but also illustrates his own refusal to be absorbed by theories of postcolonialism. Finally, the image of Indians eating the conquistadors with their eyes in Days of Obligation captures Rodriguez's counterintuitive argument that the colonized had the upper hand because they powerfully absorbed the other. These images illustrate what I mean by Rodriguez's "ethos of conversion": it is conversion that is founded by absorption of rather than being absorbed by the other, and it is important to the final stage of my argument where I discuss Rodriguez's attempted "conversion" of the Catholic Church.

In the second chapter of Hunger, "Achievement of Desire," Rodriguez describes his epiphanic discovery of Richard Hoggart's Marxist study of the working-class "scholarship boy" in Hoggart's 1957 classic, The Uses of Literacy (Hoggart was one of the founders of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies). Rodriguez experiences a sense of eureka when he sees his own alienation from his family in Hoggart's portrait, which describes how certain bright boys from working-class families take on middle-class education and imitate the language of their schoolmasters, while at the same time become alienated from their families and class. Rodriguez identifies with that experience, particularly the sense of oddness in his mimicry of the other. When Rodriguez recalls his years studying Renaissance literature at Stanford and Berkeley, his sense of alienation from that earlier self is evident from the third-person narrative, with which he parrots Hoggart's own prose, producing a double distancing:

"Topos ... negative capability ... vegetation imagery in Shakespearean comedy." He lifts an opinion from Coleridge, takes something else from Frye or Empson or Leavis. He even repeats exactly his professor's earlier comment. All his ideas are clearly borrowed. He seems to have no thought of his own. (Hunger 66)

Later in the chapter, he reflects that to "pass an examination, I copied down exactly what my teachers told me" (73). Like Hoggart's scholarship boy, Rodriguez has become an "expert imbiber and doler-out" (Uses 246). Rodriguez's mimic boy/man does not have the subversive power posited by the "mimic man" of postcolonial theory (V.S. Naipal, Frantz Fanon, Homi Bhabha); his mimicry is purely imitative and dead, without Homi Bhabha's "representation of a difference that is itself a process of disavowal" (122). Rodriguez represents his early self as friable, absorbed by Western literature and education rather than creatively absorbing it. His impersonation, unlike Bhabha's articulation of mimicry, is not "a complex strategy of reform, regulation and discipline, which 'appropriates' the Other as it visualizes power" (Bhabha 122). Rather, it is a brittle conversion to American ways that, rather than engendering power, engenders the contempt of others because he is seen as a fraud: the scholarship boy's listeners "smile--their look one of disdain" (Hunger 66). But this is because the mimic man in Hunger represents Rodriguez's undeveloped self. Rodriguez's mature self is represented by his autobiographical persona--the narrator--who can look back with a kind of removed embarrassment and pity at the scholarship boy. Rodriguez's narrator--with the cool irony of the pastoral's aristocrat looking down/back at the simple peasants--looks down/back at his earlier peasant self. Thus, the mature autobiographical persona/narrator of Hunger inhabits some of the subaltern's power, but it is the power to rhetorically consume and convert (through the absorption of culture) rather than to defy and oppose.

This persona first appears in the opening of Hunger, where Rodriguez writes, "I have taken Caliban's advice. I have stolen their books. I will have some run of this isle" (3). In introducing Shakespeare's character Caliban from Te Tempest, Rodriguez opens a volatile subject without acknowledging its volatility. Caliban has become a central figure in postcolonial revisionism, representing the resistant subaltern who fights both for power and against the perception of his baseness. According to Raymund Paredes and Jose David Saldivar, Rodriguez's figuration of Caliban stealing his master's books as a trope for his own development from a working-class Mexican American into the public intellectual is a toothless one. Paredes and Saldivar see Rodriguez's reference to Caliban as promising the subversive power that Caliban embodies in Calibanic revisionist writers who rewrite Shakespeare's Tempest from the "colonialist subject's standpoint" (Saldivar, "School" 298). (2) But Rodriguez disappoints this promise by not following the expected model of identification with the disgruntled subaltern position: "Richard Rodriguez is not a Calibanic protagonist in [George] Lamming's, [Aime] Cesaire's, and Fernandez Retamar's sense; rather, he has become, in Renato Rosaldo's words, 'an icon of collaboration with the English-only movement and the conservative right wing' [28]" (Saldivar, "School" 308). Both Paredes and Saldivar are upset by what they consider to be Rodriguez's misappropriation of this symbol of subversive power. Paredes writes that Rodriguez "seems to be aligning himself with the revisionist interpreters of Caliban" but "reveals himself to be neither a revisionist critic nor a defiant Caliban" (291), while Saldivar prickles over the fact that Rodriguez only "pretends to join Caliban's school of cultural resistance" ("School" 306) and in fact does the opposite by submitting to the dominant culture. Even more telling is Paredes's anxiety that Rodriguez is "willfully disconnected" from postcolonial theory: "The problem is not so much that Rodriguez fails to embrace this body of work but that he seems indifferent to its existence" (294).

Chicano critics such as Paredes and Saldivar feel betrayed because Rodriguez refuses to participate in the expected arguments that would ground him in the history of the oppression of his people. In 2004, Rolando Romero joined this critique of Rodriguez's putative misappropriation of Caliban. Romero claims that Rodriguez uses Caliban metaphorically, "not in the finger-pointing mode of Roberto Fernandez Retamar but in a white man's burden way" (457). Romero goes on to complain that the "calibanic mode in Rodriguez deceives, arrests, lures into a resolution that is nothing but an agreement with the status quo" (457). In reading Shakespeare without intervention from postcolonial theory, Rodriguez becomes somehow deceptive, a pretender. But why cannot Rodriguez claim and absorb Caliban in his own fashion, without the intercession of postcolonial theory?

Paredes and Saldivar's essays both appeared in the 1992 anthology, Multicultural Autobiography, and thus they just miss commenting on Rodriguez's further mention of Caliban in his 1992 Days of Obligation, mention which might have caused them further irritation. (Although it is worth noting that the publication of Days substantially shifted Saldivar's and other Chicano critics' view of Rodriguez, who was reassessed as non-essentialist, sympathetic to his Mexican roots, and a new writer of the "border." [See Jose David Saldivar Border, Stavans, and de Castro].) In Days, Rodriguez writes in reference to the trope of Indians eating the conquistadores with their eyes (to be discussed shortly): "Only Shakespeare understood that Indians have eyes. Shakespeare saw Caliban eyeing his master's books--well, why not his master as well? Te same dumb lust" (Days 23). Here, Rodriguez's Caliban is a gay "dumb" Indian lusting after his master; Rodriguez's Caliban swallows not only the master's literature but also his genitals. While erotic desire for the other is the controlling motif of Brown, the "eating with the eyes" trope in Days, including this mention of Caliban "eyeing" his master, anticipates Rodriguez's later theme of lustful absorption.

In an interview with Hector Torres, Rodriguez says that he identifies with Caliban, because--like Caliban--he has "stolen" culture:

 If you can steal the other's culture, if you can take it, if you
 can swallow his langue, if you can learn Japanese, if you can learn
 French history, if you can take this, you are going to win. Because
 the principle of merely preserving one's culture, which is part of
 my problem with the Chicano culture, is that it seems to me to be
 much too interested in preservation and not enough in acquisition.
 Acquisition is the great modern principle. (176)

Again, the Caliban trope offers a springboard for Rodriguez to describe his sense of omnivorous mastery and triumph as an American--a notion that irritates and puzzles some critics. Rodriguez continues to confound the postcolonial expectation that Caliban be represented in a particular way and by only particular subjects. His own refusal to be absorbed by postcolonial theory and imitate the postcolonial writer's use of Caliban instantiates his own brand of defiance and his insistence that he will absorb rather than be absorbed by. (3)

In his second book, Days, Rodriguez uses the trope of Mexican Indians eating the conquerors with their eyes, which shows a further development of absorption of rather than by. Te book opens with Rodriguez's visit to Mexico, land of his ancestors, and his rumination about Indians and survival and how Indian-ness matters to his own identity as an American. First, Rodriguez sets the Indian in a passive role, to be appropriated by the Spanish: "Te Indian stands in the same relationship to modernity as she did to Spain--willing to marry, to breed, to disappear in order to ensure her inclusion in time; refusing to absent herself from the future. The Indian has chosen to survive, to consort with the living, to live in the city, to crawl on her hands and knees, if need be, to Mexico City or L.A." (24). This follows the same logic (in reverse) of the old adage about American Indians: they were too proud to submit to the dominant culture (that is, intermarry) so they have been decimated. But what seems like passivity, nay even humiliating weakness (crawling on one's hands and knees), turns out to be strength, as Rodriguez's next paragraph makes clear: "I take it as an Indian achievement that I am alive, that I am Catholic, that I speak English, that I am an American. My life began, it did not end, in the sixteenth century" (24). Rodriguez loves paradox; here he commends the Indian's strength, but that strength resides in the Indian willingness to be appropriated by another culture. Tat appropriation also resulted in miscegenation, which Rodriguez sees as ultimately humane: "The success of Spanish Catholicism in Mexico resulted in a kind of proof--a profound concession to humanity: the mestizaje" (20).

But it is not so simple. Next, Rodriguez performs his rhetorical magic: that Indian achievement has not been in its passivity or its receptivity but in its triumphant ability to morph and survive. Rodriguez looks around him as he negotiates the streets of Mexico City and realizes that each face looks like his own: "Where, then, is the famous conquistador? We have eaten him, the crowd tells me, we have eaten him with our eyes" (24). Norma Alarcon explains that Rodriguez is "play[ing] here with a Mexican idiom applied to those that look too directly at another: 'Comerselo con los ojos'" (146). This trope suggests several things at once. To eat the conquistador is to digest him, making the Indian eater the more powerful agent, reversing the usual eating trope of assimilation. Use of the Mexican Spanish idiom here further suggests boldness, even defiance, in the close gaze. Furthermore, the expression includes an "element of desire, of wanting to possess what is watched, in a sexual sense or otherwise, with a more general possessive intent." (4)

But to eat the colonizer can also be related to transubstantiation during the sacrament of Eucharist; to eat Jesus' body and blood in the wafer and wine is to take on some of Jesus' mystical power and holiness. While this correlation between eating the conquistadores with the eyes and the Eucharist may seem merely speculation, Rodriguez asserts linkages between eating the body of Jesus Christ, conversion, and absorption of the other in an unusual comment during an interview with Paul Crowley:

 There may be a feminine impulse within colonial history that we do
 not understand. It's not as simple as two males butting heads--one
 wins, the other loses. Perhaps there is such a thing as seduction.
 Conversion. Perhaps cultures absorb one another. If it is true that
 the Franciscan padre forced the Eucharist down the Indian's throat,
 maybe she forgot to close her mouth. Maybe she swallowed the
 Franciscan priest. (260)

Rodriguez refers to the "feminine impulse" that he uses to describe the Catholic Church's seduction, of not letting go of her people. Thus Rodriguez figures the feminine as tenacious, seductive, and absorbing. In this instance the female Indian swallows not only the wafer of the Eucharist, but the priest as well, giving substance to Catholicism's hint of cannibalism in the Eucharist and the cannibalism of Caliban (an anagram of cannibal), who lusts after his master (Days 23). (5)

Rodriguez is also furthering here the idea initiated in Days, that the power of the colonized lies in her ability to cannibalize and absorb alterity. In this quotation, conversion is equated with seduction, which again is linked to his larger thesis in Brown where sexual desire is always pushing in the direction away from purity and toward mixture, impurity, and conversion (change). For the Indians to eat the conquistadors, then, suggests that they ingest the power, language, religion, and culture of their European colonizers and appropriate that power, language, religion, and culture without losing themselves. Moreover, this expression suggests that, rather than submitting sexually to their conquerors, it was the Indians who were the seducers (which accords with some versions of the Malinche story, in which the Indian seductress betrays her people by partnering with Cortes and then shares power with him). Rodriguez asks us to look at contemporary Mexico City from Malinche's eyes:

Look once more at the city from La Malinche's point of view. Mexico is littered with the shells and skulls of Spain, cathedrals, poems, and the limbs of orange trees. But everywhere you look in this great museum of Spain you see living Indians.

Where are the conquistadores? (Days 23)

To eat with one's eyes is to ingest intellectually, aesthetically, and erotically: to swallow the other through a piercing gaze without losing one's self and to eject the detritus (shells and skulls) while the self lives on. Rodriguez understands assimilation as absorption of language and culture that supplements rather than replaces, making the subject stronger.

Rodriguez announces, after his translation of "comerselo con los ojos," that Mexico City is "the capital of modernity, for in the sixteenth century, under the tutelage of a curious Indian whore [Malinche], under the patronage of the Queen of Heaven, Mexico initiated the task of the twenty-first century--the renewal of the old, the known world, through miscegenation" (24-25). Here, absorption is rendered specifically in terms of miscegenation, which can be linked directly to his own claim that he owes his existence to "an Indian achievement" (24). Thus, his life as an English-speaking Catholic American is owed to the Indian's powerful absorption of European culture and religion and her willingness to interbreed for the sake of survival.

While Rodriguez's inversion of the usual understanding of assimilation and conversion--absorption of rather than by the other--helps somewhat to resolve the contradiction between his assimilationist side and his essentialist side, there lingers a certain inconsistency of thought in Rodriguez's work. Rodriguez is fascinated by "[b]rown children" with "[m]ixed soul," those products of interfaith marriages such as the "young woman from San Jose" who is "the daughter of a 'New York Jew' and an 'Iranian Muslim'" (Brown 202, 203). But while he is fascinated by this phenomenon and sees it as proof of victorious brownness, Rodriguez is himself an upholder of unmixed Catholicism. In other words, his theory applies to others, but in his own life as a homosexual, Rodriguez preserves the purity of his Catholic faith, a faith that is unlikely to be compromised by children of potentially mixed religion because it is improbable that Rodriguez will reproduce.

III. Rodriguez's Catholicism and the Conversion of the Church

In the opening paragraphs of this paper, I quoted Rodriguez on being born gay and Catholic and wrote of the ways in which his dependence on the tension between these two identities is part of his experience of brownness. As Mario Garcia shows in his recent book, Catolicos, Chicano Catholics--like subaltern identities everywhere--have often used their religion to resist the oppression of the institutional church. Similarly, Rodriguez uses his experience as a gay man to resist the homophobia of the Catholic Church. In this section, I will explain how Rodriguez's conception of his religion as biologically hardwired and unchangeable motivates his desire to "convert" the church into which he was born.

Rodriguez's commitment to his Catholicism comes through powerfully in "Credo," the third chapter of Hunger of Memory. The visceral experience of childhood Catholicism is a key to Rodriguez's lifelong commitment to the church. Rodriguez's sense that he cannot leave Catholicism, that it is in fact hard-wired into his self, is seeded by these early, primal childhood experiences that are at once visceral, sensual, and aesthetic. In "Credo," Rodriguez describes his immersion in Catholic life during childhood: "Living in a community of shared faith, I enjoyed much more than mere social reinforcement of religious belief. Experienced continuously in public and private, Catholicism shaped my whole day. It framed my experience of eating and sleeping and washing; it named the season and the hour" (80). It is impossible, in the experience that Rodriguez goes on to describe in detail, to separate religion from culture, or a religious sphere from a secular sphere; religion is culture, and there is nothing outside of religion.

It is not only his parents' beliefs that have penetrated Rodriguez's life; the sensuality and eroticism of the Catholic Church imprint him in deep and exciting ways and seem to be "brownly" mixed up with homoeroticism: the "marriage" of nuns to Christ, the suffering of St Sebastian, the dizzying, "mucous perfume of white flowers at the celebration of rebirth" all "touched alive some very private sexual excitement; it pronounced my sexuality important" (84). Rodriguez admits that the "Church [ ... ] excited more sexual wonderment than it repressed" (84). (6) This potential for excitement by repression and reprobation is connected to Rodriguez's rhetorical position as gay martyr to love (to be discussed in more detail toward the end of this essay). While he is angry at the church's position on his love and attraction for his same-sex partner, there is also value in the hidden, the mysterious, the repressed, the private, and this adds a frisson to his experience as a sexual transgressor of church doctrine.

Rodriguez's Catholicism is cemented in his second book. In an interview, Rodriguez says, "My most powerful connection to Mexico comes through Catholicism, and so I wrote Days of Obligation, which is really a book about religion and my sense of the tragic in America, a country that does not admit the tragic sense of life. [...] And many people didn't respond to that book, because who cares about Catholicism and tragedy in a world that's becoming techy-Buddhist?" (quoted in Wolfe 55). In Days, Rodriguez makes clear that his loyalty for the Latin mass has much to do with commonality. His argument against bilingualism in schools is modified and extended to apply to the mass; mass held in a variety of languages simply encourages separation of Catholics and postpones Americanization, while a mass in Latin would extend the "knowledge of union, the mystical body of Christ" (italics in original 196).

Moreover, much of Rodriguez's affection and loyalty to Catholicism is due to its emphasis on community and the mediation of the priest, as set against the lonely individuality of the Protestant. Rodriguez visualizes the Catholic Church thus:

The prayerful life of the church is a communal achievement, prayer going on like the tide of the sea. Te implication of Catholicism is that man is powerless alone. Catholicism is a religion of mediation. Te Church is our mother [.] Catholics are children. Catholicism may be administered by embarrassed, celibate men, but the intuition of Catholicism is voluptuous, feminine, sure. (Days 181)

Rodriguez continues to be attracted to what he sees as the feminine, communal aspect of Catholicism not least because he sustained the serious loss of home life when he became a "scholarship boy," as detailed in Hunger, which created a gulf between him and his parents and their culture. In other words, the steadfastness of his Catholicism may be inversely proportionate to what is perceived by many Chicano/as as his lack of loyalty to home, family, language, and culture. Catholicism stands in as an abstract home and mother to Rodriguez, who views his alienation from his own Mexican-American home as a necessary step in his Americanization.

Because he cannot change his religion, Rodriguez's solution is to change his church. Te synthesis or reconciliation of this dialectic in Rodriguez's work is his recent critique of the Catholic Church in writing and interviews. While he does not articulate it in these terms, I believe his critique instantiates an attempted conversion or browning of Catholicism through "lived religion" as a gay Catholic. In Days, Rodriguez figured the browning of Catholicism in terms of skin colour, predicting that by the twenty-first century, Catholicism will have been subsumed by Latin America and brownness and will have "assumed the aspect of the Virgin of Guadalupe" (20). The browning of Catholicism enacted here takes meaning from Rodriguez's conception of sodomy as "among the brownest of thoughts" (Brown 207) and the paired conception of his gay Catholicism as "brown" (224). Browning suggests a tainting of the church, but in Rodriguez's world this is a good thing because it acknowledges the already impure and paradoxical content of both life and his Catholic faith.

Rodriguez and his partner's long and continuing participation in the Catholic sacraments during weekly mass demonstrate his belonging to the Catholic Church (email communication 15 November 2007), despite the fact that church doctrine rejects his sexual identity. In this way, I argue, religion is performative; Catholicism changes through Rodriguez's participation within the church as a gay man and through his writing about those experiences (his version of "lived religion"), just as the performance of Mexican-American folk or popular Catholicism (home altars, emphasis on Our Lady of Guadalupe) have changed the church over time (see Garcia 251-75).

"'Lived religion,' Robert Orsi concedes, "is an awkward neologism," but he likes it "because it recalls the phrase 'lived experience' used by existentialists for men and women 'everywhere where [they are], as Sartre has written, 'at ... work, in [their] home[s], in the street'" (7). His own prime example of lived religion is the everyday miracle of the "Bronx Lourdes," a replication in the North Bronx of the Lourdes grotto, where Catholics come to sample the "precious liquid" which is actually nothing more than New York City tap water (3). This instance of Catholics deciding what they believe is holy through their own practices is an example of lived religion as an appropriation of authority. While the Vatican may scoff at the holy water of this faux Lourdes, Catholics from all over America visit the springs and through their observances grant it a kind of holiness. If some of the content of Catholicism resides in the authority of the Magisterium, some of that content must, too, reside in what faithful Catholics actually do in their everyday lives.

Orsi's example serves as an introduction to my own consideration of Rodriguez's lived religious experience as a gay Catholic. I propose that this experience--but particularly his writing and talking about it--is changing or converting Catholicism. Te conversion to be sure is not the stuff of Saul-to-Paul drama, or the quick change of Vatican II, but rather the slow accretion of marks made by lived religion that shifts patterns of religious practice over time. In some religious traditions, surrender is a valued constituent of conversion, one characterized by "submi[ssion] to the authority of a guru, teacher, institution, or other form of authority that will guide the convert's actions, associations, and beliefs" (Rambo 132). I suggest that institutions, too, inevitably submit to conversion by the people simply because institutions cannot control the way that believers interpret, observe, feel, and perform their faith, and it is in this gap between doctrine and lived religion where change occurs and also where doctrine and tradition are conveyed and disseminated. As Ferraro frames this discrepancy between doctrine and practice, the Catholic Church generates "forms of worship [...] yet knows not how to sanction [them]" (13).

The figure of Juan Soldado (or John Soldier in English) is an excellent example of an unsanctioned form of worship; Soldado has become the saint of illegal border crossings for many Mexican Catholics, protecting the passage of immigrants from Mexico to the U.S. and assisting them with becoming legal Americans. Te worship of saints is foundational to the Catholic faith; however, the Church refuses to acknowledge this saint, "overlooking] Soldado in even its most preliminary canonization decisions" (Leon 548). The church's neglect of "Saint" Soldado "has not discouraged Mexican and Chicano devotion to him" (548), which illustrates the fertile gap between church doctrine and lived religion. Te change via "lived religion" that I am discussing in relation to Rodriguez has the added authority of literature. Like other Catholic writers such as Flannery O'Connor and Tomas Merton, Rodriguez changes and even subverts the face of Catholicism through that writing. While papal edicts may not be affected by Rodriguez's writings, readers' perceptions of what it means to be Catholic are changed by his words.

While the Catholic Church "presents an image of a divinely prescribed hierarchical institution whose teaching is constant and immutable [.] from an historical perspective it is evident that change in doctrines and practices has been a feature of the church since earliest times" (Dillon 34). Michele Dillon furthermore underscores these changes in the church as always in response to societies' changing contexts:

 The church hierarchy's emphasis on an immutable tradition
 obscures the fact that the church hierarchy redraws the
 boundaries of Catholicism in response to changing historical,
 political, and cultural contexts, and that in this process it is
 responsive not only to political elites and anonymous social
 forces (e.g., the Enlightenment) but to the circumstances and
 traditions of the communities (the laity) that comprise the
 church. (34-35)

While the changes listed in the previous paragraph suggest that the church is becoming more flexible in the twentieth century in response to society's relative liberalization, some of her shifts represent resistance to change. One current instantiation of that resistance is the seven new sins, unveiled in March 2008, which were supposed to show the relevance of the Catholic Church as it responds to contemporary ethical challenges, such as pollution and drug abuse. However, the inclusion of birth control--a very old taboo--on the list seems to illustrate that the church needs to again register its continued resistance to widespread use of birth control by Catholics.

As for its doctrine regarding homosexuality, the Catholic Church has moved from what in contemporary America would be considered a tolerant policy on same-sex love to a much more proscriptive and damning attitude. While current Catholic catechism sees homosexual acts as "acts of great depravity," Yale historian John Boswell's groundbreaking research, published in 1980, showed that the early church (prior to the fourteenth century) tolerated homosexuality and accepted passionate same-sex friendships (Dillon 37-40; Boswell 200-02). As European society narrowed its views on sexuality, Christianity followed suit (Boswell 127-28). In other words, the church did not initiate the taboo on homosexuality but followed the mores of contemporary society.

Twentieth-century American Catholicism, then, inherits the anti-homosexual doctrine of early modern Europe, but historical change from liberalism to conservatism shows that--once again--the church can and will change. While attitudes toward homosexuality were overwhelmingly negative during the 1970s and 1980s, a poll published in 2001 shows that, beginning in the early 1990s, "Americans appear to be gradually becoming more accepting of homosexuality, independent of shifts in demographics and cultural ideological beliefs in the population" (Loftus 780). A more recent study (2008) by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life showed that 58 percent of American Catholics "believe society should accept homosexuality" (Kuruvila). In other words, Catholics, as members of the wider American population, are becoming more liberal in their attitudes toward homosexuality. Te church--while recalcitrant on this issue now--may eventually soften in response to its believers, in the same way that it has responded in the past, as Dillon cites above. This seems to be the expectation implied in Rodriguez's attitude: given time, societal pressure, and the lived experience of Catholics like himself, the church will come around.

The Catholic Church current doctrine deems that homosexuals deserve compassion because they do not choose their sexual orientation but are, rather, victims of it; they are nonetheless "called to chastity," because the only acceptable sexual union is that between married men and women. Article 2359 of the official catechism of the Roman Catholic Church reads that "By the virtues of self-mastery that teach them inner freedom, at times by the support of disinterested friendship, by prayer and sacramental grace, they can and should gradually and resolutely approach Christian perfection" ("Roman"). (7) In other words, if you are gay in the Catholic Church, you are tolerated, pitied, and expected to renounce your sexuality by living the life of a celibate. Clearly, lived Catholicism cannot be contained by those strictures: there are many publicly homosexual Catholic Americans who are not chaste, and Rodriguez's position is of course not unprecedented. Numerous books that break the silence about gay Catholics as well as gay priests and nuns have been published, among them Donald Boisvert and Robert Goss's Gay Catholic Priests and Clerical Sexual Misconduct: Breaking the Silence in 2005, Mark Jordan's The Silence of Sodom: Homosexuality in Modern Catholicism in 2002, and Rosemary Curb and Nancy Manahan's Lesbian Nuns: Breaking Silence in 1986.

Moreover, DignityuSA is a longstanding group formed by lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered Catholics who are working to maintain their Catholicism and positive sexual identities. Michele Dillon's 1995 study of the Dignity/Boston chapter, formed in 1972 as part of DignityuSA, shows how participants in this group "rework [Catholicism's] sacramental rituals in ways that affirm the validity of a gay or lesbian Catholicism" (116). Te group is not allowed to use Catholic Church facilities, so they use a Protestant Church to hold weekly mass (117), presided over by gay Catholic priests, some of whom have been prohibited by church authorities to celebrate mass because of their public homosexuality (132). What is striking about Dillon's findings is that the majority of these participants, like Rodriguez, feel a biological compulsion to remain Catholic; they feel that Catholicism is an essential(ized) part of their identities just as their sexuality is. Despite the fact that the homophobic church will not sanction their "lifestyle," they insist on belonging to the "larger culture, history, and tradition of Catholicism" (118).

Dillon specifically cites the importance of Catholicism for this group as a "community of religious memory" (123); in other words, formative childhood experiences are the girders that keep members connected to this institution that persists in seeing them as outside its margins. Te Dignity/Boston group, then, is a microcosm of American Catholic gays and lesbians who are in the continual process of forging new identities that combine a connection to ancestral Catholicism with an affirmation of their sexuality. As Dillon points out, their ability to do so rests partly on the malleability of religious symbols; while keeping the traditional Sunday Mass, Dignity/Boston priests and churchgoers work "innovatively [...] with and around the traditional Mass liturgy" (133), adding an emphasis on the value of participants ("I am worthy" instead of "I am unworthy") and referring to "Christ's gay and lesbian brothers and sisters" (133). In doing so, they are creating an alternative body of Christ, as the original body excludes them. (8)

But Rodriguez is different from lesbian nuns and gay priests, as well as from Courage and Dignity members. He does not want to remain chaste, create an alternative body of Christ, nor change the liturgy (except, perhaps, back to Latin). Neither does he wish to claim that he is worthy. In fact, he embraces the notion that the Catholic Church is for sinners, losers, and the unworthy. He attends mass at a regular church every Sunday with his male partner. What he does want to do, and is doing, is to insist that he--as a gay man--is a legitimate member of the church and will continue to be a member, despite the church's decree that he is somehow depraved. Rodriguez's local church accepts him and his partner as well as their relationship, even granting the lay minister role to his partner. Rodriguez explains: "My partner and I attend mass every Sunday. Not only are we witnesses to the service, but we are members of the community of worshippers around us. We are already in the church, in other words. So the issue of whether we belong is already mute [sic]" (email communication 15 November 2007). Rodriguez rages at the end of Brown against the orthodoxy of the church that sees same-sex love as a "vanity" (230). It is the Catholic Church's orthodox theology that makes Rodriguez angry; his daily, lived experience of that religion in his local church in fact seems to contradict the abstract theology.

Rodriguez, however, has not always been transparent about his sexual identity. In Hunger, he largely elides discussion of his adult sexuality. In Days he offers hints about his homosexuality (in the chapter "Late Victorians" about the San Francisco gay community), but it is during interviews in the late 1990s and in Brown where Rodriguez finally voices his dissent as a gay Catholic. In the Crowley interview published in 1997, Rodriguez uses as the moral example of a good Catholic, his gay neighbour, a retired Navy officer, who smokes, drinks, and frequents gay bars but also drives old ladies to church and "visits the sick, takes Communion to them" (263). This man is the real substance of the church, even while his presence "the Church will not accept officially" (263). Rodriguez goes on to elaborate how people change the church:

 I accept the fact that the Church, as an institution, is
 conservative--by definition resistant to change. But what that
 means is that the agents for change and growth in the church are
 always the people in the pews, not the cardinals in their silk
 shrouds.

 The shepherd is moved by the sheep, even the sinner within the
 flock. (264)

While this interview, over a decade old, shows Rodriguez's commitment to change from within the church, he seems still unwilling to step into the role of the one who enacts change. It is with the publication of Brown, and his public appearances and interviews surrounding and following that book, that Rodriguez and his partner are embodied as agents of change; the sinful, gay former Navy officer disappears and it is Rodriguez's lover who gives communion to the sick and the old: "I like the idea that my impure lover would be the one giving communion at Mass as a eucharistic minister. That's what the church should be about, it seems to me. We should always hand the Eucharist over to a sinner" ("Conversation" 67).

While here he approves of his lover's role as a eucharistic minister and seems to celebrate the subversive work that lived religion accomplishes with this act, Rodriguez is at the same time angry that the church forces him to experience, as a gay Catholic, a constant tension between these roles. He reveals in a 2002 interview that he wrote part of Brown "in great anger against the Church, which describes my own love as a vanity. At the very end of the book I describe being in bed with a man whom I would die for, a man whom I have lived with for over twenty-five years and who distributes communion to the elderly and the dying. He is as good a man as I can imagine. I am in a rage precisely because the Church is more easy with crimes of hatred than with what he does" (quoted in Wolfe 60). On the last page of Brown, Rodriguez eloquently expresses that aforementioned anger at the church when he ponders the magisterial teaching that his love for his male partner is mere "vanity":

 [R]age fills me, against the cubist necessity of having to arrange
 myself comically against orthodoxy, against having to wonder
 if I will offend, against theology that devises that my feeling
 for him, more than for myself, is a vanity. My brown paradox:
 The church that taught me to understand love, the church that
 taught me well to believe love breathes--also tells me it is not
 love I feel, at four in the morning, in the dark, even before the
 birds cry. (230)

Thus, the powerful closing of this book is an anguished cry about compromised identity and speaks to what I mean by Rodriguez's conversion of the church. Trough his admission of suffering and living paradox, Rodriguez marks Catholicism by refusing to be contained by the church's teaching that he remain celibate, thus becoming a martyr to the principle of love.

IV. Rodriguez as Martyr

Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert points out that Rodriguez sets himself up as a martyr figure both in Hunger and in Days. Rodriguez, "metaphorically flagellated through confession and invoking the mea culpas necessary for absolution, is but an adult version of the child who would 'study pictures of martyrs--white-robed virgins fallen in death and the young, almost smiling, St Sebastian, transfigured in pain' [84]--martyred, but ultimately triumphant" (87). Paravisini-Gebert here suggests that Rodriguez's martyrdom stems from his Catholicism and becomes most pronounced in Days when he figures aids victims as the "collective martyred body," confirming his "philosophy of life rooted in a Catholic upbringing" (88). Paravisini-Gebert's essay appeared before the publication of Brown; thus her own understanding of Rodriguez the gay Catholic rests on his final scene in Days, that of the outsider, expelled from the Garden of Eden because of his sexual transgression: "I, barren skeptic, reader of St Augustine, curator of the early paradise, inheritor of the empty mirror, I shift my tailbone upon the cold, hard pew" (quoted in Paravisini-Gebert 88; Days 47).

That image from Days is countered by the closing scene in Brown, just discussed, where Rodriguez is in bed with his lover, raging at the absurdity of a church that worries more about crimes of love than those of hate. These contrasting images register a movement in the two texts: first homosexuality is figured as a site of sin and barrenness in the eyes of Rodriguez's church, and the hardness of his tailbone against the hardness of the pew suggests not only the unyielding nature of Catholic doctrine but also Rodriguez's alienated discomfort. He is "barren" and alone. At the end of Brown, Rodriguez lies in the comfort of his bed pre-dawn, "listen[ing] to the breathing of the man lying beside me" (229). He continues to position himself as a martyr because he insists on loyalty to the higher principle of love, which the institution has betrayed. However, he is no longer the lone man on a church pew but is lying with the man he loves, speaking thus from the place of his own vulnerability and--paradoxically--power. In the first instance, he sees himself as transgressor of his church; in the second, he sees the church as transgressing his humanity. To be sinned against positions Rodriguez in a more powerful position as martyr than his former position in Days as sinner. His writing then, moves in rhetorical succession that builds the case of the Catholic homosexual martyr, from his childhood sensual appreciation of "the young, almost smiling, St Sebastian, transfigured in pain" (Hunger 84) to the "barren skeptic" on the "cold, hard pew" (Days 47) to the sexually and emotionally fulfilled, yet angry and vulnerable man in bed with his male lover, sinned against by a recalcitrant Catholic Church that preaches love and is yet blind to it.

In a 2007 interview with Mary Ambrose, Rodriguez again affirmed that it is better to articulate one's belief within the uneasy confines of an imperfect church than to shout from outside the church:

I find that in the struggle over abortion, gay marriage, the churches have taken the negative stance in their institutional life. But I find them very consoling. There is much in Christianity that I use, steal, learn from, borrow, depend upon. Its inability to teach me about my experience of love is insufficient for me to walk away from it.

In some way the people in the pew teach the priest--the Church--what it means to love. Te left, like spoiled children, having been accused of being sinful by the Church, they decide the Church is really sinful. That's not useful. More useful is to spend a life of service to a Church that is not easily yours. ("Mystery")

Here, Rodriguez returns to a theme from the 1997 interview, that the sheep can move the shepherd, as well as to his claim that--regardless of its infelicities--he can never leave the church. "I would very much like to be able, as many Americans do, to choose my way out of Catholicism, but I can't," said Rodriguez in 2002. "I consider my Catholicism to be a providential gift, and I don't feel it is a choice" (quoted in Wolfe 61).

As we have seen, Rodriguez views conversion as the absorption of the other, a way of subsuming the power of alterity without losing the self. In the same way, Rodriguez subsumes the power of Catholicism--"There is much in Christianity that I use, steal, learn from, borrow, depend upon"--but retains his own power as a gay man and as a writer. In other words, while martyrdom may be psychologically distasteful to some, it is well to remember that Rodriguez is first and foremost a skilled essayist and that martyrdom and sainthood are two pillars of Catholic ideology. Te way that Rodriguez has positioned himself as more sinned against than sinning is a profoundly strategic move from a consummate rhetorician; by placing his valuation of God's universal love as superior to the church's outdated doctrine about homosexuality, he portrays himself as more sophisticated, humane, and intelligent than the church fathers.

Works Cited

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Alarcon, Norma. "Tropology of Hunger: The 'Miseducation' of Richard Rodriguez." The Ethnic Canon: Histories, Institutions, and Interventions. Ed. David Palumbo-Liu. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995. 140-52.

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Boswell, John. Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.

Curb, Rosemary, and Nancy Manahan. Lesbian Nuns: Breaking Silence. Tallahassee Florida: Naiad Press, 1986.

de Castro, Juan E. "Richard Rodriguez in 'Borderland': Te Ambiguity of Hybridity." Aztlan 26 (2001): 101-26.

Dillon, Michele. Catholic Identity: Balancing Reason, Faith, and Power. Cambridge: Cambridge up, 1999.

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Ferraro, Thomas J. "Not-Just-Cultural Catholics." Catholic Lives, Contemporary America. Ed. Thomas J. Ferraro. Durham: Duke up, 1997. 1-18.

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(1) Juan de Castro's important article argues that we should be careful in associating the post-Days Rodriguez, the defender of "browning" and hybridity, with Anzaldua and other Chicano writers. Rodriguez's theory of hybridity is quite different from that of other border theorists, because--de Castro claims--he uses it to argue for the eventual homogenization (browning) of America that would allow policies based on racial difference to disappear. In other words, Rodriguez presents a challenge because he refuses to be politically pigeonholed; ideas that might seem at first glance to make him fit into the school of thought that prizes cultural difference and multiculturalism in fact do no such work.

(2) Jose David Saldivar's "School of Caliban" was published in a different form (chapter 6) in his book, The Dialectics of Our America (123-48). I chose to discuss the later essay because it appeared in conjunction with Paredes's essay in Multicultural Autobiography. The pairing of these two essays side by side in Payne's anthology seems to me to be an intentional swipe at Rodriguez.

(3) Gustavo Perez Firmat reads Rodriguez's identification with Caliban as equivocal, noting that "the invocation of Caliban in the very first sentence as if he were the author's brutish muse does not square with the book's tone and content" Rodriguez feels liberated, rather than enslaved, "by his assimilation into North American culture" (257). Furthermore, Rodriguez "forsake[s] Caliban by labeling his text 'Ariel's song, an identification subtly reinforced in the title of the first chapter, 'Aria'" (257), thus emphasizing Rodriguez's identification with a more suitable muse.

(4) Email communication with Miguel Murmis, native Spanish speaker, 23 November 2007.

(5) The relationship between Aztec cannibalism and Catholic Eucharist is made explicit by Gloria Anzaldua in her poem "The Cannibal's Cancion" (Borderlands 143).

(6) Camille Paglia, Rodriguez's Catholic contemporary, elaborates on the thrill she felt seeing the overwhelming statue of St Sebastian in her church: "It was a semi-nude young man with a loincloth slipping off his hips, and the look on his face was one of mild pleasure, as opposed to the pain you'd expect if your body were penetrated by all those arrows" (239). Like Rodriguez, Paglia admits to feeling a "sadomasochistic or homoerotic sensuality about the image" (239). See Ferraro's "A Pornographic Nun: An Interview with Camille Paglia" in Catholic Lives, Contemporary America, 238-58.

(7) See also www.vatican.va for the text of "Considerations Regarding Proposals to Give Legal Recognition to Unions Between Homosexual Persons," approved by John Paul II in 2003.

(8) While the Catholic Church does not endorse Dignity, they do sanction "Courage" an apostolate of the Roman Catholic Church that counsels Catholics attracted to the same sex to remain chaste. Their website promises that "By developing an interior life of chastity, which is the universal call to all Christians, one can move beyond the confines of the homosexual identity to a more complete one in Christ" ("Welcome").

Madeline Ruth Walker has a doctorate in English and is currently the Writing Scholar at University of Victoria's School of Nursing. This article is part of her book about religious conversion in ethnic American autobiography to be published next year by the University of Iowa Press.