Mainstream U.S. culture fosters an oppositional relationship with gay culture by luring gay men and women into mimicking its thinking by “halving the world into us and them,” even as it attempts to keep gay culture divided by making it difficult for gay men and women to acknowledge one another openly.14
The experience of being in the closet is akin to the experience of cultural hybridity—the feeling of being caught between cultures—that ethnic Americans undergo when they are taught to deny the parts of themselves that lie outside of mainstream U.S. culture. Tayo, the protagonist of Silko’s Ceremony, remembers what he was told at the V. A. hospital: “the white doctors had yelled at him—that he had to think only of himself, and not about the others, that he would never get well as long as he used words like ‘we’ and ‘us.’” Like many late-twentieth-century Native American writers, Silko conceives of Native American culture and history as primarily communitarian in nature and therefore set against the grain of the American national culture’s celebration of individualism. So Tayo thinks to himself that he has “known the answer all along, even while the white doctors were telling him he could get well and he was trying to believe them: medicine didn’t work that way, because the world didn’t work that way.” Kingston’s Wittman Ah Sing finds himself in an analogous position in Tripmaster Monkey, sitting in the unemployment office watching “a cartoon about going for a job interview” that gives him hints about “good grooming,” which turn out to include the following pieces of advice: “COME ALONE to the interview. DO NOT take friends or relatives with you.” Wittman immediately realizes the nature of the message implicit in these dicta: “An X through my people. Adios, mis amigos…. An American stands alone. Alienated, tribeless, individual. To be a successful American, leave your tribe, your caravan, your gang, your partner, your village cousins, your refugee family that you’re making the money for, leave them behind. Do not bring back-up.”15
What Monette, Silko, and Kingston are confronting here is the logic of ontological individualism that has been so dominant within U.S. culture. As I argued in the first chapter, American theorists of individualism from Ralph Waldo Emerson to John Rawls have typically sought to shift the ground of inquiry from culture and society to the individual, thereby translating moments of social choice into moments of individual choice. And one of the most powerful claims that U.S. culture makes about individuals is that sexuality, ethnicity, and cultural hybridity are contingent, incidental, and ultimately irrelevant aspects of individual identity.
Richard Rodriguez’s controversial autobiography, Hunger of Memory (1982), makes a powerful case for the applicability of this model of identity-formation to individuals designated as minorities by mainstream U.S. culture. Arguing that class is the true dividing line in U.S. culture, Rodriguez argues that middle-class Americans of all races and ethnicities who are in a position to think like individualists should do so. His opposition to both bilingual education and affirmative action (which have made him unpopular among Chicano activists) is based on the belief that such remedies are unnecessary for middle-class individuals who have the opportunity to participate in America’s culture of individualism.
The benefits—and the potential losses—that result from this stance can be seen most poignantly in Rodriguez’s rendering of what is the classic situation for the ethnic minority subject: being forced to choose between the culture of his parents and the dominant culture that surrounds him. Having summoned the courage to raise his hand and speak up in class, Rodriguez tells us that “at last, at seven years old, I came to believe what had been technically true since my birth: I was an American citizen.” This gain, however, entails a loss: “the special feeling of closeness at home was diminished” by “the dramatic Americanization” that he and his siblings underwent: “gone was the desperate, urgent, intense feeling of being at home; rare was the experience of feeling individualized by family intimates. We remained a loving family but we were greatly changed. No longer so close; no longer bound tight by the pleasing and troubling knowledge of our public separateness.”16 For Rodriguez, the loss is completely offset by the gain. It is never, for him, really a question of choosing between two equally viable cultural groups. There is only one group—the dominant group—and it is one to which he does not belong. In other words, Rodriguez presents himself from the outset as “tribeless,” and he conceives of emergence not as a struggle between cultures, but as a process of personal metamorphosis. It is in this shifting of the ground of analysis from the group to the individual that Hunger of Memory proves itself to be a classic account of American self-making, a contribution to the Emersonian and Rawlsian traditions of American liberalism.
The last pieces of advice that the cartoon offers to Wittman Ah Sing deal with the question of language: “SPEAK clearly and answer questions honestly. BE business-like and brief.” The cartoon exhorts its audience to present a public self that is likely to succeed in mainstream culture, and it is the development of this public self that Rodriguez charts in his autobiography. In arguing against bilingual education, Rodriguez writes: “Today I hear bilingual educators say that children lose a degree of ‘individuality’ by becoming assimilated into public society…. But the bilingualists simplistically scorn the value and necessity of assimilation. They do not seem to realize that there are two ways a person is individualized. So they do not realize that while one suffers a diminished sense of private individuality by becoming assimilated into public society, such assimilation makes possible the achievement of public individuality.” The achievement of this public individuality has a price: “it would never again be easy,” Rodriguez tells us, “for me to hear intimate family voices.” But it is a price that Rodriguez is willing to pay, though he nonetheless tries to minimize its cost, naturalizing this split between private and public individuality by ascribing it to the “inevitable pain” of growing up: “The day I raised my hand in class and spoke loudly to an entire roomful of faces, my childhood started to end.” Childhood is indeed full of pain, and children often find themselves at odds with their families, but what is different about the particular pain that Rodriguez describes is that it is the product of the dominant culture’s attempt (in Wittman Ah Sing’s phrase) to put an X through his people. Almost in passing, Rodriguez tells us that “the bilingualists insist that a student should be reminded of his difference from others in mass society, his heritage.” But “heritage” is a subject upon which Rodriguez chooses not to dwell, setting it aside without further comment. The price for the achievement of his public individuality, then, is alienation from family, ancestors, and heritage. What Rodriguez fails to points out is that it is only members of minority cultures who must pay this particular price.17
In seeking to portray class as the primary determinant factor in American life, Rodriguez must deny his identity as an ethnic hybrid (and, though this is not made explicit in the text, his identity as a gay man). He is thus forced to inflict damage not only upon himself—by sacrificing his “private individuality”—but also upon his family. In a later essay he describes the beginning of his Americanization as his “emergence as a brat” and admits that he “determined to learn English, initially, as a way of hurting [his parents].”18 Rodriguez’s autobiographical writings provide a case study in the ways that America’s minority cultures internalize the damage inflicted upon them by mainstream culture. There is a tension in Rodriguez’s text between the argument he is making—about the primacy of class over ethnicity as a determinant of identity—and the ethnically inflected episodes that he uses to illustrate that argument.
Hunger of Memory is indeed an emergent text: it transforms American liberalism because it asserts the right of a person of color to participate in the American liberal tradition, a right recognized in theory but not yet fully realized in practice. Paradoxically, however, the text can assert this right only by denying the relevance of its author’s racial, ethnic, and sexual identity. In other words, the text is forced to abjure the very qualities that make it emergent. Because Rodriguez’s aim is not to transform mainstream U.S. culture but rather to detail a strategy for becoming part of it, he seeks to naturalize what other authors might represent as a process of cultural damage. Rodriguez chose to describe the hardships he has undergone as fundamentally similar