"Immigration and the Role of Hispanics in America" Featuring Richard Rodriguez

FREE Event at CSUB's Dore Theater sponsored by Kegley Institute of Ethics.  Russo's Books will be on hand with Mr. Rodriguez's books available for sale.

RICHARD RODRIGUEZ, one of America's most important essayists and a master of the "personal essay," writes about the intersection of his personal life with some of the great vexing issues of America.

Rodriguez, the son of Mexican immigrant parents, grew up in Sacramento, California. He was an undergraduate at Stanford University. He went on to spend two years in a religious studies program at Columbia. He then studied English Renaissance literature at the Warburg Institute in London and was a doctoral candidate at the University of California in Berkeley.

In 1982, he published an intellectual autobiography, Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez. Widely celebrated and criticized, this book is read in many American high schools and colleges. A memoir of a scholarship boy, Hunger remains controversial for its skepticism regarding bilingual education and affirmative action.

In 1992, Rodriguez published Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father, a "philosophical travel book," concerned with the moral landscape separating "Protestant America" and "Catholic Mexico." Days of Obligation was a runner-up for a Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction in 1993.

In 2002, Rodriguez published Brown: The Last Discovery of America. In a series of essays concerned with topics as varied as the cleaning of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, cubism, and Broadway musicals, Rodriguez undermines America's black and white notion of race and proposes the color brown for understanding the future (and past) of the Americas.

For more information click on http://www.cs.csubak.edu/~donna/kie/rodriguez.html