Richard Rodriguez came to Cal State Bakersfield on April 17 to give the 22nd annual Charles W. Kegley Memorial Lecture.
Raised in Sacramento, Rodriguez is an alumnus of Stanford University and the University of California Berkeley.
He spent two years in a religious studies program at Columbia University, and he studied English renaissance literature at the Warburg University in London.
He has worked with the Pacific News Service in San Francisco, and is a contributing editor for Harper’s Magazine and the Sunday Opinion section of the Los Angeles Times.
He has written an autobiography called “Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez.” He has also authored the books “Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father” and “Brown: The Last Discovery of America.” Rodriguez compared people to crayons in a box.
In his speech, he made reference to a time when the Spanish came to Central America and married or raped the native women, which resulted in children with Spanish and Indian heritage.
Throughout the course of history, said Rodriguez, those children would continue to breed with other races, which symbolized the crayons melting together.
In time, everyone would have every kind of nationality and race within him or her.??Rodriguez said that “in a couple of years, we’re all going to look like Keanu Reeves, and everything will taste like chicken.”
Rodriguez continued with his view that America has a society that’s based on self-interest and personal cliques, while people south of the border live in a society where instead if using the word “I” they use the word “We.”
Rodriguez’s style of public speaking was formal and humorous, as student Juana Robles deduced.
“I thought he was going to be boring like a lot of speakers are, but he was funny,” said Robles.
In conjunction with the forum, two high school seniors were awarded $1,000 scholarships for tying for first place in an essay competition.?
The topic was “Should the state of California pay for undocumented immigrants to attend public schools?” The two winners were Denise A. Del Cid, a senior from Foothill High School, and Angelina Roman, a senior at Highland High School.