THE INAUTHENTIC ETHNIC Richard Rodriguez's Brown and Resisting Essentialist Narratives of Ethnic Identity

This essay explores Richard Rodriguez's resistance to narratives of "ethnic authenticity" through a reconsideration of how we read Rodriguez's texts subsequent to the radical message of cultural and racial miscegenation celebrated in Brown (2002). Rodriguez's meditations on identity in Brown resonate with Gloria Anzaldua's theorization of mestizaje, and trouble the waters of any monolithic notion of ethnic identity. A close reading of Rodriguez's critique of ethnic authenticity illuminates his underlying philosophical worldview as well as why he takes - notoriously so for his critics - some of the stances that he does. An analysis of both its eternal recurrence and the logic by which it operates helps scholars to understand how and why lingering traces of ethnic authenticity can creep into conceptualizations of even such ostensibly anti-essentialist theorizations of identity as hybridity. Whether resistant or revisionist in spirit, rereading Rodriguez acknowledges the irredeemable complexity of identity - intersubjective, contradiction-laden, and brown.