# Quote — Richard Rodriguez, Brown

> And lately fashion photographers, bored with Rome or the Acropolis, have ventured farther afield for the frisson of syncretism. Why not Calcutta? Why not the slums of Rio? Cairo? Mexico City? The attempt is for an unearned, casual brush with awe by enlisting untouchable extras. And if the model can be seen to move with idiot stridency through tragedy, then the model is invincible. Luxury is portrayed as protective. Or protected. Austere, somehow—“spiritual.” Irony posing as asceticism or as worldly-wise.

- Author: [Richard Rodriguez](https://www.leafyquotes.com/richard-rodriguez.md)
- Book: [Brown](https://www.leafyquotes.com/richard-rodriguez/brown.md)
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Richard_Rodriguez#Brown_:_The_Last_Discovery_of_America_(2003)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/richard-rodriguez/brown/and-lately-fashion

## More from this book

> The other night at a neighborhood restaurant the waiter, after mentioning he had read my books, said about himself, “I’m white, I’m nothing.” But that was what I wanted, you see, growing up in America—the freedom of being nothing, the confidence of it, the arrogance. And I achieved it.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/richard-rodriguez/brown/the-other-night.md)

> It is one thing to know your author-man or woman or gay or black or paraplegic or president. It is another thing to choose only man or woman or et cetera, as the only quality of voice empowered to address you, as the only class of sensibility or experience able to understand you, or that you are able to understand.
>
> How a society orders its bookshelves is as telling as the books a society writes and reads. American bookshelves of the twenty-first century describe fractiousness, reduction, hurt. Books are isolated from one another, like gardenias or peaches, lest they bruise or become bruised, or, worse, consort, confuse. If a man in a wheelchair writes his life, his book will be parked in a blue-crossed zone: "Self-Help" or "Health." There is no shelf for bitterness. No shelf for redemption. The professor of Romance languages at Dresden, a convert to Protestantism, was tortured by the Nazis as a Jew — only that — a Jew. His book, published sixty years after the events it recounts, is shelved in my neighborhood bookstore as "Judaica." There is no shelf for irony.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/richard-rodriguez/brown/it-is-one.md)

> Certainly in Mexico, the Latin American country I know best, white ascends. Certainly, the whitest dinner party I ever attended was a Mexico City dinner party where a Mexican squire of exquisite manner, mustache, and flán-like jowl, expressed himself surprised, so surprised, to learn that I am a writer. One thought he would never get over it. Un escritor . . . ¿Un escritor . . . ? Turning the word on a lathe of tooth and tongue, until: “You know, in Mexico, I think we do not have writers who look like you,” he said. He meant dark skin, thick lips, Indian nose.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/richard-rodriguez/brown/certainly-in-mexico.md)