Reversing the National Myth in Richard Rodriguez’s Brown.

Abstract

There is little doubt that the American West has come to be historically associated with certain features that are deeply engraved in the country’s consciousness. Since the very birth of the nation, the West has functioned as a space of freedom and opportunity in which the individual could undergo the kind of selftransformation that was not possible in the more constrained and “Europeanized” context of the Atlantic seaboard. But what would happen if the traditional myth were reversed and we looked at the history of the continent from the opposite end—that is, from the shores of California? How would such myths as the Western Hero and Manifest Destiny be transformed? This is the arduous task that Richard Rodriguez sets for himself in the second half of Brown: a meditation on how the country will need to re-invent itself in the 21st century in terms of movements south-north, and west-east.