I was fascinated with his emerging concept that Spanish spoken at home was for expression of his private and true self, whereas the English spoken in school was for projecting a public persona. The process led him toward some sense of shame over their lack of education and associated sophistication. They could be proud of him, but for a long time he had lost the ability to be proud of them. His parents sacrificed a lot for him to get a decent education, but the drive he developed toward success in that realm led to a wedge between him and their culture. He didn’t suffer much from explicit racist incidents, but he internalized significant levels of internal racism from his mother’s linkage of a dark complexion with poverty and manual outdoor labor and his sister’s sense that lighter skin was more attractive. I loved his portrayal of the impact Catholicism had on him in youth, his comfort in the rituals and mystery, inspiration from their high Latin Mass then standard, and serving as an altar boy. He paints a vivid picture of his emotional and mental development as the child of working class Mexican immigrants in Sacramento. I was attracted to this set of “essays impersonating an autobiography” from 1982 due to the warm, wise, and sensitive persona he projected in his reflections on the human condition in his TV segments on Charles Kuralt’s CBS production “Sunday Morning”.
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