Mixing it up: Richard Rodriguez on 'Brown'. (Culture Watch).

If you go to a bookstore to buy Richard Rodriguez's Brown: The Last Discovery of America (Viking; see review, page 30), you might find it, as I did, in the sociology section. And, gazing at the author's markedly Hispanic face on the front of the dust jacket, you could find yourself thinking, "Ah, another work about America's fastest-growing minority and its special place within the American scene."

That wouldn't be an absolutely irrelevant expectation, but this book is no more a contribution to "ethnic studies" than Moby-Dick is a treatise about whaling. Brown is a meditation, an extended prose poem or lyrical monologue, with dips into grouchiness and flights into pixilation, that portrays the United States as a country where barriers, categories, and--eventually--ethnicities are constantly infiltrated, undermined, obliterated. For Rodriguez, "brown" isn't just a skin color but stands for the breakdown of categories and the mixing of visions. Any cultural mutant can be "brown."

Such a cultural mutant is Rodriguez himself: A homosexual Catholic who will not be found in the front lines of act-up during their next march into Saint Patrick's. A Hispanic man of letters more devoted to nineteenth-century British literature than to the "magical realism" of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. A consumer of pop culture turned on by Broadway musicals rather than mariachi. A writer who will quote Joseph Addison in the pages of his latest book but not Cesar Chavez. A traitor to his race, you might say. But that label is an example of the very sort of emotional blackmail that Rodriguez believes pressure groups perpetrate.

Trying to come to terms with his own quiddity, Rodriguez tracks down "brown-ness" everywhere. He sees it both as the cause of failure of dual-language programs in Californian schools and as the nemesis of those groups seeking legal recognition of English as the official U.S. language. Kids coming together erotically will also come together linguistically.

He sees "brown" celebrated in America's classic novels, Huckleberry Finn and Moby-Dick, not just because the sailing crews of both books are interracial but because "in American places where water seduced or penetrated the landscape, the promiscuity of the horizon encouraged African Americans who lived near those places to speak the truth about themselves. In New Orleans and Charleston, African Americans often described themselves as 'Creoles' or 'mulattos'...But the landlocked places kept to the shackle of blood-as-fate; color within the lines."

"Promiscuity" is a blessed word in this book, but not as a denotation of sexual license. Rather, it is the force that uncovers the truth about one's real thoughts and desires and talents. Thus, a brown-skinned Californian boy named Richard does become entranced by original Broadway cast LPs even though it may have seemed a very odd source of pleasure for such a boy in such a place. But there you are. And who could have predicted that his pretty sister would go on to win male hearts not in Los Angeles but in Paris with her mexicaine looks and Audrey Hepburn coats? But there you are again. And how come a black singer named Mabel Mercer wasn't specializing in Fats Waller or Duke Ellington when she became the toast of New York in the 1950s but was wowing audiences with the songs of Cole Porter and Noel Coward? Well, she was educated by British nuns who insisted on public-school elocution, and there you are yet again.

But sometimes such promiscuity meets a firm resistance from a society insisting not only on justice but constant political correctness of appearance. At Stanford University in the 1950s, a Yurok Indian named Timm Williams decked himself out in a camp parody of Native American dress and won, at first, great popularity as the mascot of the Stanford Indians football team. But when Native American protestors took action, Williams's act was banished. Rodriguez, who attended Stanford, writes of the Yurok's masquerades as expressions not of ethnic pride or insult but as outbursts of theatrical revelry. He knows another theater queen when he sees one. For him, the protestors were avatars of puritanism, not authenticity or dignity, and puritanism--whether it be the dietary absolutism of the vegan or the intellectual captiousness of the politically correct--Rodriguez designates as the instinctive enemy of "brown."

In fact, not only political correctness but the cultural segmentation so much at large in our culture irritates Rodriguez. Giving a reading at the University of Arizona for an audience that turns out to be mostly Mexican American, the author notices the entirely female audience gathering in the lobby for the next lecturer, a lesbian poet. He wonders, "Why can't I get the lesbians for an hour? And the lesbian poet serenade my Mexican-American audience? Wouldn't that be truer to the point of literature?"

There has been and will be plenty of commentary on Brown's virtues and limitations as political and social forecast but, as a camp follower of the arts, I'm bound to say that Rodriguez is on solid ground when he sees the world of entertainment as a meeting place and a blending place. American art is brown and has been for more than a hundred years.

I think of Langston Hughes, inspired to write the short stories of The Ways of White Folks when he read the Englishman D. H. Lawrence. I think of Duke Ellington creating jazz out of the melodies of Tchaikovsky and Grieg. In jazz, black gives to white gives to black: turn and turn again until the music turns brown.

Consider the following scenes (my examples, not Rodriguez's):

"Finally quit the band at Tom Anderson's to go on the boat--excursion boat called the Steamer Sydney. I joined Fate Marable's band" (Louis Armstrong).

"When people talk about jazz traveling up the river they are paying tribute to Marable....When the boat docked at various stopovers on the Mississippi, the robust piping of the calliope brought thousands of people to the river's edge to hear a music rarely played outside of New Orleans....Among the young white musicians who heard Marable's men were Bix Beiderbecke" (Gary Giddins, Satchmo: The Genius of Louis Armstrong).

Beiderbecke's recording "Singin' the Blues" "had a germinal influence on an entire generation of jazz players, black as well as white. Lester Young wore out several copies of the record, copying the solos note for note" (Grover Sales, Jazz: America's Classical Music).

As a theater buff, Rodriguez surely would not mind my next example. The Method, that technique of acting and teaching acting, is certainly rooted in the practices of the late nineteenth-century Moscow Art Theater, and the several American mid-twentieth-century promoters of the system--Clurman, Strasberg, Adler--are mostly Russian Jews. But, turning to a photo of a bunch of Method actors rehearsing a scene at the Actors Studio in the 1950s, one sees every male body clad in dungarees, leather jackets, and torn T-shirts. What is so soulfully Russian about this apparel? A homage to Brando, yes, but where did Brando get it? From his beatnik pals when he was studying at the New School for Social Research in the late forties. And who were the Beats emulating? Jazz musicians, black and white, longshoremen, street people, con artists, hustlers, motorcyclists. When Russian soulfulness comes to America, it turns into American Soul.

I think of--but does the subject sustain thinking?--the latest Austin Powers movie (Goldmember, made by Mike Myers, a Canadian), which pokes fun not only at the James Bond genre but also at the blaxploitation films of the early seventies, sideswipes science fiction, Hollywood musicals of the fifties, and takes one solid poke at rap and rap videos.

In our culture, brown is here to stay. But is anybody alive who remembers when it was absent?