Richard Rodriguez Quotes

There are some Chicanos who don't want to be Chicanos - they want to be Mexican-American, Hispanic, or even Spanish.

Explain to me what Italian-American culture is. We've been here 100 years. Isn't Italian-American culture American culture? That's because we're so diverse, in terms of intermarriage.

All American fiction could be classified as immigrant fiction.

Assimilation, not success, is the American end game.

The question of identity has separated from the issue of 'assimilation', having lost much of its drama and become, so to speak, a secular problem.

I'm opposed to wearing headscarves in public places. That's not France. There's something I just don't understand: the people who come to France, why would they want to change France, to live in France the same way they lived back home?

I think one can live in American society with a certain cultural heritage, whether it's an African heritage or other, European,what have you, and still absorb a great deal of this culture. There is always cultural assimilation.

After all, we are not French and never can be, and any attempt to be so is to deny our inheritance and to try to impose upon ourselves a character that can be nothing but a veneer upon the surface.

Mixed-bloods loosen the seams in the shrouds of identities.

I think of myself as being Jewish and Irish, despite the fact that I'm English.

I hear that melting-pot stuff a lot, and all I can say is that we haven't melted.

When I was at school, you had to choose; there was a lot of pressure to assimilate. You were an Aussie, or you were one of 'the wogs' - which was everybody else. But I didn't want to be in either group, so I felt like an odd one out.

When I was young I was one of the second generation of black people in Holland. My father was the first. My mother was white, and living with a black man at that time and having a how-you-say half-caste boy is not easy.

We are now integrated into American society and I don't like the word fashionable, because fashionable means that it's going to pass. It's not like that anymore.

I'm fascinated by how ethnic communities have assimilated into massive capitalist environments.

There's a big difference between race and culture. Because racially, I'm an Indian man. Culturally, not at all.

It took me a long time to square with the fact that none of my experiences are typical - I'm not a typical American, but I'm also not a typical Muslim.

Traditionally, the ideology of the United States nationhood perpetuated the myth that immigrants would shed their particularistic ethnic identities and loyalties. Eventually these “strangers” would be assimilated into a homogeneous body politic that was based on the equality of individual rights.

Having uncritically accepted [Western] culture in everything, we now find we have lost our hold on the autonomous ideals of the Japanese race.

The melting pot has sprung a leak.

Efforts to concentrate immigrants in social groups and to retard their Americanization should be steadily frowned down.

The unifying characteristics that make us Americans are becoming more and more diluted now because new immigrants want to set up ethnic enclaves to retain their culture and language.

Indians should associate with English youths in a mixed school, and should be removed entirely from native influences.

Whoever imitates a people is one of them.

Countries like France, Italy and the Netherlands may pay lip service to inclusion, but the ethos in those places is that immigrants can never really become French, Italian or Dutch, no matter what their passports say. The emphasis is on tolerance and respect, but there’s no real expectation that foreign nationals fit in.