Richard Rodriguez Quotes
What has happened in the last generation is that Tijuana has become a new Third World capital - much to the chagrin of Mexico City, which is more and more aware of how little it controls Tijuana politically and culturally. In addition to whorehouses and discos, Tijuana now has Korean factories and Japanese industrialists and Central American refugees, and a new Mexican bourgeoisie that takes its lessons from cable television.
London, Scott. "A View from the Melting Pot: An Interview with Richard Rodriguez." The Sun, no. 260, Aug. 1997.
The problem she described has generally not been solved. The only thing that saved most of rural America is the remarkable increase in agricultural productivity, but that has become so good that farming requires fewer and fewer workers each year and migration to the cities has continued since before WWII. However to avoid higher city wages, unionization, higher taxes, and higher energy costs, many industrial operations deliberately moved to small or medium sized after WWII, and many communities then became one company towns. Then the companies would relocate elsewhere if the mover would save some costs, and the small towns who did get factories were again in the predicament that Mrs. Roosevelt describes. In the 1980s, off shoring eliminated the major job source for thousands of small towns and cities as well. Some cities and suburban areas attracted knowledge industry companies and jobs, but the small town problem is in much of America just as it was when Mrs. Roosevelt wrote this in her column in 1936.
Richard Rodriguez is an American writer who became famous as the author of Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (1982), a narrative about his intellectual development.
