"I write of a color that is not a singular color, not a strict recipe, not an expected result, but a color produced by careless desire, even by accident; by two or several. I write of blood that is blended. I write of brown as complete freedom of substance and narrative. I extol impurity.
I eulogize a literature that is suffused with brown, with allusion, irony, paradox -ha!- pleasure.
I write about a race in America in hopes of undermining the notion of race in America.
Brown bleeds through the straight line, unstaunchable - the line separating black from white, for example. Brown confuses. Brown forms at the border of contradiction (the ability of language to express two or several things at once, the ability of bodies to experience two or several things at once).
It is that brown faculty I uphold by attempting to write brownly. And I defy anyone who tries to unblend me or to say what is appropriate to my voice.
You will often find brown in this book as the cement between leaves of paradox.
You may not want paradox in a book. In which case, you had better seek a pure author.
Brown is the color most people in the United States associate with Latin America.
Apart from stool sample, there is no browner smear in the American imagination than the Rio Grande. No adjective has attached itself more often to the Mexican in America than "dirty" - which I assume gropes toward the smile "dirt-like", indicating dense concentrations of melanin.
I am dirty, all right. In Latin America, what makes me brown is that I am made of conquistador and the Indian. My brown is a reminder of conflict.
And of reconciliation.
In my own mind, what make me brown in the United States is that I am Richard Rodriguez. My baptismal name and my surname marry England and Spain. Renaissance rivals.
North of the U.S.-Mexico border, brown appears as the color of the future. The adjective accelerates, becomes a verb: "America is browning".
South of the border, brown sinks back into time. Brown is time. [...]"
In: Richard Rodriquez, Prefazione del libro "Brown: The Last Discovery of America", ed. Penguin Books, 2002, pagine 1-10
