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Mulberry Street

The Story Of A Photograph

I felt tired, as if I’d just returned from a trip, a journey that had begun a long time ago, when an unknown craftsman had built a model ship, which had somehow ended up in a Mulberry Street window. The journey had been one of gradual attenuation: a ship, with its immense physicality, had been transformed into a replica, a symbol, and then the replica had been reshaped into a photograph, a symbol of a symbol. Did this attenuation, this slow dematerializing of wood and sail and sunlight, serve a purpose? And what was the next step: a leap into words, into pure meaning?

Crossing Borders

An Interview With Richard Rodriguez

My grandmother always told me that I was hers, that I was Mexican. That was her role. It was not my teacher’s role to tell me I was Mexican. It was my teacher’s role to tell me I was an American. The notion that you go to a public institution in order to learn private information about yourself is absurd. We used to understand that when students went to universities, they would become cosmopolitan. They were leaving their neighborhoods. Now we have this idea that, not only do you go to first grade to learn your family’s language, but you go to a university to learn about the person you were before you left home. So, rather than becoming multicultural, rather than becoming a person of several languages, rather than becoming confident in your knowledge of the world, you become just the opposite. You end up in college having to apologize for the fact that you no longer speak your native language.

Fist Stick Knife Gun

If you wonder how a fourteen-year-old can shoot another child in the head, or how boys can commit a drive-by shooting and then go home to dinner, you need to realize that one doesn’t get to that point in a day, or a week, or a month.

Sunbeams

Every parting gives a foretaste of death, every reunion a hint of the Resurrection.

Arthur Schopenhauer

Where The Parking Lot Is Now

I wondered how I’d feel when the place was gone. It would stay alive in my memory, but I couldn’t take much comfort from that. Memories we’re sure are indelible — how long do they really last?

Cities With Spanish Names

It had all been very proper. There had been letters between Luz’s home in Guadalajara, and Los Angeles, where Diego’s family had lived for some years. Diego’s parents wanted him to marry a decent mexicana, not a wild American girl with no morals, and Luz was the daughter of old family friends. Diego traveled to Guadalajara to marry her, and she came to live with him in Los Angeles.

Global Villager

An Interview With Pico Iyer

America the notion is still very different from America the nation. What’s touching and almost regenerative is that, whatever is happening in the real America — where the murder rate is worse than Lebanon’s, and there is homelessness and poverty — America is still a shorthand throughout the world for everything that is young and modern and free. One interesting thing is that Mick Jagger, the Beatles, Reebok, pizza, enchiladas — everything that is hip and desirable — are all regarded as American no matter what their true origins.

Perry

Perry was just another scrubby desert town tucked behind a minor highway — to us it was a highway; to the state it was a tired dirt road that had been paved in an election year and forgotten.

Village Voices

Best Of The 11th Street Ruse

Finally I stepped out, looking as elegant as I ever have, in electric blue silk, my hair stylishly vertical. R. whispered, “You look so Republican.” (A week later, he finally apologized.)

Shame