Parallel Stories: Richard Rodriguez in Conversation

Timed to coincide with the Getty Initiative, Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, the far-reaching and ambitious consideration of Latin American and Latino art in dialogue with Los Angeles, taking place from September 2017 to January 2018 across Southern California, noted author, essayist, and commentator Richard Rodriguez explores the color brown as a metaphor for mixture, and thus the key to our cosmopolitan societies where lives interact and borrow from one another. Just as the great Mexican philosopher and essayist Octavio Paz once celebrated the dense, rich, layered complexity that is Mexican mole, opposing it to the American mania for clear gravy (American pot roast), Rodriguez embraces mixture as an essential part of the human experience.
“I write of brown, a color that is not a singular color, not a strict recipe, not an expected result…”
In his lyrical, resonant interweaving of family, food, religion, history, language, California, America, Mexico, we may find a new way of placing ourselves in the 21st century.
Mary Craig Auditorium
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