Speaking/Teaching American: Rodriguez, Anzaldua, Villanueva, and Horner

Since I wasn't able to make the discussion on Thursday I figured I would try and roll some Lit Fest into my blog post here. This isn't much of a stretch seeing as how Richard Rodriguez was one of the presenters this year, and much of his lecture had me thinking about the Shen, Lu and Horner, Anzaldua, and Villanueva pieces that we've read over the last couple of weeks.

For those of you not familiar with Rodriguez, he is mainly a nonfiction writer who also appeared regularly on PBS's Newshour for some time. I was able to dig up one of his old Newshour segments (happens to be pertinent to the discussion and to some of the educational policies being enacted in places like Arizona, Texas, and New Mexico recently):

For those that have some time and would like a better feel for Rodriguez (as a speaker...I would always recommend reading his work) maybe check out this video (or some of the videos for his commencement addresses at Kenyon College):

One of the things that really struck me during one of the Q&A sessions during the events last week was an answer that Rodriguez gave to a question about the place/concept of "home" in each writer's process. What was interesting about Rodriguez's answer was his notion of home as being rooted in language (in his case Spanish), and what it meant for him to experience the power politics of having to navigate between the language that his parents and grandparents spoke at home and the language of "public voice"--one that he often had to adopt for his parents in public venues. He also noted that, for many students, the real education begins when school is out and students have to then go home and stifle what they have been learning in order to integrate back into the sphere of the home. 

This is something, related to class, that (Rodriguez contends) Americans do not normally write about. Though, I would say that some of the people we've read over the past couple of weeks are exploring these ideas (particularly Anzaldua and Villanueva) in relation to pedagogy. I believe this is just one of the "cactus needles embedded in the flesh" that Anzaldua likens to the psychic state of unrest particular to the writer. I believe it is what Villanueva seeks to explore through Memoria. 

In thinking about the ways that scholarship is divided in academia (where we find our niche fields and cling on for dear life), I was also struck by a passage in Rodriguez's Brown: The Last Discovery of America where he writes:

How a society orders its bookshelves is as telling as the books a society writes and reads. American bookshelves of the twenty-first century describe fractiousness, reduction, hurt. Books are isolated from one another, like gardenias or peaches, lest they bruise or become bruised, or, worse, consort, confuse. If a man in a wheelchair writes his life, his book will be parked in a blue-crossed zone. "Self-Help" or "Health." There is no shelf for bitterness. No shelf for redemption. (11)

I'm wondering how people might read this passage in thinking about some of the things we've been discussing in the last few weeks (particularly with regard to how some of the theorists--Villanueva, Horner, Anzaldua--have positioned academia and the place of academic writing).

Does Rodriguez's view of "America's bookshelves" hold for our academic discourses as well?

If so, what would our alternative bookshelves look like and why?