An Interview with Novelist Joe Rodríguez: The Vietnam War Beyond the Wire

In a comprehensive attempt to understand both your critical work as well as your prose fiction, let's begin with the obvious: namely, the recurrence of selected categories or conditions such as paradox, epistemic literacy, and ethnicity.As an open gambit, let's place our trust on an initial assumption: in your literary criticism and narrative fiction, such categories and conditions seem to represent some sort of theoretical limits or boundaries that await transcendence or transgression, much like the barbed wire on the perimeter of Talbot's camp in your Vietnam war novel Oddsplayer (1989).Viewed as such, how does your life as a war veteran, as a writer, and your academic background find their "inner logic" beyond such enclosures that, more so than to be transcended, might have to be transgressed in the sense of being reconfigured and altered at another level of personal significance?Joe Rodríguez: I think Chicanos are a cultural and people-centered expression of a revolution in thinking about identity and the sense of self.Our mixed legacies, history of challenges in the United States, and our unique vision demand that frozen versions of who is "American" be unthought and rethought.Such rethinking involves ideas about language and theories of knowledge.Unfortunately, many people aren't ready to hear the message or they are threatened.I myself am an expression of the "Latino diaspora" in terms of my own history.I was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, on November 4, 1943.My mom's family had migrated to Hawaii from Puerto Rico to work in the sugar cane fields.My dad was a Tejano from Laredo, Texas, who joined the U.S. Navy.They met in Pearl Harbor, married and started a family.We moved every two or three years as part of my dad's career in the Navy.Guam, Japan, Vallejo, Long Beach, North Chicago, Illinois, and San Diego were some of the places we lived.Hawaii was our home of record and we always returned there.I was encouraged to take school seriously.My mom's family wanted to return to middle-class standards of living, and my dad always said learning was something "they" couldn't take away from you.I was the proverbial "troubled youth," and I started and dropped out of college several times.I received an NROTC scholarship to the University of Texas at Austin but I stayed only a year.Texas was my baptism into the Alamo.Hawaii and Texas were very different in terms of anti-Mexican sentiment.