Richard Rodriguez

July 31, 1944-

Name: Richard Rodriguez

 


Nationality:  American
Ethnicity:  ChicanoMexican AmericanHispanic American

Genre(s):  Autobiographies; Journalism; Essays

Biographical and Critical Essay
Hunger of Memory
Writings by the Author
Further Readings about the Author
About This Essay

WRITINGS BY THE AUTHOR:

Books

Periodical Publications

In 1981 Richard Rodriguez burst onto the publishing scene with his autobiography, Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez . Its success can be attributed to the author's antagonism to bilingual education and affirmative action and the media's attention to these issues. Beyond its notoriety, however, the book is significant because Rodriguez reveals himself with frankness and sensitivity.

Prior to 1981 Rodriguez published portions of Hunger of Memory in the Columbia Forum (1973), American Scholar (1974), College English (1978), and other journals. In recent years he has written several articles. "The Head of Joaquin Murrieta" (Nuestro, November 1985) takes as its subject the nineteenth-century California folk bandit supposedly shot by rangers who verified their deed by placing his severed head in a jar of alcohol. In his account of the legend and its survival, Rodriguez wryly interprets California and its search for a past. In "California Christmas Carols" (California , December 1983), a vignette reminiscent of episodes in Hunger of Memory, he gives a brief, poignant account of an early Christmas and his request for an unusual gift. In his article "The Mexicans Among Us" (Reader's Digest, March 1986) he compresses the history of the relationship between Mexico and the United States, and, although he emphasizes the survival of the Mexican-Americans with their dignity and spirituality, he continues to lament linguistic fragmentation. A 1986 essay in American Scholar, "Mexico's Children" (also the title of a projected book), is a more complete analysis of this issue; there Rodriguez synthesizes and interprets the dilemmas of Hispanics both in Mexico and in the United States.

The son of Leopoldo Rodriguez and Victoria Moran Rodriguez, both Mexican immigrants, Rodriguez was born on 31 July 1944 in San Francisco, California, where he now resides as a full-time writer. As a child he moved with his parents to Sacramento--their purchase of a small house on the edge of an Anglo neighborhood is described in Hunger of Memory. He worked at a variety of jobs as a teenager, and in his book he describes the physical pleasure of labor and social interaction with workers from Mexico. He notes that although like them he had dark skin, because of his education he was distinguished from them. His working-class father observed that Richard would never know the meaning of hard work.

Rodriguez, a Roman Catholic, devotes an entire chapter of Hunger of Memory to his religion. As an altar boy he loved the church with its ceremony and sounds. As an adult he deplores the changes in liturgy and feels separated from it. Even the experience of religion marks a distinction between the Anglo and Mexican worlds: "I was un católico before I was a Catholic. That is, I acquired my earliest sense of the Church ... through my parents' Mexican Catholicism. It was in Spanish that I first learned to pray...."

Educated in Catholic primary and secondary schools, Rodriguez received his B.A. from Stanford in 1967 and his M.S. from Columbia University in 1969. He did graduate work at the University of California, Berkeley, and at the Warburg Institute in London and received a Fulbright Fellowship (1972-1973) and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship (1976-1977).

The prologue and six chapters of Hunger of Memory chart the fragmented course of Rodriguez's education. For him education refers equally to formal training and maturing experiences. Rodriguez says his education (which he calls "radical self-reformation") and his revelations have alienated him from his family: "I am writing about those very things my mother has asked me not to reveal. Shortly after I published my first autobiographical essay seven years ago, my mother wrote me a letter pleading with me never again to write about our family. 'Write about something else in the future. Our family life is private.' And besides: 'Why do you need to tell the gringos about how "divided" you feel from the family?'" He points out that Latino culture practices autobiography in a restrained form. Nothing unfavorable is disclosed about the family, and childhood is consequently idealized or vaguely rendered. Furthermore, in Mexico the most favored autobiographical form is the memoir, which allows the writer to concentrate on others rather than on himself.

Rodriguez's positions on language and affirmative action have sparked most of the public discussions. In brief, he feels that all Americans must learn English, a public language, as opposed to Spanish, a private language used in the home. Condoning the brash Irish nuns who invaded his home to insist that the Spanish-speaking Rodriguezes use only English, he attributes his success to this wrenching move toward assimilation. He attacks affirmative action, feeling that government programs accelerate the success of middle-class Chicanos like himself to the detriment of the targeted group, barrio Chicanos. To him affirmative action should be based on class, not ethnic group. In an interview in People magazine given shortly after the publication of Hunger of Memory, he synthesized his feelings on ethnic identity: "I refuse to accept my generation's romanticism about discovering 'roots.' The trouble with that is it somehow holds children accountable for maintaining their culture, and freezes them into thinking of themselves as Mexicans or as Chinese or as blacks. But culture is an extraordinary progression of ancestral memories and individual experience. People have accused me of losing my heritage. That assumes heritage is this little suitcase I carry with me, with tortillas and a little Mexican cowboy suit inside, and that one day I lost it at a Greyhound depot. The fact is, culture survives whether you want it to or not."

Rodriguez says that his autobiography "is a book about language." In chapter 1, "Aria," Rodriguez says he learned English to the exclusion of Spanish; his parents struggled with English but remained comfortable only in Spanish. The two languages merge in the child: "At the age of five, six, well past the time when most other children no longer easily notice the difference between sounds uttered at home and words spoken in public, I had a different experience. I lived in a world magically compounded of sounds. I remained a child longer than most; I lingered too long, poised at the edge of language--often frightened by the sounds of los gringos, delighted by the sounds of Spanish at home."

Rodriguez discusses his use of language as an author in the final chapter, "Mr. Secrets," in which he analyzes the act of writing and its motivation. A writer's feelings, he says, "are capable of public intelligibility. In turn, the act of revelation helps the writer better understand his own feelings. Such is the benefit of language: By finding public words to describe one's feelings, one can describe oneself to oneself. One names what was previously only darkly felt." As reviewer Paul Zweig observed, Hunger of Memory "is not only about the language adventures of a Mexican American child, ... it is also about the coming into being of the remarkable language in which it is written."

Through the concept of language Rodriguez explores the processes of alienation, assimilation, growing up, and, of course, education. Through growth in language Rodriguez increasingly alienates himself from his family, the comfortable childhood with warm Spanish sounds, as he enters an adult world of superficial communication. The wedge between him and his family was caused mainly by education, a linguistic process that he describes as "radical self-reformation."

Reviewers have given Rodriguez more attention than any other Mexican-American author. Even the New York Times Book Review, indifferent to the literary creation of the Chicano Movement since its beginnings in the 1960s, gave front-page recognition to Hunger of Memory (28 February 1982). Approximately fifty other periodicals, from professional newsletters to library journals to the New Yorker and Atlantic Monthly, have reviewed Rodriguez's autobiography. Some Mexican-Americans, such as Arturo Madrid (La Red/The Net, 23 April 1982), saw in Rodriguez a betrayal of the goals of the Chicano people as evidenced by the government programs he attacked. Sarcastically deriding Rodriguez's angst, these detractors have been rarely moved by his style or convinced of the universality of his experience. They felt that he spoke only for himself to a white audience. Yet Antonio C. Marquez, a professor of Chicano literature, argued that "there is a level of artistry in Hunger of Memory that should not be shunned simply because Rodriguez does not meet the Procrustean bed of 'cultural awareness' of any other ideology. I contend that its ultimate value lies in its literary qualities and the uniqueness of the autobiographical form."

However controversial it may be, Hunger of Memory belongs to the mainstream of American autobiography. Indeed the universality the author achieves through his sensitive examination of the complexities of language is arguably the most notable accomplishment of the book. Presently Rodriguez's canon is small, distinguished by his thoughtful, outspoken stance on issues related to the Chicano experience and his skill as a stylist. One can look forward with anticipation to his future work.

 

FURTHER READINGS ABOUT THE AUTHOR

 

"'¿Habla español?' (Do You Speak Spanish?) Author Richard Rodriguez Does, but He Wishes the Schools Would Stop," People, 18 (16 August 1982): 75-79.