38 pages • 1 hour read
Richard RodriguezHunger of Memory
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1981A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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Chapter 1 Summary: Aria
Rodriguez begins with his first day in a Roman Catholic school in Sacramento, California. The author recalls how the nun pronounced his name when introducing him. This was the first time that Rodriguez, whose family spoke Spanish at home, had ever heard his name pronounced by an English speaker.
Rodriguez comments throughout his memoir on the connections between his early education and his later stances on educational policy. Later in his life, an education initiative known as bilingual education became fashionable. Rodriguez opposes it, believing that education breaks down the barrier between language at school and language at home, and that bilingual education prevents students from assimilating because the boundary between home and public is never crossed. Rodriguez differs from bilingual educators who believe that children lose their individuality when they assimilate to public society. Rather, Rodriguez believes that these children develop individuality within both the public and private (home) spheres.
Rodriguez’s parents were quite successful and lived in a middle-class gringo neighborhood, in contrast to other Latinos in Sacramento, who lived in another part of the city. Rodriguez and his family were isolated, caught between two worlds, and not fully able to assimilate.
Rodriguez was a keen student of language, trying to improve his own English while feeling embarrassed by his parents, who, early on, struggled with English outside the home. The author found that he lived with duality; in public he spoke English, while at home, he spoke Spanish. Rodriguez disagrees with activists’ suggestion that children like him were disadvantaged by not being taught in his family’s native language, Spanish, at school. He stresses that he felt Spanish was a “a private language” (17), and that speaking it at school would have corrupted the language for him.
At his school, Rodriguez was forced to speak English, a “public language” (18). The nuns who taught him visited his family’s home to ask his parents to help their children by speaking English more. At first, practicing English was like a game, with the family working on English together at designated times. But soon, Rodriguez’s parents would speak Spanish only with each other and English exclusively with their children. Rodriguez felt like his identity was being taken away. He identified as an American citizen at age seven. Rodriguez feels bitter about this transition, since he and his siblings spoke to their parents less. However, his parents’ newfound ease with English allowed them to assimilate better in the neighborhood.
As he grew, Rodriguez struggled to speak Spanish fluently. He still felt an intimacy at home, something that transcended language. Now, as an adult, he argues that context distinguishes home language from public. He recalls how sharp this distinction was for him by remembering how, when his grandmother died, the mortician fashioned her face into the public one she would wear at the grocery store, not into the expressions he remembered that were tied to her native Spanish.
Chapter 2 Summary: The Achievement of Desire
Rodriguez notes that at each level of education, people congratulate him and remark on how proud his parents must be. Rodriguez describes himself as a “scholarship boy,” recognizing himself when he reads about scholarship students in Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy. The scholarship student has to choose, like he did, between his school life and his life at home, knowing that more education will bring greater distance from family. Sometimes the student will resent his parents for their differences, as Rodriguez did, learning to not show off his new education or skills at home.
He also felt this divide with literature, as he devoured books and read constantly. In elementary school, Rodriguez struggled with reading English. He took remedial lessons with the nuns and gradually transformed into an advanced and hungry reader. In high school, he found a list of the canonical works of Western Civilization and diligently read the books on the list. His mother asked for him for book recommendations, but he was disappointed when she did not read past the first few pages of Willa Cather’s My Antonia, his suggestion. Rodriguez describes his parents’ journey in America. Both were successful, but their success paled in comparison to what they might have achieved back home in Mexico, partially due to their difficulties with English.
Rodriguez was accepted at Stanford University, which divided him from his family even more. His mother was distraught at his leaving and resented him for the expense that his college education would cost them. When he returned for Christmas, it was awkward to talk with his parents, as it was clear they were in different worlds.
Scholarship boys, according to Rodriguez, serve to make others feel better about themselves. When a scholarship student succeeds, the teacher will congratulate himself on the success. The scholarship boy also faces enormous pressure to get get good grades and to achieve in school, even if it distances him from his family. Rodriguez argues that he was a bad student because of his inferiority complex and his realization that to succeed, he had to imitate the other students.
Rodriguez experienced gratitude when he was pursuing his doctorate and felt like he was part of a network of scholars; he had joined the international academic community and was confident enough to engage with his peers in their debates and dialogue. Still, he felt too intimidated to make bold statements or passionate arguments.
Chapter 1-2 Analysis
In the first chapter of his memoir, Rodriguez describes how his life was divided between the public and the private when he began studying and speaking English at home and at school. Rodriguez describes his family’s position as solidly middle class. His parents were able to afford to live in a neighborhood that was mostly white and to send him to a good school. However, this alienated them from other Latino families, many of whom lived in a different part of Sacramento, and from their predominately white neighbors. At home, they spoke Spanish, but when the nuns from school came to encourage Mr. and Mrs. Rodriguez to practice English at home with their children, the barrier between Rodriguez’s worlds began to break down. Spanish became a language spoken exclusively between his parents. This divided them from Rodriguez, which frustrated him but ultimately pushed him toward English. At the same time, learning English helped his parents feel more comfortable in their environment.
The issue of bilingual education is raised in the first chapter. Though the split between public and private lives was challenging and painful for Rodriguez, he also believes that being educated in English better prepared him for success later on. Moreover, it kept his native language an intimate aspect of his home and family life. Blending it in at home would have corrupted Spanish for him and would have denied him the opportunity to learn English, the language he would need in order to excel in education, life, and business. In Rodriguez’s opinion, bilingual education handicaps students by keeping them in a safety bubble they cannot afford if they want to succeed in America.
The second chapter deals more with Rodriguez’s education. He discusses his identification with the “scholarship boy” persona. In elementary school, he learned that his hunger for knowledge and diligence as a student made him a favorite of his teachers. He knew, though, that the more education he received, the more it would separate him from his parents. Attending Stanford University made this distance both literal and emotional. When he returned home for Christmas, he felt awkward around his parents. He realized that by that point there would likely be no overcoming the distance between them. For Rodriguez, then, education was a passion he could only pursue by acknowledging the impact it would have on the family he would be leaving behind. In this way, the “scholarship boy” feels pressured to meet the high expectations of teachers, his family, and himself. At various points during his education and in his memoir, Rodriguez will characterize his relationship to other academics and educators in terms of ownership. For Rodriguez, as the scholarship boy, his accomplishments were celebrated at school, but he stifled them at home so as to not make his parents uncomfortable. Later he will describe how educators objectified him as a minority student, as if his success were a reflection of their own, and his accomplishments a source of pride for them.
Literature and writing were one source of division between Rodriguez and his parents. His parents could not understand why he wanted to read so much. His mother made an effort by asking for book recommendations, but she did make much progress in Willa Cather’s My Antonia, her son’s suggestion. Every English language book Rodriguez hungrily devoured widened the rift between him and his parents. Rodriguez did not just love reading recreationally; he eventually went on to study it all the way up to the doctoral level and then to become a writer. Tension about his career choice will come up again later in the memoir when he describes struggling against the machismo personality. Finally, the memoir will end with him reconciling his profession and his identity as a writer with his parents’ lack of understanding or respect for his career and passion, literature.
