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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BetaChapter 3-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 3 Summary: Credo
Rodriguez describes his parents’ worship practices, from a Catholic church back in Mexico to an Irish-American Catholic parish in America. Since he attended a Catholic school, Rodriguez was isolated from “non-Catholics” and rarely interacted with them. President John F. Kennedy, the first Catholic president, was idolized in Rodriguez’s community. Rodriguez remembers how the first English-speaking guest to his family’s home was the local priest of an English-speaking church. His parents tried to pass as American, and served him meatloaf. His visit brought great pride. At college, Rodriguez would think of himself as a Catholic in a non-Catholic world.
There was a heavy concentration on sin at school, while at home, faith was reserved for bedtime prayers and tales involving angels and demons. At school, education was taught as a social activity, and the students would read the bible together and analyze it.
Rodriguez notes that only the Catholic Church treated his parents as intelligent, critical thinkers. Political parties, entertainment companies, and their employers all condescended to them.
Rodriguez was fascinated by liturgy, felt at home in the church, and became an altar boy at age twelve. When he got to high school, he felt a schism between how his parents worshipped and how he did. Rodriguez scrutinized tenants of the faith and grappled with ethics and intellectual arguments. His parents, meanwhile, seemed limited to engaging with the faith through prayer and worship services alone.
At Stanford, Rodriguez met friends of different faiths, including some agnostics, and his own faith evolved as he began to seek spiritual and intellectual engagement with thinkers like Freud and Sartre, not just with liturgy. Rodriguez also interacted less with the church, seeking advice from friends rather than a priest, and stopped going to confession. He found that he was a liberal Catholic in every sense but when it came to liturgy. He is against folk songs, hand holding, and other, more casual ways of worship. Still, Rodriguez recognizes that times have changed and the liturgy has evolved to be more liberal. He is frustrated by the clash between tradition and secularism and how the two sometimes blend together. Rodriguez understands that he is living in a more secular world than the one his grandparents grew up in. This makes him wonder if God is dead. He acknowledges that this very autobiography will be released to a largely secular world, and notes how different that is from works by early American Puritans, who were writing to a primarily religious world.
Chapter 4 Summary: Complexion
Rodriguez reflects on how the pigment of his skin, which identifies him as a Latino, has impacted his life. His parents hoped they would not have children with dark complexions, his aunts even suggesting folk remedies during his mother’s pregnancy, hoping to ensure the child would not be dark skinned. His parents realized that the darker the complexion their children would have, the more they would struggle to overcome prejudices, discrimination, and racism. His mother viewed a darker complexion as a guarantee for a lifetime of “oppressive labor and poverty” (126). She told him never to get a job that required a uniform, which, she believed, would make people treat him like a servant because of his dark complexion. She was also preoccupied with the sun, always nagging him to wear a hat outside lest his skin tan. As they transformed into part of the middle class, Rodriguez’s parents trained their son to fit in with even the upper class by teaching him manners and the proper way of eating. This instilled in Rodriguez a lifelong fascination with the rich.
Rodriguez grew up believing he was ugly. He resented his appearance and believed everything would have been better if he had had lighter skin. His skin color undercut his confidence, and he struggled to speak to girls. At Stanford, Rodriguez realized that his complexion set him apart from his mostly wealthy or well-off white classmates.
He was at odds with the traditional macho personality demanded of men. At home, Rodriguez would be more reserved, to match that restrained masculinity. At school, however, he was much more talkative. His love for language and literature, in particular, undermined the macho personality. Rodriguez wrote fictional stories and poems and received high marks. At home, his room was filled with books by poets and novelists.
In his senior year, seeing that Rodriguez needed help, a friend asked if he wanted to pick up some construction work. His friend seemed cognizant of the racial implications. Rodriguez accepted the job, though his friends did not believe he could do heavy, manual labor. Rodriguez took to the work but realized that he was fundamentally different than the other “ethnic” men he worked with. Sometimes the manager would hire Mexican alien workers. Rodriguez felt awkward around them. One time, the contractor asked him to translate between him and the Mexicans. This summer of work made Rodriguez realize he would never be like these workers. He became more comfortable with his body from working out in the sun. He began to change his fashion to be more of a dandy, wearing expensive suits and clothes and fashioning himself as a member of the new rich (nouveau riche). When he traveled, people now had trouble placing his background.
Rodriguez remarks that he still feels troubled by that summer working with the Mexican alien workers. They unsettled him, especially their silence; since they didn’t speak English, they were treated as if they were invisible.
Chapter 3-4 Analysis
Catholicism played a large role in Rodriguez’s home and school lives growing up. Rodriguez felt insulated by orthodox Catholicism and especially enjoyed the liturgy, seeking out opportunities to get involved, like being an altar boy. One can trace Rodriguez’s pursuit of scholarship and intellectual investment in thinkers like Freud to his early interest in liturgy and the great ethical and moral questions of his faith. For Rodriguez, faith is not just about worship but about understanding the world. Though Rodriguez recognizes that Catholicism treated his parents as thinkers, when he is older he realizes that his parents’ faith is actually quite simplistic, at least in comparison to his own, and is limited to prayers and scripture, not grappling with bigger questions of faith, like good and evil.
The Rodriguez family’s Catholic faith and his education in Catholic schools made Rodriguez able to assimilate better. Instead of attending one of the primarily Latino Catholic churches in Sacramento, Rodriguez and his family worshipped at a local Irish-American Catholic church. This helped Rodriguez blend in better, since his neighborhood and peers were all united by their faith.
Rodriguez’s dark complexion sparked a near-lifelong insecurity. He faced enormous pressure from his parents to be aware of how his darker skin might invite racism and discrimination. His mother’s obsession with Rodriguez avoiding jobs in uniforms spoke to her fears that he would automatically be viewed as lower class. She taught him proper manners and ways to blend in with the upper classes. This provoked his fascination with the upper classes. Initially, Rodriguez felt self-conscious about his skin tone. He believed that above all else, his complexion made him ugly and was insurmountable. While one could “fix” one’s teeth by getting braces, for instance, his complexion would be with him forever.
The summer that Rodriguez spent working in construction was a formative period in his life. At the time that he took the work, Rodriguez had not quite figured out why he was taking a job that would spite his mother and reverse all he had done to avoid being seen as a lower-class worker. Yet Rodriguez was, and continues to be, on a journey to understand his identity. His experience taught him that he could never be like the workers he was so curious about. He enjoyed the labor, but he never truly felt comfortable interacting with the other workers. He could never truly become one of them. This much is clear when he is asked to translate on behalf of the Mexican alien workers and the boss. Rodriguez is ashamed of the silence of his fellow workers, the fact that they could not converse with their employer because they spoke no English. This experience drove home the point that his fluency in the English language would forever separate him from Latinos who did not learn English. Not knowing the language would prevent them from achieving upward mobility and assimilation.
Later, after Rodriguez embraced his natural skin tone and was no longer afraid to tan, he took up running. In the prologue he speaks of how people cannot seem to place him, but frequently identify him as “exotic.” In this chapter, too, when Rodriguez adopts fancy clothing and formal attire, people cannot place him; his opacity almost becomes a tantalizing mystery. He realizes, though, that this is one more way that gringos objectify him as a minority, fetishizing him for his unplaceable appearance.
