Hunger of Memory

“The nun said, in a friendly but oddly impersonal voice, ‘Boys and girls, this is Richard Rodriguez.’ (I heard her sound out: Rich-heard Road-ree-guess.) It was the first time I had heard anyone name me in English.”

In this quote, Rodriguez hears an English speaker pronounce his name for the first time. Throughout the memoir, Rodriguez will remember how people have pronounced his name. His last name identifies him as of Latino heritage. He carries this with him as a mark of his ethnicity and minority status. The emphasis the nun and others will place on Rodriguez’s name will signify how he stands out as a minority and an exception in a mostly white world.

“In adulthood, I am embarrassed by childhood fears. And, in a way, it didn’t matter very much that my parents could not speak English with ease. Their linguistic difficulties had no serious consequences…. And yet, in another way, it mattered very much—it was unsettling to hear my parents struggle with English. Hearing them, I’d grow nervous, my clutching trust in their protection and power weakened.”

The major distinction between Rodriguez and his parents in his first years of schooling was his command of the English language, the dominant language of his environment. Knowledge of English will be the first wedge driven between Rodriguez and his Spanish-speaking, Mexican immigrant parents. Even from a young age, as seen here, Rodriguez felt a shame that his mother and father were not fluent in English or even very comfortable speaking it. He recognizes that this frustration was inherently irrational; their lack of ease with English did not harm them in any way. Yet the divide he feels as a native-born American citizen both at home and in public signifies his conflicted desire for and rejection of assimilation.

“Spanish seemed to me the language of home. (Most days it was only at home that I’d hear it.) It became the language of joyful return.”

As a child, even before he attended school, Rodriguez understood the divisions between the public and the private. At home, in the private sphere, Rodriguez’s family spoke Spanish, while outside the home, English was the dominant language, especially because Rodriguez’s family lived in a middle-class white neighborhood, not with other Latino families. Here he describes the joy he felt when his family spoke Spanish at home: his intimate connection with the language. By framing it as a “language of joyful return,” Rodriguez associates Spanish with the comfort of home and makes a clear division between home and public life. When he begins school and learns English, this division begins to both break down and expand.

“Supporters of bilingual education today imply students like me miss a great deal by not being taught in their family’s language. What they seem not to recognize is that, as a socially disadvantaged child, I considered Spanish to be a private language. What I needed to learn in school was that I had the right—and the obligation—to speak the public language of los gringos.”

In this passage, Rodriguez articulates his main point of disagreement with the bilingual education advocates. Rodriguez believes that it was integral to his success to learn how to speak English, the language spoken in public by los gringos (non-Latinos, especially whites). Although the divide between the public (and English) and private (and Spanish) was painful for Rodriguez, he recognizes that by being forced to learn English he was better prepared for academic and professional success. This is a position he does not deviate from or abandon. Rodriguez believes that bilingual education would divert students from learning the language of assimilation, of business, education, and commerce. According to Rodriguez, accommodating students with a bilingual education would only perpetuate the disadvantages of minority students. For Rodriguez, his private, home language of Spanish was a crutch he needed to shake.

“At last, seven years old, I came to believe what had technically been true since my birth: I was an American citizen.”

Becoming fluent in English was a turning point for Rodriguez. This contributed to his identity as an American citizen. For Rodriguez, being able to speak and read the dominant language of America helped him feel like a true citizen. He embraces this nationality once he frees himself from the limitations of only understanding Spanish.

“In public, by contrast, full individuality is achieved, paradoxically, by those who are able to consider themselves members of the crowd. Thus it happened for me: Only when I was able to see myself as an American, no longer an alien in gringo society, could I seek the rights and opportunities necessary for full public individuality.”

One of the primary arguments of bilingual education supporters is that by continuing to speak their native language, minority students retain their individuality, their heritage and culture. Rodriguez disagrees with this point and embraces assimilation as both painful and necessary. In this passage, Rodriguez argues that he retained his individuality once he started seeing himself as an American, not as a Latino separate from the gringos. He claims he was better able to create individuality by paradox: once he identified as an American, like everyone else, he did not feel pressured to think of himself as different. 

“When I went up to look at my grandmother, I saw her through the haze of a veil draped over the open lid of her casket. Her face appeared calm—but distant and unyielding to love. It was not the face I remember seeing most often. It was the face she made in public when the clerk at Safeway asked her some question and I would have to respond. It was her public face the mortician had designed with his dubious art.”

To close his first chapter, Rodriguez describes seeing his grandmother’s corpse in a casket. His grandmother was a formidable presence, but she never became fully bilingual, and he would have to help translate or speak English on her behalf at the grocery store. Rodriguez grimly notes that the mortician has arranged her face so that she wears the expression she wore in public, not in private, at home with family. To Rodriguez, his grandmother never fully assimilated, so his parting look at her is to see her public face, not her relaxed and intimate expression.

“What I am about to say to you has taken me more than twenty years to admit: A primary reason for my success in the classroom was that I couldn’t forget that schooling was changing me and separating me from the life I enjoyed before becoming a student.”

Rodriguez struggles to admit that he realized at the time of his education that the more he learned, the more he was severing ties with his private life. He realized that he was changing from the boy he had been, and changing his identity within his family, but he continued on anyway. It was necessary that he buried this realization and kept going, or else he would have regressed and never become successful.

“He has used education to remake himself. It bothers his fellow academics to face this. They will not say why exactly. (They sneer). But their expectations become obvious when they are disappointed. They expect—they want—a student less changed by his schooling.”

Rodriguez notes in this chapter the transformation of the scholarship boy from one who pleases teachers to he who falls out of their favor. Rodriguez believes this transition occurs because teachers and fellow students are disappointed that the scholarship student has grown and transformed because of his schooling. This makes them oppressors. Though they are happy to give someone a chance and claim his success, if he rises above his circumstances and, especially, his disadvantaged minority background, they are not happy when he breaks out of the box wherein academia and society had confined him.

“It was to be in college, in Stanford, that my religious faith would seem to me suddenly pared. I would remain a Catholic, but a Catholic defined by a non-Catholic world.”

Rodriguez grew up in a Catholic household and attended Catholic primary and secondary schools. He was immersed in the Catholic faith, and participated as an altar boy. At school, Rodriguez was taught strict doctrines, such as the evils of interfaith marriages and the pervasiveness of sin. Although Rodriguez held on to his Catholic faith, attending Stanford as an undergraduate took him outside the Catholic cocoon for the first time. Many of his new friends were atheist. Confronting his religion sparked another education in Rodriguez, as he grew spiritually. His Catholicism also put him in the minority in college, another way in which he was defined by his differences rather than recognized for his similarities.

“Of all the institutions in their lives, only the Catholic Church seemed aware of the fact that my mother and father are thinkers—persons aware of the experience of their lives. Other institutions—the nation’s political parties, the industries of mass entertainment and conclusions, the companies that employed them—have all treated my parents with condescension.”

Rodriguez notes that the Catholic Church was alone in treating his parents like they were thoughtful, intellectual people. In the neighborhood Catholic church, Latin American congregants like Rodriguez’s parents were welcome to worship and were not turned away because of their heritage or ethnicity. Rodriguez’s parents felt comfortable within the Catholic Church, which encouraged them to consider complex concepts like life, death, sin, and heaven. There, they were treated as equals.

“Throughout college and graduate school, I thought of myself as an orthodox Catholic. I was a liberal Catholic. In all things save the liturgy I was a liberal.”

As Rodriguez grows up and leaves his Catholic community to go to Stanford, he beings to question his faith and to realize he is not as strict a Catholic as he had thought. His positions, he discovers, are really more liberal. It is only in liturgy that he is staunchly orthodox. He becomes opposed to liturgical reformation, which included elements such as relaxed services and the incorporation of folk music.

“Dark skin was for my mother the most important symbol of a life of oppressive labor and poverty. But both my parents recognized other symbols as well.”

Rodriguez’s parents both carried with them certain symbols about Latin American culture and the prejudice they faced. Rodriguez’s dark complexion was a constant source of anxiety for his mother in particular. If Rodriguez wore certain outfits, like a uniform, she panicked and told him to avoid them, since he would look like a servant or wait staff or a member of some other lower class profession. She did not want him to be mistaken for a laborer when he had a middle-class background and status. She also made him wear a hat, so his face would not become any darker. His father equated certain characteristics with labor, too. For example, he felt that rough and calloused hands in a handshake were the mark of a heavy laborer. In contrast, if he shook hands with someone whose skin was smooth and uncalloused, that meant he was not of the blue-collar working class.

“Language was crucial. I knew that I had violated the ideal macho by becoming such a dedicated student of language and literature.”

Rodriguez felt a tension between the “machismo” or “proper behavior of men” that was expected of his culture and his own academic interests and talents. Studying literature and being a writer was a contradiction of the masculine ideal within his culture. His pursuits were thought of as more feminine interests. This reflects another way that English language and literature caused Rodriguez to feel different than his family. Even his mother was suspicious of his voracious appetite for reading.

“And I can still hear the quiet, indistinct sounds of the Mexican, the oldest, who replied. At hearing that voice I was sad for the Mexicans. Depressed by their vulnerability. Angry at myself. The adventure of the summer seemed suddenly ludicrous. I would not shorten the distance I felt from los pobres with a few weeks of physical labor. I would not become like them. They were different from me.”

The summer after his senior year of college, Rodriguez takes seasonal construction work after his friend suggests it. Rodriguez fully realizes that by doing so he is in some ways betraying his mother, who told him to stay out of the sun to avoid darkening his complexion and to never work in a job where he needed a uniform. By taking the construction job, Rodriguez is experimenting with a profession that is sometimes associated with men of his heritage. The Mexican crew that is hired from time to time presents a challenge for Rodriguez. Ultimately, he finds that he can never be like the Mexican workers he is asked to translate for—that he can never be like them due to the very fact of translation. He chooses to live in the English-speaking world. The workers’ inability to speak English will, to Rodriguez, fundamentally prevent them from rising above their working-class jobs.

“Walking on campus one day with my mother and father, I relished the surprised looks on their faces when they saw some Hispanic students wearing serapes pass by. I needed to laugh at the clownish display. I needed to tell myself that the new minority students were foolish to think themselves unchanged by their schooling. (I needed to justify my own change.)”

When Rodriguez attends college, the affirmative action movement is picking up traction nationally. Although he is technically a minority student, Rodriguez associated the term “minority student” more with those who were socially or economically disadvantaged than with those disadvantaged by race. After the civil rights movement, more students begin embracing their heritage. One group that Rodriguez runs into frequently are Latino students who are part of the Chicano Movement, an initiative in the 1960s and 1970s to empower Mexican Americans. Walking with his parents, Rodriguez passes by students who have embraced the Chicano style of wearing serape blankets. His parents are shocked. Rodriguez is annoyed with these students because he feels their adoption of Chicano culture to be hopeless, shallow, and misguided. He knows what they seem unwilling to admit; they have been changed by their education, which has allowed them passage into the world of gringos and the middle- and upper-class elites. They are privileged and will never be true Chicanos.

“After that I was regarded as comic. I became a ‘coconut’—someone brown on the outside, white on the inside. I was the bleached academic—more white than the Anglo professors.”

When a group of Chicano students ask Rodriguez to teach a noncredit course on minority literature at a Latino community center, he tells them of his hesitation because he does not necessarily believe there is such a thing as minority literature. The students do not wish to hear that, and they label him as a pariah. To them, he appears on the outside to be Mexican, to be one of them. On the inside, however, he is white. This conversation speaks to Rodriguez’s discomfort with the Chicano Movement students as well as to his recognition that he had by then fully assimilated into white culture. Rodriguez is caught between two worlds. Academics and friends, white society, wants to label him as a minority, but among his fellow Latino students, he fails the test of being one of them.

“[N]o one wondered if it had ever been possible to make higher education accessible to the genuinely socially disadvantaged.”

One of Rodriguez’s main complaints about affirmative action is that it does not go far enough. For Rodriguez, just using race and ethnicity as markers of minority status overlooks economically and socially disadvantaged students. Students who are economically and socially unable to rise above their circumstances, Rodriguez feels, should be prioritized, too, even if they are white. Rodriguez becomes frustrated when white middle- and upper-class students complain about affirmative action and how it takes places at schools away from them. Rodriguez feels that poor white students get left behind, too.

“At the edge of hearing, I listened to every word he spoke. But behind my eyes my mind reared—spooked and turning—then broke toward a reckless idea: Leave the university. Leave.”

At the end of graduate school, Rodriguez is reluctant to apply for teaching positions. He suspects that he will get more placements because he is a minority student. As much as Rodriguez is against affirmative action, he is well aware that he has benefitted from it. A fellow graduate student tells him that he is just as good as he is, but Rodriguez is getting more and better offers because of affirmative action. He tells Rodriguez that there used to be quotas to prevent his parents, Jews, from being admitted to Yale. Now, there are quotas that allow Rodriguez to get in more easily. This conversation shakes Rodriguez, as he realizes he does not want to have a career in academia. He realizes that he would never be able to escape the paradoxical benefits and drawbacks of affirmative action. If he stays in academia, he will never know if his work is good enough or if he succeeds only because of his ethnicity. He has an epiphany and decides to leave academia and become a writer.

“'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?’”

In the closing chapter of his autobiography, Rodriguez reflects on his mother’s question about why he needs to tell white readers about his division from his family. It is a question that Rodriguez sincerely considers. He realizes that he is making his private life public. By writing his memoir, he is exposing his family’s and his own secrets. Moreover, as his parents realize success through their children, he realizes that they never fully became Americanized. They have always been held back.

“I shied away from the idea. It was the one suggestion that the scholarship boy couldn’t follow. I would not have to write about the minor daily events of my life; I would never have been able to write about what most deeply, daily, concerned me during those years: I was growing away from my parents.”

In sixth grade, one of Rodriguez’s teachers encourages him to keep a diary. Rodriguez does not comply because he does not wish to make public the very private pain he was experiencing as school and education distanced himself from his family. His parents encouraged a culture of secrecy and privacy. From an early age, if Rodriguez was asked to describe his family life, he fictionalized it. A diary would demand something he could not yet give: the truth, secrets and everything.

“I can well imagine their faces tightened by incomprehension as they read my words. (Why does he do this?)”

Rodriguez recognizes that his parents will never be able to understand, accept, or appreciate the courage it takes to share his life in this memoir. They are fiercely private people, and they can see no benefit in sharing his experiences with other people, with readers who are not like them. To them, he is sharing gossip. They do not understand how it could be beneficial for other people to learn about his experiences.

“My teachers gave me a great deal more than I knew when they taught me to write public English…. Today I can address an anonymous reader. And this seems to me important to say. Somehow the inclination to write about my private life in public is related to the ability to do so.”

Rodriguez expresses that education has given him the gift of being able to write in the public language of English about his private experiences. He has had the advantage of being in a privileged position from which he can provide a perspective that many people do not see. He bears the burden of representing his background but also representing other minority students who were not in the same position he is in. Being able to wield the public English language so skillfully gives him an opportunity to share his experiences and a hope that people will understand them better.