Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez

I return to this book 8 years after I read if for the first time. Within minutes I find myself recalling the Sunday brunches my parents used to prepare for our entire family, the joyful sounds of my growing up in Virginia, after spending my early years in Eastern Europe. I intimately know the things Mr. Rodriguez writes about, because I've experienced them. The book itself is an abstract approach to the original structure of an autobiography. It lacks the voluminous accounts of monthly or yearly accomplishments (Colin Powell `My American Journey' or Bill Clinton's `My Life' come to mind). Rather, the author takes on a path of moral reflection on the time it took one boy to become a man and the education it took to transform one's identity. He assembles a combination of essays through which via a free flowing narrative, he conducts self-examination over the emergence of his `public' character and the replacement of his `private' persona. But there is something else in this book. There is longing. Longing for the days when the 'sounds' of his family brought meaning and recognition for what he was meant to be, for where he was meant to go (or was that a childhood illusion?). A reader would find it difficult to ignore the author's emotional yearning for the past for a childhood now gone, when love, and family, and values, and identity made sense. Mr. Rodriguez has done a superb job of capturing with words what many of us (first or second generation Americans) feel as members of families with similar backgrounds. I highly recommend this book. -by Simon Cleveland

I'm an author of a mystery novel in current release that features a Stanford-educated detective of Latino heritage as its protagonist, an American government/economics teacher (for over twenty years) in a rural California high school with a student population that is over 98% Latino, and I have attended several lectures/discussions by Richard Rodriguez over the years. His HUNGER OF MEMORY remains one of the most controversial books in the community in which I work for a significant portion of every year. HUNGER OF MEMORY is viciously hated by some of the most gifted students I have ever had. Others love it. My fellow professionals argue over Mr. Rodriguez and his positions on assimilation and bilingual education. I respect this book and this man. I don't necessarily agree with all he writes, but I do agree he writes what he writes well. I admire what Richard Rodriguez has gone through in life, and I admire the courage of his positions. HUNGER OF MEMORY is an excellent book that anyone interested in the contemporary American Southwest should read. It is extremely educational.

Richard Rodriguez shares how education transformed his life forever in this searing, poignant, candid autobiography. He became a confident, capable, knowledgable, strong individual who could speak, write, debate, communicate with others beyond the comfort zone of his immediate family. He ultimately amazed elite scholars with his brilliance, but he writes that he lost the close, warm loving affinity with his family, his roots. He is painfully candid. His courageous stance on both bi-lingual and affirmative action programs may make some readers uncomfortable, but his reasoning is sound.Read the book. It is an honest attempt to portray one man's journey from illiteracy. It is the american dream gained, and a detailed passionate account of the price one man paid to achieve it.

I just finished reading Hunger of Memory as an assignment for a Language and Literacy class I'm taking in my teacher training program. I recommend this book to all teachers or to people like myself who are planning to be teachers. Rodriguez does a outstanding job of capturing the feelings of confusion and separation one feels when learning English. I liked how Rodriguez corelates language with intimacy. He talks a lot about how Spanish was for him a language of intimacy and family. When he learned English in school, however, he lost a lot of that intimacy in the home when he began to lose his language. One particularly sad part was when his grandmother died and he wasn't able to speak to her or say goodbye beforehand because his Spanish was so limited and his grandmother spoke only Spanish. Towards the end of the book, Rodriguez exhibits a lot of honesty and courage in writing about his feelings on affirmative action. As a result of assimilation and studying in England, Rodriguez no longer felt like he could be an effective role model for minority students. However, because he was a Mexican-American with a Phd in Renaissance Literature and because he was a "minority professor", he was expected by Berkley administrators (and students) to be such a role model. When some hispanic students ask him to teach a minority literature class at a community center, he declines. As a result, they treat him like a sell-out. All in all, I admire how Rodriguez is not afraid to take stances on issues like affirmative action and bilingual education that go against what is expected, considering his race. One would expect him to be in support of both programs, but he is not. Though I do not agree on his stances on these issues, I truly admire his ability to be true to his convictions in spite of being called a sell-out.

Vance Packard, in researching his book "The Status Seekers," found that upward mobility in the United States was much more difficult than Americans would like to believe, and that those who were successful made it largely by cutting ties to their roots. Although framed in the context of ethnicity--Richard Rodriguez' book makes that same point. Moving up from working class to upper middle class promised success and acceptance and self-respect, but getting there was a little like edging out onto the ice, feeling inadequate and fearful that at any moment he might fall through. This book will resonate with anyone--immigrant or not, minority or not--who has made such a journey. Rodriguez scathingly criticizes affirmative action and bi-lingual education programs, correctly identifying the first as promoting socially crippling labels--"disadvantaged minority"--and the second as an obstacle to what he sees as the keys to success in America--a solid education and learning to speak and write English well. Rodriguez discovers early on what many of those with romantic notions about their ethnic or racial heritage eventually come to realize--that he is an American. But in the sadness he feels at the growing distance between himself and his parents, he fails--and several previous reviewers of this book fail--to note one very important thing. Upward mobility occurs incrementally, not in one leap. Rodriguez was put in a position to get that excellent education, to learn to speak unaccented English, and to become a respected author and scholar by parents who left Mexico and the little homogeneous Catholic towns and moved to the United States. In short, by parents who had cut the ties to their own roots.