- For the ex member of the Children of God religious movement, see
Ricky Rodriguez.
Richard Rodriguez (born 31 July 1944) is a
Mexican-American writer who became famous for his 1981 book, Hunger of
Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (ISBN 0-553-27293-4), a narrative about his development as a literate,
American student.
Early life
Rodriguez was born in 1944 into a mexican immigrant family in San
Francisco. A child of Mexican immigrants, Rodriguez spoke Spanish until
he went to a Catholic school at age 6. As a youth in Sacramento, California, he
delivered newspapers and worked as a gardener.
Career
Rodriguez received a B.A. from Stanford University, an M.A. from Columbia University, was a Ph.D. candidate in English Renaissance literature at the University of California, Berkeley, and attended the Warburg Institute in London on a Fulbright fellowship. A
noted prose stylist, Rodriguez has worked as a teacher, international
journalist, and educational consultant, in addition to writing, lecturing and appearing regularly on the PBS program, The NewsHour with Jim
Lehrer, for which he received the 1997 George Foster
Peabody Award. Rodriguez’s books include Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (1982), a collection
of autobiographical essays; Mexico’s Children (1990); Days of Obligation: An Argument With My Mexican Father
(1992), which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize; and Brown: The Last discovery of
America. In addition, he has been published in The American Scholar, Change, College English,
Harper's Magazine, Mother
Jones, and Time.
Political and Social Implications of his Writing
In his highly acclaimed autobiography, Hunger of Memory, Rodriguez offers readers a glimpse of his journey through
California’s education system as a Latino student of working-class, immigrant parents. His viewpoints were at once controversial
and ignited a national debate where he was both scorned by the Left and almost unilaterally praised by the Right. Rodriguez
eventually rose to become the ‘poster child’ of a conservative-based movement in the 1980s that sought to seriously question the
efficacy and rationale of both Affirmative Action and Bilingual education in American education. ‘If Richard Rodriguez could
succeed in education given his obstacles,’ they reasoned, ‘why can’t the rest of you’? More than this, Rodriguez’s notoriety grew
nationwide as Right-leaning education and literary think tanks began to vigorously advocate his viewpoints. Today he enjoys near
‘super-star’ status and has become somewhat of a cultural icon of intra-culture resistance.
The major tenets to Rodriguez’s arguments, particularly in Hunger of Memory, are essentially based on the
‘assimilation/acculturation’ model, which, for Rodriguez, is itself heavily based on one primary notion: that language is a
‘conduit’ of social power. But perhaps Rodriguez’s most striking ideas center around ‘public identity,’ and from his belief that
its development is fostered through the mastery of academic English. To that end, Rodriguez strongly contends that Bilingual
Education, in particular, denies Latino students this very ‘public identity.’ The main premise to this argument is that by
delaying English, Bilingual Education negatively affects the Spanish-speaking child. According to Rodriguez, children have an
obligation to learn America’s “great lesson of school,” which is that we each belong to a pluralistic society and therefore
assume a “public identity” through a common language. Rodriguez outlines the general claims of Bilingual Education in the
following passages:
1.) “Children permitted to use their family language in school will not be so alienated and will be better able to match the
progress of English-speaking children in the crucial first months of instruction.”
2.) “…that children who use their family language in school will retain a sense of their individuality—their ethnic heritage
and cultural ties.”
Accordingly, Rodriguez also outlines Bilingual Education’s contradictions as well: "that one can become a public person while
still remaining a private person. At the very same time one can be both! There need be no tension between the self in the crowd
and the self apart from the crowd! Who would not want to believe in such an idea? Who can be surprised that the scheme has won
the support of many middle-class Americans? If the barrio or ghetto child can retain his separateness even while being publicly
educated, then it is almost possible to believe that there is no private cost to be paid for public success."
While Latino immigrant students today may not be afforded the luxury of developing a ‘public identity’ early on through
language, Rodriguez’s schooling seems to have offered him just that. In fact, Hunger of Memory details a schooling experience
that is, for all intents and purposes, fraught with middle-class privilege: "Perhaps because I have always, accidentally, been a
classmate to children of rich parents, I long ago came to assume my association with their world." Young Richard’s early
middle-class associations come by way of his parents, whose "optimism and ambition led them to a house (our home) many blocks
from the Mexican south side of town. We lived among gringos and only one block from the biggest, whitest houses."
Rodriguez’s upbringing demonstrates how certain environment-based variables—-ones typically absent in working-class
Latinos—-are clearly at work during his formative years. And this is precisely how Rodriguez’s argumentative assumptions become
somewhat comprised in so far as he fails to fully account for these advantages. That is, although he plainly states in Hunger of
Memory that his autobiography is not a “model” of the “typical Hispanic-American life,” he nonetheless goes on to propose
far-reaching changes in Bilingual Education and Affirmative Action based solely on the outcomes and results of his own personal
childhood—-an upbringing that neither reflects or matches the circumstances of those Latinos for whom his critique is aimed.
Indeed, he openly admits this contradiction: "An accident in geography sent me to school where all my classmates were white, many
of the children of doctors and lawyers and business executives." But it was precisely his parent's ‘aristocratic’ tendencies that
created the atypical thrust to live ‘among gringos.’ This influence apparently had far reaching implications for the young and
impressionable Richard, and even included complicated formulas of etiquette: "In their manner, both my parents continued to
respect the symbols of what they considered to be upper-class life. Very early, they taught me the propia way of eating como los
ricos. And I was carefully taught elaborate formulas of polite greeting and parting." The ‘symbols’ of ‘upper-class life’ become
thoroughly ingrained in young Richard, and he learns to esteem and assume (as natural) the precepts of a middle-class ‘public
identity’—which not only includes language (English), but eventually money and social status, as the following passage suggests:
"I wanted to go to college at Stanford, attracted partly by its academic reputation, partly because it was the school rich people
went to"….
Although Rodriguez may appear at times to assert a contrary claim—of having come from a “socially disadvantaged”
childhood—‘disadvantaged’ for Rodriguez represents in actuality more of a linguistic rather than economic hardship: "One day in
school I raised my hand to volunteer an answer. I spoke out in a loud voice…. That day I moved very far from the disadvantaged
child I had been only days earlier." Thus, Rodriguez’s later arguments against Bilingual Education and Affirmative Action
correspondingly center around this notion of having transcended disadvantage: "I was not really more socially disadvantaged than
the white graduate students in my classes…. I was not disadvantaged like many of the new nonwhite students who were entering
college, lacking good early schooling."
To be sure, young Richard’s ‘good early schooling’ is unlike many Latino students, even by today’s standards. But this is
precisely the danger of applying Rodriguez’s autobiography as a measurative and ‘representative case study’ of Latino
achievement. Simply put, young Richard’s success was the result of a multitude of factors involving far more than mere language
acquisition alone. It was instead the combination of 1.) upper-class leaning parents, 2.) a middle-class neighborhood, and 3.) a
middle-class parochial school setting. These factors together worked to produce Rodriguez’s rather remarkable educational
experience that, when compared to Latino achievement as a whole in California, is atypical in nature. Wealth, power, and upward
mobility are thus the principal—-yet unacknowledged—-stimuli to young Richard’s success.
Rodriguez wrote a Newshour with Jim Lehrer essay entitled '"Soy Indio",
in which he states that, on a trip to Mexico, he astonished VIPs by being well spoken and well dressed but having dark skin and
Indio facial features. He also said that had he grown up in Mexico, he would have been denied a good education and good
jobs, but in the U.S., he was allowed onto the first steps of the ladder and had the ability to climb the rest of the way.
Browning of America
The 'Browning of America' may seem like a phrase coined by Rodriguez to describe an increase in the mixing of
cultural, racial, and ethnic
identities in the United States during the late
20th and early 21st century, but the term was in use
long before his 2001 book entitled Brown: The Last Discovery of America. For Rodriguez the phrase has to do more
with the color brown as a symbol of mélange in the United States
or specifically an increase in its bi- or even tri-racial subgroups. The phrase is commonly applied to the current
demographic shift towards a higher proportion of minorites in the total population in the United States. It can be used neutrally as a name for the
current demographic shift in the United States, but has also been appropriated by organized groups on both the left and the right. The far right evokes the phrase
generally as a minority-based usurping of customary or assumed White privilege, while the far left hails it as a welcomed
rethinking and/or accountability of deep-seated notions of White 'normativity.'
Rodriguez's original ideas are further explored in his 2002 collection of essays entitled , which was a finalist for the National Book Critics
Award.
External links
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