Richard Rodriguez's memoir Hunger of Memory investigates his transition from speaking Spanish at home to becoming educated in English and assimilating to American culture. He describes how learning English separated him from his family and Mexican heritage. Rodriguez criticizes bilingual education and affirmative action, arguing they prevent full assimilation and that disadvantages are more due to class than race. However, he acknowledges benefiting from affirmative action programs as a student. The memoir examines the themes of language, identity, culture and Rodriguez's views on education and political issues impacting Latinos and minorities in the U.S.

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Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodríguez is a diary that investigates
Richard Rodríguez's transitioning in an America that challenges him to comprehend what it
means to be a Mexican-American and what it means to be a Catholic in America. At the heart
of this personal history is Rodríguez's acknowledgment that his is a position of distance, a
position that he acknowledges with acquiescence and regret. As the title of this accumulation
of personal pieces suggests, he recalls his initial adolescence with wistfulness, while
recognizing that his transitioning has brought about his uprooting from that basic, secure life.
The most vital part of his education and his advancement to an adult is dialect. He investigates
his first memory of language in the opening essay, which looks into his hearing his name
pronounced in English when he goes to a Catholic school in Sacramento, California. He is
surprised by the acknowledgment that the generic quality and open nature of this declaration
proclaim his own particular selection of open dialect—English—to the detriment of his
private dialect—Spanish. Rodríguez has started to be taught as an open individual with an
open dialect.
This education, as he reviews it, happened before the emergence of bilingual education,
a situation that Rodríguez soundly scrutinizes. In his perspective bilingual education keeps
children from taking in the general population dialect that will be their medium to
accomplishment in the world, and he utilizes his own particular experience—being a bilingual

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child who was taught without bilingual training as it was brought into the American
educational system in the 1960's as a trial.
Rodríguez offers himself as another case in condemning affirmative policy regarding
minorities in society. Turning down offers to lecture at different post-secondary educational
organizations that he knew needed to contract him essentially because he was Latino,
Rodríguez started what has been his diligent feedback of governmental policies regarding
minorities in the United States. Another object of his criticism in Hunger of Memory is the
Roman Catholic Church and its changed sacrament, dialect, and customs. Reviewing the
religious establishment that had formed his personality, he laments the progressions that he
accepts have streamlined and in this way decreased the majesty and mystery that he connects
with the customary Catholic Church. Rodríguez is nostalgic about what has been lost while
tolerating the truth of the present.
In giving a record of his education, Rodríguez likewise gives a record of his calling:
writing. From his initial decision of a public dialect to his later decision to expound on this
choice, he paints a self-picture of a man whose adoration for words and thoughts propels him
to investigate his past. Rodríguez acknowledges the individual who writes in English and who
expounds on the individual whose personality is characterized by his battle to discover his
own voice.
Some of the themes in Rodriguez’s memoir are language, race, and affirmative action.
His traditionalist perspectives on these issues have made Rodriguez a most loved of the
political Right and a target of Latino and Chicano activists.
Rodriguez starts Hunger of Memory with a reflection on dialect and how it denoted the
start of his cultural assimilation and consequent separation from his family. He describes the

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inconvenience he was having in school in view of his constrained English capability.
Communicating in Spanish at home, the nuns from his school contended, had been harming
the Rodriguez children and their capacity to advance in school. Rodriguez's parents obliging,
the nuns start the alienation process between his parents and Rodriguez. Rodriguez demands
that the Spanish dialect has no place in children's education, that to "speak the public language
of the gringos" is both a privilege and commitment. He reprimands bilingual projects and
contends that full accommodation and assimilation is vital if children are to have open
personalities and the full privileges of citizenship. Researchers, accordingly, contend that
Rodriguez's own detachment from his way of life and family clarifies precisely why such
projects are required (Agudo 112).
Supporters of bilingual education would contend that the feeling of loss experienced by
Rodriguez in his transition from Spanish-Mexican society to English-American society could
have been facilitated, if not altogether avoided, through a more continuous cultural
assimilation in which the dialect of home, the language, and culture of closeness, need never
be surrendered. A local dialect can exist together; even flourish, with the general society
dialect. They are not totally unrelated. Scholarly abilities learned in one are effortlessly
moved into the other. To succeed in English-speaking American society, it is not important to
hinder expression in the dialect of one's ethnic birthplace (Petrovic 70). The loss of closeness
at home is similar to the one Rodriguez experienced when the Catholic Church changed to the
vernacular from Latin, a change that influenced him profoundly and about which he writes in
the absolute most moving entries of the book.
Rodriguez recounts that his feeling of mediocrity and ugliness growing up had been
brought on by prejudice against him for his dark brown skin. He clearly reviews that this

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prejudice came not just from whites but also from his family, for instance, his parent
cautioning him to stay out of the sun and relatives typically frightful of children being
conceived with dark complexions. He recognizes that relatives responded along these lines as
a result of the social abuse of individuals with dark skins, perceiving that darker skin
symbolized destitution and persecution. He even endeavors to trim off his own "brownness"
at a certain point. Although, it is his know-how of los pobres that let him understand his skin
complexion does not make a difference. He had worked side by side with white collar class,
educated, white individuals, and when a team of Spanish-speaking Mexican workers was
brought to work, he needed to, however, could not feel associated with them. He had
understood that regardless of how dark his own particular skin, his education surpassed the
complexion (Wise 17). At least, as a public and open individual, he can protect himself and
his rights, which drives him to at long last appreciate his dark complexion.
This acknowledgment prompts Rodriguez's criticism affirmative action. His advanced
education started to unwind, he explains, amid the Civil Rights movement, after he was
marked a minority. His intense complaint to governmental policy regarding minorities in
society originates from his conviction that such projects are misguided. He contends that the
disappointment of governmental policy regarding minorities in society is that just white collar
class non-white individuals, and not destitute ethnic minorities, advantage from affirmative
action. He further writes that non-white individuals like him, taught and working class, will,
at last, be fruitful paying little respect to the system. He then recommends that prejudice,
particularly institutional bigotry, is more an issue of class than of race. Change ought to
concentrate on essential and optional educating, yet this change ought to exclude all the more
socially delicate training (Wise 18). Rather, he contends, essential and auxiliary schools ought

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to culturally assimilate non-white individuals. The irony here is that Rodriguez was the
recipient of such projects, which he recognizes, and he keeps on expounding on such issues,
decades later.
Although Rodriguez’s targets Affirmative action, he openly confesses to having been
the recipient of the system on various events. As a graduate student in the 1970's, he won a
few prestigious fellowships and awards, and in spite of the fact that he adequately met the
criteria for such grants, he felt singled out in view of his Chicano roots. While amid his last
year of graduate studies at the University of California at Berkeley, he was offered desired
teaching opportunities at a few schools while similarly qualified white kindred students had
no such offers, he chose to turn them down. This autobiographical crossroads gives Rodriguez
the chance to dig into what he considers the irony of his dilemma. From one perspective, he
realizes that he has given his life to turning into an individual of English-talking public
society, for which he endured the misfortunes as discussed. However, in the wake of
accomplishing his objective and separating himself out in the open society, he is remunerated
for being an individual from an ethnic minority, the definite thing from which he made it his
all-consuming purpose to get away. He trusts that he does not need such compensates; which
he has as of now accomplished. Governmental policy regarding minorities in society's
largesse ought to go to the genuinely underprivileged, to the individuals who cannot read and
compose and are bound to an existence of need and poverty.
The situation that Rodriguez reprimands may have been common amid the early years
of affirmative action and may have had the outcomes he notes in specific sections of higher
education. Rodriguez has a place, to some degree, in the initial generation of Ph.D. students
whose minority status and ethnicity, as later with sexual orientation, served as a catalyst, as

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opposed to hindrance, for the conceding of scholarly appointments. Proponents of affirmative
action contend that minorities have been customarily underrepresented in advanced education
and other aspects of the employment sector and that its projects have looked to redress the
circumstance. The number of minorities seeking vocations in higher education has increased
drastically since the mid-1970's, in huge part on account of affirmative action policies. The
individuals who took after Rodriguez in undergraduate and master's level college under the
sponsorship of affirmative policies have possessed the capacity to utilize the system to
accomplish a level of preparing and education that Rodriguez accomplished all alone. On
account of the project, they need not feel estranged and alone as he did. The fact that
governmental policies regarding minorities were executed toward the end of Rodriguez's
instruction, making him the muddled beneficiary of its benefits, is essentially a mishap of
history.

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Works cited
Agudo, Juan de Dios Martínez. Teaching and Learning English through Bilingual Education.
Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012.
Petrovic, John E. International Perspectives on Bilingual Education: Policy, Practice, and
Controversy. Charlotte: IAP, 2010.
Rodriguez, Richard. Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez : an
Autobiography (Reprint). New York City: Bantam Books, 1982.
Wise, Tim J. Affirmative Action: Racial Preference in Black and White. Abingdon:
Routledge, 2012.