Hunger Memory Hunger of Memory: Contradictions From

Hunger Memory

Hunger of Memory: Contradictions from Experience

In Richard Rodriguez's autobiography Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez, the authors paints a portrait of himself, his family, his work, and his society as they all developed and converged or diverged over the decades of his life to this point. Through his experiences first as a student and then as an educator, Rodriguez has encountered many problems arising from his ethnicity and his native language and culture as well as from his adoption of English language and American culture in the later periods of his life. This has led to a certain juxtaposition of ideals and observations that at times makes it unclear precisely how Rodriguez truly perceives things, or if there might not be some ambiguity in many of his perspectives. This paper will explore some of the apparent contradictions that Rodriguez makes in this book and in his general outlook, coming to a more nuanced and more complex understanding both of Rodriguez as an individual and of his circumstances and perspective on life based on his mixed cultural and linguistic identities.

Even the very beginnings of Rodriguez's book seem to present some contradictions to the reader seeking to investigate this work in an open and accepting manner. He begins by alluding to certain ways in which he has been stereotyped or pigeonholed throughout his life, making it clear that he wishes to be judged independently as an individual rather than classified based on only the most shallow perception of who he is. This is definitely understandable, especially in light of the story of his life that Rodriguez goes on to relate in which he is often left with little alternative other than to submit to the preconceptions developed about him.

It appears highly contradictory, then, for Rodriguez to reflect on other people with the same sense of judgment and superficial stereotyping, yet this is precisely what he does in the introduction to his autobiography. He imagines a clerk in a bookstore attempting to determine which section the Hunger of Memory should be placed in: "(Rodriguez? Ridriguez?) Probably he will shelve it alongside specimens of that exotic new genre, 'ethnic literature'" (p. 7). It would seem as though Rodriguez is just as quick to judge this imaginary bookstore clerk as others have been to judge him. Yet examining this seeming contradiction more closely, it can be seen that Rodriguez is not actually stereotyping anyone, but rather commenting on the lack of a proper way to identify an "ethnic" individual that does not purport or even attempt to represent his ethnic "identity." It is not that he assumes the bookstore clerk will be racist or stereotype Hunger of Memory, but rather he acknowledges that there aren't really any alternatives to such treatment on today's world.

There is also an odd juxtaposition and seeming contradiction to be found in the relationship that Rodriguez describes to language, as well. Both English and Spanish play very important roles in his life and the development of his character, yet the different roles that he ascribes to these two languages seem at times to be in conflict with each other, or seem to cross over between the two languages in ways that the author claims they specifically don't. In other words, though Rodriguez insists that English and Spanish had entirely different and separate purposes in his formative years, this does not always appear to have been the case.