Ricardo/Richard

Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez.
by Richard Rodriguez.
Godine. 195 pp. $14.95.

The story is familiar in its outlines. Clever and watchful, the son of a poor immigrant family (in this case Mexican) is propelled by his easy successes in school into a world that is far removed from that of his parents. But that is where familiarity ends. For Richard Rodriguez’s account is not so much the record of a personal journey from one destination to another as it is a study of the distances that separate them, a careful assessment of the price that has had to be paid for achievement.

At an early age Richard Rodriguez became painfully aware of the class and cultural differences between his Spanish-speaking family and the English-speaking outside world. He turned Spanish and English into metaphors for the most critical division in a childhood world: that between the personal and the impersonal. Inside the screen doors of his home in Sacramento, California, his family life was safe, happy, and noisy, “a celebration of sounds.” Outside, the authority of his parents was disturbingly diminished; they became heartbreakingly vulnerable, alien, mute. He listened, embarrassed, as they struggled to make themselves understood, measuring the self-confident voice of a gas-station attendant against his father’s suddenly pitiful high-pitched falsetto. Since his Spanish-speaking home became a haven where he could hide from the unpleasant realities enforced by an English-speaking world, he drew a childish distinction between a language of intimacy and a public language:

My parents would say something to me and I would feel embraced by the sound of their words. Those sounds said: 1 am speaking at ease in Spanish. I am addressing you in words I never use with los gringos. I recognize you as someone special, close, like no one outside. You belong with us. In the family.

What Rodriguez discovers in the course of growing up and out, and what he returns to again and again as an adult in this book, is the meaninglessness of his childhood division between an intimate and a public language. The term “intimate language,” in fact, is a paradox. Intimacy is not a property of language, but is related to people, to feelings. The point, made by Rodriguez with wearying insistence, mars the clarity of his most persuasive arguments in this book, as when he attacks the supporters of bilingual education:

Today I hear bilingual educators say that children lose a degree of “individuality” by becoming assimilated into public society. . . . They do not seem to realize that there are two ways a person is individualized. So they do not realize that while one suffers a diminished sense of private individuality by becoming assimilated into public society, such assimilation makes possible the achievement of public individuality. . . .

Bilingual enthusiasts, moreover, sin against intimacy. An Hispanic-American writer tells me, “I will never give up my family language; I would as soon give up my soul.” . . . He credits to language what he should credit to family members. . . . For as long as he holds on to words, he can ignore how much else has changed in his life.

When the author was a graduate student, he first published the sane views for which he has since become known: if a child is to perform well in an English-speaking society, he must learn to speak articulately in English. The sooner his English education is begun, the greater will be his chances of performing well. By starting too late, the open-admissions college programs become a cruel hoax. As Rodriguez puts it, the ill-educated are welcomed with open arms when they enter, but no one is around to console them when they leave, blaming themselves for their failure. In fact the real beneficiaries of affirmative-action programs are those who are lucky enough to be convenient symbols of social oppression rather than the genuinely deprived. Instead of granting meaningful opportunities to those who have none, the programs grant preferments to those who are already educated, promoting the privileged in the name of the poor.

But as this book reveals, it was easier for the author to come to terms with these issues in print than it was to come to terms with them in his own life. Not only was he expected to champion minority causes that he did not espouse and minority students whom he did not understand, but he also found himself accepting the preferments that he knew he did not deserve. As a final irony, it was only because of his background that his views gained him a certain celebrity and made him much sought-after on the lecture circuits. Aware of the hypocrisy of his situation, he had no choice, he tells us, but to break off work on his Ph.D. dissertation and leave the academic world.

And so his long education ended in reverse of the way it began. It started when he was forced at the age of seven to become Richard instead of Ricardo; it ended when, having severed his ties with the personal, private world of his childhood, he was forced to play the part of the minority representative he no longer was.

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Far from being a celebration of achievement and of opportunities won, Hunger of Memory is thus a dirge to success, lamenting (while defending) the necessary breaking of personal ties with all those left behind, mute. Although Rodriguez still sees himself as one of the lucky ones—he has been granted an education, a public voice—what he has lost is always more palpable to him than what he has gained.

Or at least so he says—for this is finally an unconvincing book. In spite of the pervasive air of suffering, the apologetic tone, we are left to guess at why the author is suffering and just what he is apologizing for. Although the main subject is his estrangement from his parents because of his rise in class, it remains unclear why he should feel estranged, or why his gain should be their loss. Not surprisingly, his parents too remain in the dark. His father, when told that his son is giving up his career because of his troubled conscience, very sensibly says: “I don’t know why you feel this way. We have never had any of the chances before.” To which the author’s response is characteristic: “We, he said. But he was wrong. It was he who never had any of the chances before.” And yet for all his protestations of sympathetic misery, it is not the author’s fine distinctions but his father’s simple use of “we” that reflects genuine family feeling.

Since the author’s guilt, though genuine enough, seems always to be ascribed to the wrong cause, the only real pathos in the book lies in the discrepancy between what we hear and what we are told. We are told that education necessarily brings estrangement, but the thesis is false: understanding does not distance us from experience; understanding does not cut us off.

There is little in the book that is not analyzed strictly in terms of class. Although it is ostensibly a tribute to education, education is never described in terms of the joy or enlightenment it brings; it is described strictly as a hard-earned passport to worldly success. Books become symbols of accomplishment. We hear nothing of the impression they make, but a great deal about how much teachers, librarians, family, and friends are impressed by the quantities read. In spite of the reasons Rodriguez gives for his flight from his dissertation (to recapture his roots) and his teaching position (to escape the hypocrisy of preferential treatment), one suspects that he did not suffer overly much for his withdrawal from academia. Education is seen here as a process that is long, unglamorous, and demeaning, leading to membership in a community of scholars that is referred to as lonely, dour, and dreary. This is clearly not the community to which Rodriguez wishes to belong.

Furthermore, although the book is an attempt to recapture something of the closeness and intimacy of family life in the past, we learn little about the members of the Rodriguez family that is not refracted through the author’s obsession with class. His parents, described only in terms of telltale mannerisms, are sometimes pitiful and sometimes caricatures. But they fare better than his many sisters and brothers, who are nothing but complexions (light or dark), jobs, furs, trips, cars.

The same is true of friends. They are referred to during boyhood either as gringos, the children of the rich, the middle class, or professionals; later, as either envious academics or the kind of laughing intimates who are seen at tennis and brunch parties on Sunday mornings (when the author’s former intimates would be in church).

Even the reader is imagined in class terms: “Someone with a face erased; someone of no particular race or sex or age or weather. . . . All that I know about him is that he has had a long education and that his society, like mine, is often public (un gringo).”

Finally the author protests too much. Although he continually tells us that he suffers from a sense of the poor’s lack of advantages, from the evidence of this book he is suffering rather from an exaggerated sense of the chasm between himself and them—in short, from a sense of superiority. He is in fact guilty of nothing but being a snob.