essay about his alienation from his family and culture. His mother wrote him a letter to express her concern about these topics, and she asked him to stop doing so. His response is that his intention in the essay had been to praise what had been lost. He closes this chapter underscoring that education has divided his entire family.

Some of the most controversial and discussed themes in Rodriguez’s autobiography are language, race, and affirmative action. His conservative viewpoints on these issues have made Rodriguez a favorite of the political Right and a target of Chicano and Latino activists.

Rodriguez begins Hunger of Memory with a reflection on language and how it marked the beginning of his acculturation and subsequent disconnect from his family. He recounts the trouble he was having in school because of his limited English proficiency. Speaking Spanish at home, the nuns from his school argued, had been hurting the Rodriguez children and their ability to progress in school. The parents’ obliging the nuns begins the alienation between Rodriguez and his parents. Rodriguez insists that the Spanish language has no place in the education of children, that to “speak the public language of the gringos” is both a right and obligation. He denounces bilingual programs and argues that full assimilation is necessary if children are to have public identities and the full rights of citizenship. Scholars, in response, argue that Rodriguez’s own disconnection from his culture and family explains exactly why such programs are needed.

Rodriguez writes that his sense of inferiority and ugliness growing up had been caused by prejudice against him for his dark brown skin. He vividly recalls that this prejudice came not only from whites (in the form of racial slurs) but also from his own family—for example, his mother warning him to stay out of the sun and aunts generally fearful of children being born with dark skin. He acknowledges that family members reacted this way because of the social mistreatment of dark-skinned people, recognizing that darker skin symbolized poverty and oppression. He even attempts to shave off his own “brownness” at one point. However, it is his experience of los pobres that makes him realize his skin color does not matter. He had worked alongside middle-class, educated, white labors, and when a crew of Spanish-speaking Mexican laborers were brought on the job, he wanted to but could not feel connected to them. He had realized that no matter how dark his own skin, his education erases the color. At minimum, as a public person, he can defend himself and his rights, which leads him to finally embrace his dark skin.

This realization leads to Rodriguez’s objection to affirmative action. His higher education began to unravel, he writes, during the Civil Rights movement, after he was labeled a minority. His vehement objection to affirmative action comes from his belief that such programs are misguided. He argues that the failure of affirmative action is that only middle-class people of color, and not poor people of color, benefit from affirmative action. He continues, writing that people of color like him, educated and middle class, will ultimately be successful regardless of the program. He then suggests that racism, specifically institutional racism, is more an issue of class than of race. Reform should focus on primary and secondary schooling, but this reform should not include more culturally sensitive education. Rather, he argues, primary and secondary schools should acculturate people of color. The irony here is that Rodriguez was the beneficiary of such programs (which he acknowledges), and he continues to write about such issues, decades later.