With the publication of his autobiography, Hunger of Memory, in 1982, Richard Rodriguez (rawd-REE-gehz) rose to immediate national attention as a fine, if controversial, essayist. Born Ricardo Rodriguez in San Francisco, California, in 1944, the son of Mexican immigrants, he moved with his family to Sacramento, where they had purchased a small home. Ricardo spoke only Spanish at home with his parents and siblings. In Hunger of Memory he describes his first experience of English-language society, encountered in the Catholic elementary classroom which transformed him from Ricardo to Richard. When his parents began to speak only the “public” language of English at home, at the recommendation of his Irish nun teachers, Richard suffered a loss of intimacy with his family. He later decided that the educational process itself accounted for his separation from his parents, rather than simply “public” (English) versus “private” (Spanish) language.

Rodriguez was raised Catholic and attended Catholic primary and secondary schools. He earned a B.A. from Stanford University in 1967 and an M.S. from Columbia University in 1969. He did graduate work at the University of California, Berkeley, and at the Warburg Institute in London. He received a Fulbright Fellowship (1972-1973) and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship (1976-1977). Though he was offered several university teaching positions, he declined the offers because he suspected that he was benefiting from a misplaced affirmative action. That is, he was offered such positions because as a Mexican American he was a member of an underrepresented ethnic group, while he believed that his entire education and preparation had resulted in his complete assimilation into the majority. Rodriguez became an editor at Pacific News Service, where he served for more than two decades, and a contributing editor for Harper’s Magazine, U.S. News & World Report, and the Sunday “Opinion” section of the Los Angeles Times. He has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The American Scholar, Time, Mother Jones, The New Republic, and other publications.

Rodriguez spent six years writing Hunger of Memory, sections of which first appeared in magazines. Hunger of Memory is autobiographical, but rather than presenting a chronological view of Rodriguez’s growth and development, it presents his life in essays focused on his development as related to broader issues. Having learned the public language of English and entered successfully into the linguistic and cultural discourse of the dominant culture, Rodriguez reflects on the relationship between language, family, and intimacy. Having been raised Mexican American and Catholic, he examines his Catholic faith and comments on liturgical changes to Catholic rites. Though Rodriguez was awarded funding for college and postgraduate study based on merit, assistance was also based partly on his minority status.

Having thus benefited from affirmative action, he critiques it as a misguided approach that—because it helps people based on ethnicity or race—often helps those who are no longer disadvantaged. Affirmative action, argues Rodriguez, should focus on class rather than race. Rodriguez also criticizes bilingual education as a program that prevents more rapid assimilation of non-English speakers, consequently maintaining or even aggravating their disadvantaged status in relation to the majority culture. Furthermore, Rodriguez sees education as a transformative process that gives the individual an identity as a member of a group, an identity denied the student of a bilingual program. Hunger of Memory exploded on the literary scene when first published: The book received more attention from mainstream critics than any other single work by a Chicano author. Mexican American critics and Latin Americanists immediately responded to the polemical nature of the text. Advocates of affirmative action and bilingual education registered the betrayal that only one of their own could elicit.

Like Hunger of Memory, much of Days of Obligation appeared as separate essays prior to being collected. Though many of the essays take Rodriguez’s life as a point of departure, Days of Obligation is a more distanced, less polemical narrative than his first book. Rodriguez recalls, in “Asians,” the Sacramento neighborhood of his childhood and his Chinese dentist. He examines the apparent decline of Catholicism and the rise of Protestantism among Hispanics in the United States and Latin America, referencing his own Catholicism. He details the consequences of the AIDS epidemic on the gay population of San Francisco, making no effort to avoid revealing his own homosexuality. As in Hunger of Memory, he focuses predominantly on Mexican and Mexican American culture and history, particularly in relation or contrast to the United States. In “Nothing Lasts a Hundred Years,” the closing essay, he recalls the argument he had with his father when he was fourteen and his father was fifty. His father told him that life is harder than he thinks. Nearly his father’s age, he now agrees with him, and honors him, fulfilling the obligation of the book’s title. Broader in its investigation, less personal and less specifically autobiographical than Hunger of Memory, Days of Obligation nonetheless continues the discourse Rodriguez initiated in his first book and proves him to be an outstanding essayist and a major figure in Chicano literature.

Brown, published in 2002, is a collection of essays on a broad variety of topics, from the cleaning of the Sistine Chapel to Broadway musicals, in which the author works to subvert the notion of race in America as a distinction between black and white and suggests the color brown as a means of understanding both America’s future and her past. The book was nominated for the 2002 National Book Critics Circle Award for general nonfiction.

During the 1990’s and 2000’s, Rodriguez was often seen on the Public Broadcasting System’s NewsHour with Jim Lehrer in his capacity as an essayist. His abiding theme was the reexamination of race, and identity in general, in American society. His awards include the Frankel Medal from the National Endowment for the Humanities (now known as the National Humanities Medal) and the International Journalism Award from the World Affairs Council of California. In 1997 he received the coveted George Foster Peabody Award, recognizing his “outstanding achievement in broadcast and cable.” He lives in San Francisco.

Richard Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory is a collection of essays tracing his alienation from his Mexican heritage. The son of Mexican American immigrants, Rodriguez was not able to speak English when he began school in Sacramento, California. The Catholic nuns who taught him asked that his parents speak English to him at home so that he could hear English spoken all the time. When his parents complied, Rodriguez experienced his first rupture between his original culture and his newly acquired culture. That initial experience compelled him to see the difference between “public” language—English—and “private” language—Spanish. To succeed in a world controlled by those who spoke English, to succeed in the public arena, Rodriguez learned that he had to choose public language over the private language spoken within his home. Hence he opted for alienation from his Mexican heritage and roots, a choice that he viewed with resignation and regret.

His educational journey continued as he proceeded to earn a master’s degree and then to become a Fulbright scholar studying English Renaissance literature in London. At that time, he decided to leave academic life, believing that it provided an advantage to Mexican Americans at the expense of those who did not possess this hyphenated background.

Rodriguez proceeded to become an opponent of affirmative action, and details his opposition to this policy in Hunger of Memory. Another policy to which he voices his opposition is bilingual education. Believing that “public educators in a public schoolroom have an obligation to teach a public language,” Rodriguez has used various opportunities—interviews, his autobiography, television appearances—to emphasize his view of the relationship between a person’s identity in a majority culture and his or her need to learn the language of that culture.

Another component of Rodriguez’s identity that he has explored through various means is his relationship with the Roman Catholic church. Having been raised in a traditional Catholic home, he was accustomed to the symbols and language of the Catholic church as they were before the changes that resulted from the Second Vatican Council, which convened in 1962. After this council, the rituals of the church were dramatically simplified and the liturgy was changed from Latin to vulgar tongues, such as English. According to Rodriguez, these changes in the Roman Catholic church challenged the identity of people whose early sense of self was shaped by traditional Catholicism.

A thoughtful and articulate writer regarding the tensions experienced by Mexican Americans growing up in America and by a Catholic struggling with the changes in the Catholic church, Richard Rodriguez has given voice to the frequently unspoken difficulties of possessing a complex identity.

Richard Rodriguez was born on July 31, 1944, in San Francisco, California, to Mexican immigrants Leopoldo and Victoria Moran Rodriguez, the third of their four children. When Rodriguez was still a young child, the family moved to Sacramento, California, to a small house in a comfortable white neighborhood. ‘‘Optimism and ambition led them to a house (our home) many blocks from the Mexican side of town ... It never occurred to my parents that they couldn’t live wherever they chose,’’ writes Rodriguez in Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez, his well-received 1981 autobiography. This first book placed him in the national spotlight but brought scorn from many supporters of affirmative action and bilingual education.

Rodriguez’s family was not well-to-do, but his father—a man with a third-grade education who ended up working as a dental technician after dreaming of a career as an engineer—and his mother somehow found the money to send their children to Catholic schools. Ultimately, Rodriguez, who could barely speak English when he started elementary school, finished his academic efforts as a Fulbright scholar in Renaissance literature with degrees from Stanford University and Columbia University. Perched on the edge of a brilliant career in academia, but uncomfortable with what he viewed as the unwarranted advantage given him by affirmative action, Rodriguez refused a number of teaching jobs at prestigious universities. He felt that receiving preference and assistance based on his classification as a minority was unfair to others. This dramatic decision, along with a number of anti-affirmative action essays published in the early to mid-1970s, made Rodriguez a somewhat notorious national figure.

After leaving academia, Rodriguez spent the next six years writing the essays that comprise Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez, aided for part of that time by a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship. Before being compiled into book form, many of the essays appeared in publications such as Columbia Forum, American Scholar, and College English. Hunger of Memory was a hugely successful book, garnering reviews in approximately fifty publications after its release. Critics generally praised the book for its clear and concise prose and for Rodriguez’s honesty in revealing his conflicted feelings about being a ‘‘scholarship boy,’’ as he refers to himself in the book. In 1983, the book won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and a Christopher Award.

Since 1981, Rodriguez has continued his writing career, occasionally serving as an essayist for the PBS series MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour and also working as an editor with the Pacific News Service in California. In 1992, he published Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father, another collection of previously issued autobiographical essays. The book, which did not receive the same acclaim and admiration as his first book, covers such topics as Rodriguez’s Mexican and Indian heritage, his homosexuality, and the AIDS epidemic in San Francisco.