[In the following essay, Villanueva-Collado examines the concepts of cultural separation and cultural alienation as explored in Hunger of Memory and Edward Rivera's Family Installments: Memories of Growing Up Hispanic.]

An analysis of Family Installments: Memories of Growing Up Hispanic, by the Neorican novelist Edward Rivera, and Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez by the Chicano writer Richard Rodriguez, reveals some surprising parallels. Not only do both writers deal with identity in terms of family, education, language and religion, but there is a conscious decision in each case to deal with biographical material. Rodriguez openly labels his narrative in the title. Rivera chooses to create a distance between himself and the text by adopting a first-person narrative persona, his protagonist Santos Malanguez, to whom the novel's subtitle would apply, rather than to its author.

The choice between autobiography as the discursive mode in Rodriguez and the fictional first-person narrative mode in Rivera signals a different ‘reading pact’ or ‘contract’ in each case. In the text by Rodriguez, author and narrator are one and the same: “they are assumed to be the same person, one who exists outside the book … The reader assumes that the narrator tells the truth, that what is narrated did happen.”¹ In other words, the verifiability or truthfulness of the text depends on the degree of trust the author is able to generate in the reader, a form of personal privilege. Moreover, whatever message, moral, criticism or commentary the author may want to transmit is also going to be accepted on the basis of such privilege. If Rodriguez makes a statement and submits as evidence facts from his own life, then that statement cannot be refuted. On the other hand, autobiography lacks the quality of universal extension; the narrative applies to a unique human being in a particular set of circumstances leading to a particular set of accommodations. The more autobiography is beset with limits, the more it enables its subject to survive and define himself.² In order for Rodriguez' text to achieve the quality of universal extension, it would have to be treated by its author as an exemplum, a tale with a universal moral, and he himself would have to become a kind of “everyman,” the events of whose life constitute a typology for his particular race or group.

Rivera's choice of a first-person narrative enables him to generalize from the beginning of his text. “Growing Up Hispanic” applies to Rivera, by virtue of his ethnic heritage, as well as to Santos Malanguez, who shares in that heritage, but it also applies to any Hispanic reader who can find within the pages of the novel Rivera's definition of what “growing up Hispanic” means at a particular time and place. By creating an openly fictional character, Rivera removes himself from any kind of authorial privilege; he does not validate Malanguez' adventures with ‘the truth’ of his own life, allowing the reader to reach that conclusion by himself. Moreover, the use of a first-person narrator enables Rivera to typologize openly in his exploration of “growing up Hispanic.” For him as well as for Rodriguez, there operates an intentionality having to do with a particular response to just such a process. Each response involves the perception and transmission of a particular ideology which shapes and frames the fact of “growing up Hispanic” in the U.S.A.

Raymond Williams defines ideology as “a system of meaning and values which is the expression or projection of a particular class system” or “a relatively formal and articulated system of meanings, values and beliefs of a kind that can be abstracted as a ‘world view’ or a ‘class outlook,’” and quotes Engels' letter to F. Mehiring, 14 July 1893:

Ideology is a process accomplished by the so-called thinker consciously indeed but with a false consciousness. The real motives impelling him remain unknown to him, otherwise it would not be an ideological process at all. Hence he imagines false or apparent motives.³

According to Williams, common Marxist concepts of ideology are insufficient to describe “the relatively mixed, confused, incomplete or inarticulate consciousness of actual men” in any period of society (109). Instead, he proposes the concept of “hegemony,” traditionally defined as political rule or domination, expanded by Marxism to include relations between social classes, and finally redefined by Antonio Gramsci as a complex interlocking of political, social and cultural forces by which the whole social process relates to specific distributions of power and influence.⁴ Thus Williams differentiates between “ideology” and “hegemony:”

Hegemony is then not only the articulate upper-level of ‘ideology,’ nor are its forms of control only those ordinarily seen as ‘manipulation’ or ‘indoctrination.’ It is a whole body of practices and expectations over the whole of living; our senses and assignments of energy, our shaping perceptions of ourselves and our world. It is a lived system of meanings and values—constitutive and constituting—which as they are experienced as practices appear as reciprocally confirming. It thus constitutes a sense of reality for most people in the society, a sense of absolute because experienced reality beyond which it is very difficult for most members of the society to move, in most areas of their lives. It is, that is to say, in the strongest sense, a ‘culture,’ but a culture which has also to be seen as the lived dominance and subordination of particular classes.

(110)

Discourse, as defined by Michel Foucault, is “not simply that which expresses struggles or systems of domination, but that for which one struggles; it is the power which one is striving to seize.”⁵ Discursive practices “embodied in technical processes, in institutions, in patterns of general behavior”⁶ would, because of their overall pervasiveness, have to be included in Williams' concept of “hegemony.” Those reflecting cultural and social values are, by virtue of this inclusion, implicit and omnipresent, constituting themselves into what Richard Terdiman calls “dominant discourse:”

The inherent tendency of dominant discourse is “to go without saying.” The dominant is the discourse whose presence is defined by the social impossibility of its absence. Because of the implicit potential towards automatism, the dominant is the discourse which, being everywhere, comes from nowhere; to it is granted the structural privilege of appearing to be unaware of the very question of its legitimacy.

(61)

Every dominant discourse projects what Gerald Prince has called a “narrataire,” an individual who figures as “the internalized conscience of the conventional and simultaneously as resistance to any deviation from its norms.”⁷ However, for every dominant discourse there is a “contrary and transgressive counter discourse” (65) which functions to point out the limits and flaws of the dominant. Its characteristic tone has been identified as “a corrosive irony concerning the here and now” (76) and its ultimate purpose “to unmask the fetish character of modern forms of social domination” (75). Gerald Cohen defines the principal term: “To make a fetish of something or fetishize it is to invest it with powers it does not in itself have.”⁸ Even though counter discourses constitute themselves in opposition to the dominant discourse, they paradoxically reaffirm the privileged positions of the latter (107) as they reflect the ideological terms from which they are trying to distance themselves.

Family Installments and Hunger of Memory, insofar as they deal with aspects of hegemony and ideology as they apply to “growing up Hispanic,” may then be examined in the lights of the terms just defined. Dominant discourse, in Terdiman's usage of the term, is as culturally pervasive as Williams shows hegemony to be but embodies the values of a dominant class, as ideology does. On the other hand, counter-discourse expresses the relations of subordination and domination contained in the concept of hegemony but absent from the concept of ideology.⁹

The ‘reading pact’ must also be taken into account at this point. It is my intention to show that Rodriguez wants (1) to show the process by which he, as an individual, has accepted and internalized ideology; (2) to set himself up as an example of a successful “narrataire” to the reader. He tries to achieve these goals by means of a narrative which fetishizes dominant discourse. In his case, there is no such thing as “growing up Hispanic,” since the individual must, in order to manipulate dominant discourse, give up his ethnic identity. As we shall see, isolation and even ostracism is not too high a price to pay for successful assimilation.

Rivera, on the other hand, maps out a pattern of “corrosive irony” which identifies his text as counter-discursive, and proceeds to reveal the fetish character of each manifestation of dominant discourse by means of what Terdiman has called “re/citation,” that is, the imbedding of fragments of dominant discourse within counter-discourse, out of context, in order to illuminate their essential illogicity (207). However, since dominant discourse tends to incorporate counter-discourse, Santos Malanguez also goes through a process of absorption into the dominant. This occurs through the agency of an element from an established type of counter-discourse which has been allowed to set itself up as a species of counter-ideology: the world-view embodied in poetic utterance, and more specifically in the poetry of British Romanticism. Santos Malanguez is able to fight and ultimately resist assimilation by means of corrosive irony, which enables him to examine the boundaries of hegemony and to expose ideology by means of a ruthless analysis of its discourses. I have chosen to call such a stance adaptation, as opposed to the term used by Rodriguez.

Rodriguez is quick to reveal his goals. He sets out to prove that dominant discourse manifests itself as public language—that is, English—and that bilingualism is impossible.¹⁰ Throughout his text, he gets up a system of binary oppositions based on such a premise: public language (English)/private language (Spanish); public life (North America)/private life (Mexico); gringos/parents; school/home. The first term is always privileged. He makes clear the reasons for the adoption of such a system: “What I did not believe was that I could speak a single public language” (19). He also states the aims and consequences of its use:

But the bilingualists simplistically scorn the value and necessity of assimilation … 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.

(26)

Private individuality/public individuality—it seems as if Rodriguez had, within his antinomic system, created a term which is, by its very nature, contradictory and based on a mystification of language—that is, the unfounded belief that language, by itself, can achieve assimilation for individuals who are linguistically or racially different and by virtue of this fact are excluded from becoming “narrataires,” upholders and defenders of dominant discourse.

It is the experience of being different that Rodriguez first records, but in terms that point to the further development of his argument: “In the early years of my boyhood, my parents coped very well in America. My father had steady work. My mother managed at home. We were nobody's victims … We lived among gringos and only a block from the biggest, whitest houses” (12). If anything, it is the family unit, with its insistence on a separate language and separate cultural mores that can be singled out as generating difference: “I grew up in a house where the only regular guests were my relations … Our house stood apart. A gaudy yellow in a row of white bungalows. We were the people with the noisy dog. The people who raised pigeons and chickens. We were the foreigners on the block” (12–13).

Language—in this case, Spanish—remains, according to Rodriguez' account, the only barrier to total acceptance into the mainstream. This situation is quickly remedied by the intervention of “narrataires” in the shape of Irish nuns who visit the Rodriguez household to ask that Spanish not be spoken at home: “‘Is it possible for you and your husband to encourage your children to practice their English when they are home?’‘Of course,’ my parents complied” (21).

Such a visit has dramatic consequences for the Rodriguez family. It breaks up the hierarchy in several ways. It separates the children from their parents in terms of overall communication: “The family's quiet was partly due to the fact that, as we children learned more and more English, we shared fewer and fewer words with our parents. Sentences needed to be spoken slowly when a child addressed his mother or father” (23). It creates identity/identification conflicts: “My mother! My father! After English became my primary language, I no longer knew what words to use in addressing my parents” (23–24). It sets children against parents in terms of language correctness: “A second grade student, I was the one who came home and corrected the ‘simple’ grammatical mistakes of our parents” (44). Finally, it upsets the traditional position of the father: “Though his English improved somewhat, he retired into silence. At dinner, he spoke very little. One night his children and even his wife helplessly giggled at his garbled English pronunciation of the Catholic grace before meals. Thereafter he made his wife recite the prayer at the start of each meal … Hers became the public voice of the family” (24).

Rodriguez is able to justify all of the above-mentioned changes only by asserting that intimacy and language are not related, in other words, that language plays no role in the creation of relationships in the sphere of what he chooses to call “private life”; however, it seems to play just such a role in the sphere of public life. Since Spanish is the language of private life, what Rodriguez must do in fact is to devaluate Spanish and then devaluate language:

An Hispanic-American writer tells me: “I will never give up my family language; I would as soon give up my soul.” Thus he holds to his chest a skein of words, as though it were the source of his family ties. He credits to language what he should credit to family members. A convenient mistake. For as long as he holds on to words, he can ignore how much else has changed in his life.

(35)

Speaking specifically about his family, Rodriguez adds:

I would dishonor our closeness by holding on to a particular language and calling it my family language. Intimacy is not trapped within words. It passes through words. It passes. The truth is that intimates leave the room. Doors close. Faces move away from the window. Time passes. Voices recede into the dark. Death finally quiets the voice. And there is no way to deny it. No way to stand in the crowd, uttering one's family language.

(39)

An examination of the previous passage reveals not only a devaluation of language but surprisingly enough a devaluation of intimacy itself, as powerless before the passage of time and ultimately death. It thereby illuminates the passage where Rodriguez describes his relationship to his grandmother; there he reduces communication to prelinguistic levels by eliminating the need for content: “Our relationship continued. Language was never its source … My only relative who spoke no word of English … The words she spoke were almost irrelevant to that fact—the sounds she made. Content. The mystery remained: intimate utterance” (36).

If private language is reduced to meaningless utterance, public language is turned into a fetish. It is through his education at the hands of Irish Catholic nuns that young Richard changes linguistic identity: “I also needed my teachers to keep my attention from straying in class by calling out Rich-heard—their English voices slowly prying loose my ties to my other name its three notes, Ri-car-do” (21). Theirs is a task of socialization leading into absorption by dominant discourse, as well as of education:

Stressing memorization the nuns assumed an important Catholic bias. Stated positively, they believed that learning is a social activity; learning is a rite of passage into a group. (Remembrance is itself an activity that establishes a student's dependence upon and union with others). Less defensively, the nuns distrusted challenges to authority.

(89)

Rodriguez thus identifies the hidden text of Catholic education—socialization by means of obedience to dominant discourse, that “authority” which he mentions without ever defining or explaining it.

Edward Rivera, on the other hand, ruthlessly exposes the process of socialization at the hands of “narrataires” such as Irish Catholic educators. Correctness in the language of dominant discourse becomes not so much a desirable goal as an instrument with which the “narrataires—the nuns—remind their hapless students of their inferior condition, as when sister Felicia decides who is to receive, as charity, a communion outfit: “Shyness and poor English were unmistakable signs of someone who needed to have his outfit bought for him.”¹¹ Education, according to Michel Foucault, is very much involved with discourse: “Every educational system is a political means of maintaining or of modifying the appropriation of discourse, with the knowledge and the powers it carries with it.”¹² Rodriguez stresses the socializing function of education; Rivera, the “lived dominance and subordination of particular classes” that reveal it hegemonic structure.

Rivera also shows how, when “corrosive irony” is applied to language incorrectness, it can be turned into a political counter-discourse. When Sister Felicia bargains with a merchant at “La Marqueta,” the Hispanic market in El Barrio, the following dialogue occurs:

‘Anyway Sister,’ he went on, ‘if Jorge Mercado is wrong, he'll give you a free crucifixion claps. And if you are the one who is all wrong, I don't charge extra.’

‘It's cru-ci-fix, Mr. Mercado,’ she corrected. ‘And clasp. Claps is a verb, sir. Third person singular.’

‘That is what I say,’ he said, winking at the rest of us.

(83)

The wink establishes a relationship of complicity between the students and the wily merchant, who has just assured himself of a big sale by pretending to be more ignorant than he really is. At the same time, it reveals the sexual pun intended by him as a joke—a dimension of language which the nun—supposedly its champion—ignores. Thus she becomes an imperfect “narrataire.” The means by which socialization takes place involve devaluation of the students' ethnic roots and the mystifying privilege of the narrataire's own. Thus, socialization presupposes a rewriting of cultural history. This is how a nun scolds the class after she catches one of the students picking her nose:

They probably all ate standing, or squatting right there on the kitchen floor, like their ancestors the Caribs, cannibalistic Indians from the jungles of South America (we had read about them during the history hour …) She went on to tell us that the Caribs hadn't even discovered friction, that's how primitive they were. It was the Europeans … who had brought them friction, the True Faith and other forms of Christian civilization.

(76)

The word-play here is twofold, containing on the one hand a possible sexual allusion of which the nun remains blissfully unaware and a reference to the Spanish usage of “friction” as a word to mean discontent. History in grammar school is used to destroy the students' ethnic identity. In intermediate school, its purpose is subtler: to differentiate between types of Europeans, ultimately privileging the Germanic and Anglo-Saxon races over the Mediterranean Latin races. This is an Irish Brother's version of the fall of the Roman Empire:

But the Roman lechers had done it merely to intimidate and seduce young Christian beauties. And for that—their cruel pagan lechery—God had destroyed their vast evil empire. He had let the blond alemanes from the north inside the great gates of Rome … Then, as everyone knew, the bad-and-bold blondies had converted to the True Faith, and everything had ended happily for Christianity.

(128)

Rivera is far more explicit about the true nature of Catholic education and its direct relationship to dominant discourse, which reveals itself as a discourse of power exercised not only through cultural but through corporal violence as well: “The law there seemed to be that if your teacher didn't let you have it good from time to time, there was something morally wrong with him or her” (74). The narrataire's physical description reinforces the image of physical violence: “What's so funny, Chief?’ Brother Lomosney, seventh grade, would ask. He had a powerful neck and shoulders and a regulation crewcut. He had spent four years in the Navy before joining the ACB's and liked to use sailor jargon in class” (108). Two points are worth noticing: the pun on the acrostic letters, which upsets the traditional ABC's, and the reference to sailor jargon. Rodriguez mystifies language acquired through Catholic education whereas Rivera, by re/citing it, exposes its status as a cultural fetish. The nuns do not know slang; moreover, they utilize language as an instrument of cultural oppression. Santos Malanguez reports on an overheard conversation between two nuns. They are speaking about a fat boy: “‘And it all can be blamed on his stomach,’ I heard Sister tell one of the other nuns one day. ‘What that boy needs is a gag around his mouth.’ ‘Or a zipper,’ said the other sister” (94).

The Brothers in charge of intermediate school also use language to put down the students but, ironically, their usage reveals their own precarious position as recently created narrataires. In other words, they speak incorrectly but get away with it by virtue of the power they hold as defenders and transmitters of dominant discourse: “Whatsa matter with youse guys today? You're acting like a bunch of fat blue whales. A school of purposes. Either youse got too much spermacity in your heads to understand what I'm driving at, or youse haven't been listening” (120). Once again, the sexual undertone, the fact the audience is composed of teenagers full of the sexual tensions proper to their age and contained in the phrase “spermacity in your heads” eludes the producer of discourse, making him an imperfect narrataire. But he shares an essential identity with all of those other narrataires which Santos has begun identifying as the sources of oppression: “And he was Irish. So were the cops Virgilio was always threatening to call on him … The Irish sided with the Irish, the Italians with the Italians and the Latins with the Latins” (118). Thus unwritten discourse comes to the fore: “The law was that you always sided with your own kind” (118). So much for assimilation through the fetish of the “melting pot.”

Once Rivera has demystified the language of dominant discourse, he proceeds to demystify education as a medium of assimilation. Bro' Leary gives his students a test on Julius Caesar which makes absolutely no sense at all but which the students are forced to take seriously. It so happens that Bro' Leary is going through a public nervous breakdown. Rivera gleefully re/cites the questions. For the students, the material itself makes no sense. One particular test question reveals Bro' Leary's confused perception of who his students are: “Could this tragedy have taken place in a Catholic country? E. G. Ireland? Italy? Porto Rico? Poland?” (135). Rivera adopts the point of view of his protagonist:

Somebody … should have wised him up and told him that even Saint Misery's eight graders, lots of us with second-language problems … and a deep addiction to two-fisted comic books, weren't likely to know or give a damn about what an ancient English fag in tight pants and balloon bloomers was talking about in his tedious Roman “tragedy” … They dressed like fags and talked like fags.

(123)

Rodriguez treats religion as an issue separate from education, in spite of the connection between the two that exists for him (as well as for Rivera), and focuses on it from the antinomic perspective of language and race: “I was a catolico before I was a catholic … It was first in Spanish that I learned to pray” (81); “With the move to America, my mother and father left behind that Mexican Church to find themselves … in an Irish-Mexican parish” (77). He differentiates further between classroom Catholicism—associated with dominant discourse and public life—and home Catholicism, associated with the culture he is leaving behind. There is no doubt as to what type of Catholicism Rodriguez will choose: Speaking about the American church his family attends, he comments: “I grew to love its elegant simplicity: the formal march of its eight black pillars towards the altar; the Easter egg shaped sanctuary that arched high over the tabernacle” (86). His language changes abruptly when he describes the religious practices at home:

Religion at school and at church was never nighttime religion like religion at home … Religion at home was a religion of bedtime … the dark at the foot of my bed billowed with malevolent shapes … I was introduced to the spheres of enchantment by the nighttime Catholicism of my demons and angels. The superstitious Catholicism of home provided a kind of proletarian fairy-tale world.

(87)

Rodriguez has made a fetish of religion as a public activity, devaluating its function as an individual expression of faith. Rivera, on the other hand, demystifies religion, beginning with its essential assumptions which, within his protagonists' discourse, remind the reader of the nun's put down of her students' ethnic roots: “The tasteless wafers had been turned … into our Saviour's flesh, fit for human consumption. Some of us cannibals back in the pews couldn't wait to get our teeth into him” (98).

The key episode as regards the positioning of religious discourse within dominant discourse and hence ideology, concerns Santos' first communion. We have seen how it has already been demystified as an opportunity for the narrataire—Sister Felicia—to assert her charges' linguistic and economic inferiority when she goes to buy them communion outfits, and how those very characteristics are turned around by the merchant for his advantage, since while pretending to submit to dominant discourse, he is in fact, through parody, deconstructing it. At the point where Santos is already in church, Rivera manipulates the different strands of the narrative in a scene where they flow together, creating a multileveled text reminiscent of the auction episode in Flaubert's Madame Bovary.

Joseph Frank, in his seminal essay on spatial form in literature, explains how Flaubert achieves spatial form within narrative by juxtaposing events that are supposed to be perceived simultaneously by the reader, one event highlighting the other ironically. In Madame Bovary, such an effect is achieved in the episode where, at the same time there is a livestock auction at the agricultural fair and the name of the winners are being called out over the roar of the crowd, Rudolph woos Emma on a balcony above the stage. Thus the lovers' discourse is shown in all its banality by juxtaposition with the discourse of farming and business, while at the same time its essential identity with it is revealed.¹³

Rivera's handling of the communion scene follows a similar pattern, exposing the relations of domination and subordination present within an hegemonic economy. Santos, frozen with fear, approaches the altar and stumbles. He can't open his mouth; the priest brings the Host violently down and breaks it over the boy's nose. One half of it rolls out on the floor and another priest goes on all fours to retrieve it. As if that were not enough, the organ player for the ceremony, who is a patriotic Puerto Rican having a fight with his employer, the parish priest, over low wages, bursts into the Puerto Rican national anthem. Santos, disgraced, returns to his pew and as he does so he pees in his pants out of shame (104–05). Ethnic shame. Santos, as a seven-year-old, re/cites for the reader fragments of the dominant discourse's view of Puerto Ricans, thereby exposing the subtext of what is only superficially a religious ceremony:

The trouble was that you had to look good in front of all those ‘foreigners,’ otherwise they'd start buzzing to each other about “that little P.R. over there who can't even talk a straight line to the abiding presence. He must have got grogged first thing he gets up in the morning … can of six-pack in a little brown bag … keeps Rheingold and Schaefer in business … a sin to receive in that state … eighty-proof mouthwash … I hear they even wash their hair in it.

(100–01)

At the same time, Rivera exposes the ideological position of the narrataires through their comments. One priest addresses the other: “‘This whole neighborhood's going to the …’ But Father Rooney cuts him short; ‘Not here, Matt. Later, in the rectory’” (105). Sister Felicia's reaction is even more predictable: “She led me back to my pew by the arm she'd pinched, and as she was sitting me down she put her mouth to my ear and said: “Ssantosss Malanguezzz you are a disgrace to our school, bearing down on ‘disgrace.’ ‘You are not fit for First communion and maybe never will be. We have a lot to discuss tomorrow morning’” (105). It is worth mentioning that the boy's parents not only not mention the incident, but celebrate the occasion as if communion had actually taken place (105–06).

Rivera has juxtaposed the political, ethnic, religious, educational and economic discourses which constitute hegemony as imbedded in a religious ceremony, revealing that the ultimate aim of dominant discourse is the preservation of power for those who are its narrataires and the denial of such power for those who choose an adversary position, that is, become counter discursive. The relationship between power and discourse is further explored in the chapter where Rivera deals with Santos and his father in terms of their respective rhetorical modes and, simultaneously, their encounters with police.

Santos' father is fond of oratory (221), poetry readings on the radio (233) and traditional Puerto Rican music (242–43). Santos, meanwhile, who has come into contact with English poetry by means of an anthology given to him by a neighbor, begins to fall in love with poetic discourse in a most specific way: as a mirror to his most intimate feelings. Here poetic discourse functions as a private language, in opposition to his father's public language, the language of radio and oratory. This is the exact reversal of what is found in Rodriguez' text, where he proudly boasts: “the boy who first entered a classroom barely able to speak English, twenty years later concluded his studies in the stately quiet of the reading room in the British Museum” (44), where he has gone to work on a dissertation on Renaissance studies. Rodriguez thus identifies literature with dominant discourse, public life and access to power. Rivera identifies it slowly at first and then with passion, as a type of counterdiscourse—that is, a medium for exposing ideological discourses as well as a vehicle for the expression of the inner self. But the process, in Santos' case, involves a rejection of his father's rhetoric:

Papi's Fada: “Oh, my country! sublime Eve, host of the soul, chalice of life, whoever can forget you forgets God himself! But he who takes communion in your temple redeems himself!” … My anthology: “A hand that can be clasped no more—Behold me, for I cannot sleep / And like a guilty thing I creep / At earliest morning to the door.”

(233)

Santos becomes conscious of the disparity between life and literature, and to relieve the resulting tension goes walking in Central Park. One night he is stopped by police who, finding a pencil on him, harass him for lack of any further evidence as well as to assert their roles as narrataires: “The frisking officer wanted to know quickly what the hell I was doing with a goddamn pencil on the avenue at that time of night … The constable wanted to know whether I was a numbers runner, a pervert of some kind, a graffiti nut” (237). He goes home and throws the anthology away: “I simplified by telling myself one had to take sides. ‘You can't have it both ways; you are not supposed to: oil and water’” (238).

In this passage lies precisely the choice between adaptation and assimilation for ethnic minorities. Santos is at a crossroads; he must reconcile public and private discourses, each with a version of his identity. Richard Rodriguez faces the same crossroads and chooses dominant, public discourse, thereby choosing assimilation: “In public … full individuality is achieved, paradoxically, by those who are able to consider themselves members of the crowd. Thus it happened to me: only when I was able to think of myself as an American, no longer an alien in gringo society, could I seek the rights and opportunities necessary for full public individuality” (27). This, however, necessitates a fragmentation of the self, which Rodriguez strangely calls “the freedom so crucial to adulthood, to become a person very different in public from the person I am at home,” adding: “In the company of strangers now, I do not reveal the person I am among intimates. My brothers and my sisters recognize a different person, not the Richard Rodriguez in this book” (190).

For Santos Malanguez, no such road is possible for, as we have seen, he is constantly reminded of the position assigned to him within hegemony's dominant discourses. One further reminder, though, comes from members of another minority. Santos follows a friend to the park and strays into territory controlled by a black gang whose members steal his money and make him wallow in excrement. He is spared further indignities because his friend, who is both Puerto Rican and black, pleads his cause, but he is advised to keep to “his” side of the park (159). This happens to Santos just after he has boasted of his burgeoning assimilation: “I had been mistaken for a Jew, an Italian, a Greek, even a Hungarian; and each time I had come away feeling secretly proud of myself for having disguised my Spik accent, and with it my lineage. I could almost feel myself melting smoothly and evenly into the great Pot” (148). Rivera's message is clear: racial difference makes any attempt at assimilation a failure. For racially mixed minorities, assimilation means adopting ideology's racist perspectives and abandoning those in one's own group whose skin color does not correspond to one's own.

Santos is caught between a dominant discourse, which excludes him, and his father's rhetoric expressive of values he no longer holds dear. Literature provides an answer. After his encounter with police, he takes the anthology, which his mother has retrieved, back to his room, “looking for odes and sonnets to self-pity … ‘a drowsy numbness pains my sense’ was one of the ones I found useful” (238). At this point, literature still functions as a private language. It becomes a full-fledged counter-discourse when Santos uses it to describe his father's encounter with police, the old man having been arrested on a false identity charge while there is a neighborhood search for a pervert. Santos, who loves his father deeply, states: “Behold, the dreamer cometh. A dreamer of dreams. Let us slay him” (239).

It is crucial to note here that poetry is at the same time a critique of ideology and is contained in the cultural framework from which ideology originates. Adaptation is an acceptance of the former without acceptance of the latter, and a systematic analysis of the relationships of power which constitute hegemony. Thus Santos is able to break with his father's culture as manifested in oratory, certain types of music and even language, and at the same time he rejects the ideology of the cultural framework where he now finds himself. This double rejection is clearly illustrated in the episode, just prior to the father's death and the mother's return to Puerto Rico, where Santos does not come home for Christmas, spending the night instead in a Single Occupancy Hotel. When he does come home, he is chided for not having attended Mass:

“I don't like those priests too much.”

“What's wrong with them?” he said.

“They're all Irish.”

“So?”

“I don't know.”

“A priest is a priest,” she said. “No matter what the nationality.”

“Maybe you're right, Mami. They are all the same.”

“It sounds as though our son is turning into a bigot,” she said. Then she looked at me. “Is this something one learns in college?”

“Depends,” I said, offended. “It so happens I learned it before I got to high school.”

“Not in this house,” she said.

“And you've been keeping it a secret all these years?” Papi said. I put my fork down and stood up. “It wasn't hard to.”

(262)

Assimilation leads to narrataire status; therefore, Rodriguez will attack bilingual education (11, 19, 26, 27), Black English (33), affirmative action (147, 149–50) and any expression of ethnic identity, such as the word “Chicano” (159–60), as impediments to individual acceptance of ideology's discourses. He holds on to the ideological belief in education as a cultural fetish—that is, he attributes to it the power to lift individuals to narrataire status: “The reason I was no longer a minority was because I had become a student” (147). He even warns the reader that “education is a long, unglamorous, even demeaning process—a nurturing never natural to the person one was before one entered a classroom” (68). His words are ironically illustrated in the person of Santos Malanguez.¹⁴

Adaptation leads to a challenging of hegemony's relationships of power and the adoption of a critical, ironic stance by means of available counter-discourses. Santos Malanguez finds his own in poetic utterance. Edward Rivera finds his in “corrosive irony,” a systematic critique of ideology and exposure of hegemony which reveals how the privileged status and power of dominant groups is preserved and maintained. Adaptation does not imply a loss of identity or a fragmentation of the self, as in the case of assimilation. Assimilation is a fiction; to pretend it does occur is an act of bad faith, of lying to others and to the self, as when Richard Rodriguez states:

The registration clerk in London wonders if I have just been to Switzerland … My complexion becomes a mark of my leisure. Yet, no one would regard my complexion the same way if I entered such hotels through the service entrance. That is only to say my complexion assumes its significance from the context of my life. My skin, in itself, means nothing.

(137)

Santos Malanguez, would, however, advise Richard Rodriguez not to stray too far into Central Park.

Notes

1. Valerie Raoul, The French Fictional Journal: Fictional Narcissism/Narcissistic Fiction (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986): 7.

2. Linda Peterson, Victorian Autobiography: The Tradition of Self-Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986): 195.

3. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977): 198, 109, 65.

4. In Williams, 108.

5. In Rupert Sawyer's translation, which first appeared in Social Science Information (April 1971: 7–30), and was later reproduced as an Appendix to the Pantheon edition of The Archaeology of Knowledge, this concept is translated quite differently, reading: “Similarly historians have constantly impressed upon us that speech is no mere verbalization of conflicts and systems of domination, but that it is the very object of man's conflicts” (216).

6. Richard Terdiman, Discourse/Counter-Discourse: The Theory and Practice of Symbolic Resistance in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985): 55. In Rupert Sawyer's translation, which first appeared in Social Science Information (April 1971: 7–30), and was later reproduced as an Appendix to the Pantheon edition of The Archeology of Knowledge, this concept is translated quite differently, reading: “Similarly historians have constantly impressed upon us that speech is no mere verbalization of conflicts and systems of domination, but that it is the very object of man's conflicts” (216).

7. In Terdiman 76.

8. In Terdiman 76.

9. Upon confirming Williams' definition of ideology as it appears in Terdiman by checking the quote in Marxism and Literature, I discovered to my surprise (and chagrin) that Terdiman had made up a quote from lines out of two pages of text. Moreover, what Terdiman identified as Williams' definition of ideology turned out to be Williams' definition of hegemony. See Terdiman 42 and Williams 108–09. Hegemony is the term with which Williams would substitute the term ideology.

10. Richard Rodriguez, Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (Boston: David Godine, 1982): 10.

11. Edward Rivera, Family Installments: Memories of Growing Up Hispanic (New York: William Morrow & Company, 1982): 85.

12. Michel Foucault, Archeology of Knowledge & The Discourse on Languages (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972): 227.

13. Joseph Frank The Widening Gyre: Crisis and Mastery in Modern Literature (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1963): 50.

14. It may very well be that, if it not had been for my students' listless and at times violent reaction to Hunger of Memory in the classroom, I would have never had the courage to admit to myself that I was just as discomfited in using it as a text as they were in being forced to read it. The whole time I had the impression the book was founded on a series of illogical leaps, carefully hidden within a deceptively simple, even elegant, style. It was when I was able to show them the manipulation of language and thought present in the text that my students eagerly undertook an analysis of it. In older terms, Rodriguez could be called an “unreliable narrator,” that is, one who wants to ensure the reader, by means of language, into a world-view that the reader himself rejects.