SOURCE: Fachinger, Petra. “Lost in Nostalgia: The Autobiographies of Eva Hoffman and Richard Rodriguez.” MELUS 26, no. 2 (summer 2001): 111–27.

[In the following essay, Fachinger discusses the differences in autobiographies written by authors from distinct ethnic and racial backgrounds, using the memoirs of Eva Hoffman and Richard Rodriguez as her examples.]

In “The Plural Self: The Politicization of Memory and Form in Three American Ethnic Autobiographies,” in which she compares N. Scott Momaday's The Names, Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera, and Audre Lorde's Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, Jennifer Browdy de Hernandez concludes,

Ethnic autobiography gives “new meanings” and new possibilities to the term autobiography. Using “retrospection to gain a vision for the future,” … ethnic autobiographers create a hybridized, double-voiced form of autobiography in which collective ethnic memory and individual memory are linked in a dialogue.

(57)

Although Browdy de Hernandez's argument is convincing with respect to the three writers she discusses, I will demonstrate that some “ethnic” American autobiographies resist hybridization and double-voicedness. Hybridization, as Mikhail Bakhtin defines it, is “the mixing, within a single concrete utterance, of two or more different linguistic consciousnesses, often widely separated in time and social space” (429). Furthermore, Bakhtin's definition of double-voiced discourse is “another's speech in another's language, serving to express authorial intentions but in a refracted way” (324) so that double-voiced discourse is always “internally dialogized” (324). The examples of double-voiced discourse that Bakhtin cites are “comic, ironic or parodic discourse, the refracting discourse of a narrator, refracting discourse in the language of a character and finally the discourse of a whole incorporated genre” (324).

I would like to suggest that “ethnic” discourse could consequently be read as the discourse of an “ethnic” writer who dialogizes the dominant language by self-consciously resorting to “ethnic” form and language to express his or her intentions in a “refracted” way through the dominant language. Since autobiography is traditionally both a “western” and an “androcentric” genre, “double-voicedness” in “ethnic” autobiography would be apparent in the “refraction” of conventional discourse, that is, in its rewriting, or, at least, in its self-reflexive questioning of autobiographical conventions.

A comparison of texts by writers of different ethnic/racial background also raises certain methodological questions. After a brief overview of the current debates over methodological concerns regarding critical writing about “ethnic” literature, I will compare and contrast the autobiographies of Eva Hoffman, a Jewish Polish immigrant to the United States, and of Richard Rodriguez, a Mexican-American, to demonstrate that neither is hybridized and double-voiced. In doing so, I will not neglect the differences between the respective diasporic locations of the two writers. Other autobiographies by so-called visible minority writers born in the United Stated lend themselves to comparison with Rodriguez's Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez, such as Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts and Zora Neale Hurston's Dust Tracks on a Road, not least because, like Rodriguez's autobiography, their texts have been criticized for misrepresentation by members of their “own ethnic” groups. However, I choose to compare a text by a non-Anglo-Celtic immigrant and that of an American-born writer whose ethnic group has experienced colonization in a way not shared by any other group in the United States. The similarities and differences between these autobiographies are instructive, and a comparison of the two can provide significant insight into the intricacies involved in comparing two texts that are both consent oriented¹ and that share a number of narrative strategies, even though their authors and the autobiographical selves represented in the texts belong to different “ethnic” groups.

The main question one needs to consider when comparing the texts of writers with different “ethnic” backgrounds is how one can read these texts as sharing ways of conceptualizing the pull of two or more cultural loyalties without losing sight of the fact that their “ethnic” communities have experienced different degrees of dislocation, colonization, and racism. Two approaches to ethnic literature have been prevalent in recent American criticism: the cultural pluralist approach, which claims that each ethnic group's experience within mainstream American society is different and that this difference is reflected in their texts, and the approach that assumes that all ethnic writing shares a collective experience. Proponents of the latter have been criticized for “relegating ‘race’ to a mere feature of some ethnic groups” (Wald 22) and for disregarding the fact that European Americans are usually no longer exposed to racism.

The endeavor to look for similarities while discounting differences also obscures the distinction between first and second generation as is obvious, for example, in William Boelhower's Immigrant Autobiography in the United States: Four Versions of the Italian American Self. Furthermore, Boelhower attempts to prove that all immigrant American autobiographies deal with the protagonist's “transformation” or Americanization. As he sees it, the immigrant anticipates America as a country of hope and renewal, a fact that is reflected in the biblical language with which America is usually described in these autobiographies. Claiming general validity for this model, Boelhower maintains that the range of cultural strategies exemplified in the four Italian-American texts that he discusses could just as easily be illustrated by the texts of any other ethnic group. By testing Boelhower's typology with Chinese-American and other Asian American immigrant autobiographies, however, Sau-ling Cynthia Wong has found that many of these autobiographies deviate from the pattern Boelhower suggests in that they display “a pragmatic, matter-of-fact attitude towards the idea of going to America on the part of Chinese immigrant autobiographers” (Wong 155). She concludes that while his typology may apply to European immigrant experience, it does not apply to that of non-European groups.

Like William Boelhower, Werner Sollors assumes that all ethnic groups share a collective experience. He claims that to understand American literature as “a poly-ethnic literature, it is essential to use comparative methods. Comparing Afro-American, Jewish-American, and Irish-American novels of the 1930s thus becomes as essential as comparing writings by immigrants and writings by their descendants” (“Nine Suggestions” 96). In Beyond Ethnicity, he explores the similarities between “black” and Jewish writing. He points out that Charles W. Chesnutt's “The Wife of His Youth” and Abraham Cahan's Yekl: A Tale of the Ghetto resort to the same symbolism to depict the tension between the hereditary and the contractual (156) while James Weldon Johnson's Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man and Abraham Cahan's The Rise of David Levinsky use similar literary strategies in doing so (168). Interestingly enough, Sollors foregrounds Jewishness in this latter comparison rather than Cahan's Lithuanian and Levinsky's Polish descent. By doing so, he fails to do justice to the complexity of “descent” and the relevance of potentially conflicting “loyalties.”

Although I agree with Werner Sollors that criticism of “ethnic” writing requires comparative methods, it needs to be more observant of cultural differences. Mary E. Young, for example, in Mules and Dragons: Popular Culture Images in the Selected Writings of African-American and Chinese-American Women Writers, bases her comparison of these two groups of writers not only on their histories, “but also [on] each group's response to the stereotyped images that have become part of American cultural history” (ix). Thus Young claims that Native American women, Hispanic women, and Jewish women have also been stereotyped, but that none of these stereotypes has been as persistent as the stereotypes of African American and Chinese-American women. Likewise, Inderpal Grewal, in her comparison of Sara Suleri's Meatless Days and Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera, observes that although both texts “share a concern with the breakdown of ethnocentric dualities, which they both see as sources of oppression” (251), the different diasporic locations of the two writers make it impossible to analyze Anzaldúa's “‘borderland’ through theories of Asian diasporas” (248). Finally, Shirley Lim in her study of the difference between Anglo American and Asian American poetry also takes an “ethnocentered” approach. She justifies her focus on stylistic and textual features that differentiate Asian American from Anglo American poetry by arguing that an emphasis on the differences is necessary to “correct” (51) “the inherent bias of the Anglo-American mainstream” (51). In her opinion, ethnopoetics asks for “an informed socio-cultural approach which counteracts the privileging of the dominant culture” (59).

Following Shirley Lim's call for an “informed socio-cultural approach,” I suggest combining the methodologies of the two theoretical camps and to consider several questions before setting out to compare and contrast “ethnic” texts. First of all, do the authors of these texts have any antecedents in their “own ethnic” group, and do they choose to acknowledge them? Eva Hoffman, for example, can look back to a long tradition of Polish-American autobiography, Jewish and non-Jewish, as Magdalena Zaborowska has shown, and she does refer to some of these texts. Since intertextuality plays an important role in most “ethnic” writing, it would be worth asking if a text by a writer from one “ethnic” group serves as a model for a writer with a different “ethnic” background, as Richard Wright's Black Boy provided a model for Carlos Bulosan's America Is in the Heart. On the other hand, does an “ethnic” text rewrite a more established text, as, for example, John Courno's Autobiography rewrites The Education of Henry Adams and Alfred Kazin's A Walker in the City writes back to “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”? (See Boelhower “Making.”) If a minority writer chooses to rework the text of a writer who belongs to a different minority, he or she, in doing so, might want to draw attention to the fact that the discrimination to which both groups are subjected is comparable. Consideration of whether the ethnic groups to which the two writers belong share a common experience of racism or a similar experience of discrimination and stereotyping is therefore important. If minority writers, on the other hand, write back to a text of the canon, they usually intend to “rupture” and destabilize this text to uncover its underlying ideologies.

Over the last few years, interest in literary predecessors has justifiably fallen into disfavor among comparatists for being Eurocentric and essentialist. The discussion of predecessors, however, is not reductive as long as it is not preoccupied with verifying sources and influences rather than being concerned with exploring intertextual dynamics and diasporic locations. For, as Shirley Lim points out, “the differences in cultural contexts create significant differences between readers' expectations and authors' intentions, between the untrained readers' conventional, culture-bound responses and the trained readers' ethno-sensitive interpretations” (56). Therefore, if two texts such as Abraham Cahan's and James Weldon Johnson's exhibit “striking similarities,” as Werner Sollors puts it, one needs to ask whether these two texts can be read as representative of their “ethnic” groups. This question leads to what is probably the most important question: Who is the intended audience, and how have the texts been received both by readers of the same “ethnic group” and by readers of the mainstream? As Gayatri Spivak has pointed out in a discussion of multiculturalism with Sneja Gunew, “the question ‘Who should speak?’ is less crucial than ‘Who will listen?’” (194). Both critics agree that when a writer from the margin confronts the dominant culture, this audience will affect the construction of that writer's identity by virtue of the choices it makes in reading the writer's work.

Eva Hoffman's Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language relates the experience of a Jewish Polish girl emigrating first to Canada with her parents and younger sister and eventually to the United States. The chapters that are concerned with the preadolescent and adolescent autobiographer's bios focus on her happy life in Cracow, her unhappy life in Vancouver—for the young Hoffman the word “Canada” had “ominous echoes of the ‘Sahara’” (4)—and her Americanization, that is, assimilation into middle-class America through institutional education.² Hoffman interrupts biographical chapters with essayistic meditations on the difficulty of living “between” two languages and her struggle to achieve fluency in English.

Although the three chapter headings, “Paradise,” “Exile,” and “The New World,” seem to suggest that Hoffman is inverting the conventional immigrant model in which the “Old World” figures as a place of hardship or even persecution, and the “New World” is anticipated in utopian terms, a close reading of the text shows that the place where Hoffman finds her true fulfillment is New York and not Cracow. Cracow appears as a paradise only in comparison with her “exile” in Canada/Vancouver, not with her life in the United States. Cracow stands for all that Canada/Vancouver is not: her childhood Cracow offered stability because of its long history, it was a place in which “the signifier” was not “severed from the signified” (106), and in which the self was one with its surroundings. Paradoxically, in Hoffman's retrospective description, the aura of Cracow is not significantly tainted by Polish anti-Semitism and the fact that her grandparents were victims of the Holocaust, a fate which her parents only narrowly escaped.

In Vancouver, the place of “exile,” the adolescent autobiographer undergoes an unsettling Anglicization of her name, an experience described in many immigrant novels and autobiographies. Her family also moves considerably down the social scale, and her parents have even greater difficulty adjusting to the new life than their daughters. Their feelings of disorientation and displacement anticipate what has become another commonplace in immigrant literature, the role reversal in the parent-child relationship. The teenaged Eva explains: “I'm a little ashamed to reveal how hard things are for my family—how bitterly my parents quarrel, how much my mother cries, how frightened I am by our helplessness, and by the burden of feeling that it is my duty to take charge, to get us out of this quagmire” (112). Richard Rodriguez describes a similar role reversal in his own family once he and his siblings achieve fluency in the dominant language while their parents communicate in heavily accented and not always grammatically correct English.

The chapter entitled “Exile” concludes with a reference to Mary Antin's autobiography, The Promised Land. Hoffman points out that in certain details Antin's story so closely resembles her own that “its author seems to be some amusing poltergeist” (162) come to show her that her life is not unique. The parallels between the two writers' lives are uncanny indeed. The Promised Land is usually read as a narrative of success, a story of a model assimilation. Antin was born into a Jewish family in Polotzk, a town within the Russian Pale. Faced with czarist anti-Semitism, the Antins decided to emigrate to the United States, settling in Boston when Mary was thirteen—Hoffman's age when her family emigrated. Hoffman claims that the similarities between Antin's biography and her own end when it comes to the interpretation of their respective lives, especially Antin's reading of her new life as an untarnished success story: “For, despite the hardships that leap out from the pages, Mary insists on seeing her life as a fable of pure success: success for herself, for the idea of assimilation, for the great American experiment” (163).

However, contrary to what Hoffman seems to suggest, Mary Antin is quite aware of these hardships, of her older sister's less privileged life, and of the “sad process of disintegration of home life” (271). Furthermore, the similarities between Hoffman's text and her predecessor's are less tenuous than Hoffman is willing to admit. Like Antin, Hoffman gives credit to the American education system as the main assimilating force and she praises American education just as enthusiastically as does Antin: “For one thing, I've learned that in a democratic educational system, in a democratic ideology of reading, I am never made to feel that I'm an outsider poaching on others' property. In this country of learning, I'm welcomed on equal terms, and it's through the democratizing power of literature that I begin to feel at home in America” (183–84). Thus for Hoffman, the Ph.D. in English Literature, which she received from Harvard, becomes the “certificate of full Americanization” (226).

This ode to education is also reminiscent of the glorification of American education by eighteenth-century male American autobiographers like Benjamin Franklin. And like Franklin, “whose name [she has] never heard” (137), the teenaged Hoffman devises programs of “physical, intellectual, spiritual and creative” (137) self-improvement, efforts similar to those that turned Jimmy Gatz into Jay Gatsby. Franklin's description of his achievements, raising himself “from the poverty and obscurity in which [he] was born … to a state of affluence and some degree of reputation in the world” (3), anticipates Hoffman's account of her own success. In both texts, conversion, the objective of spiritual autobiography, is transformed into wealth and social prestige. Hoffman fails to acknowledge the inadequacy of an eighteenth-century male vision which, among other things, assumes the absence of racial and sexual prejudice and discrimination in a classless society in the contemporary context. On the contrary, she discounts issues of race, class, and gender in her own description of school and university. Being also relatively unconcerned with her Jewishness, as I have mentioned before, she blames her struggles for Americanization on the fact that English was not her first language, discounting the possibility that her Jewish-Polish descent might have been an obstacle.

While similar life stories have been told by other European immigrants to the United States, especially Eastern European immigrants, the innovative technique of Hoffman's autobiography is its essayistic investigation of the role of language in the process of assimilation. It describes the tension between the “ethnic” language, which for Hoffman remains the language of privacy and intimacy, and the “New World” public language which Eva “learns from the top” (217) and which will ultimately separate her from Cracow and estrange her from her parents. Hoffman's privileging of the “public” over the “private,” her refusal to reflect on the androcentric tradition of autobiography, her adoption of the male model of self-representation, and her endorsement of the American story of successful assimilation, have motivated me to discount issues of gender in theorizing Hoffman's and Rodriguez's respective diasporic locations. According to Sidonie Smith,

If [the woman autobiographer] inscribes a ‘masculine’ story of cultural significance she approaches the center of ‘autobiography’ from her position of cultural marginality; but she simultaneously becomes implicated in a complex posture of transvestism, becoming a ‘man’ and thereby promoting the ideology of the ‘same.’ In telling her life as a ‘man,’ she collaborates in the marginalization of woman and her story.

(3)

The extent to which Hoffman values public over private is apparent in her comparison of her own position with that of her mother's:

I've gained some control, and control is something I need more than my mother did. I have more of a public life, in which it's important to appear strong. … My mother stays close to herself, as she stays close to home. She pays a price for her lack of self-alienation—the price of extremity, of being in extremis, of suffering. She can only be herself; she can't help that either. She doesn't see herself as a personage; she's not someone who tells herself her own biography.

(270)

By claiming in a rather patronizing manner that her mother lacks the skill to address the public in English and therefore has no autobiographical self, Hoffman marginalizes and silences her. She also firmly believes in keeping private and public self separate: “I've developed a certain kind of worldly knowledge, and a public self to go with it. That self is the most American thing about me; after all, I acquired it here” (251).

This statement uncannily echoes Richard Rodriguez's Prologue to his autobiography where he claims, “my book is necessarily political … for public issues … have bisected my life and changed its course. And, in some broad sense, my writing is political because it concerns my movement away from the company of family and into the city. This was my coming of age: I became a man by becoming a public man” (7). Both authors imply that the only identity worth having is a “public” identity, steeped in middle-class “public” discourse. Why would the identity of an immigrant woman in Vancouver and the identity of a Mexican worker be less authentic, “public,” or political than that of an urban writer? And how can Polish, and particularly Spanish, be conceived as languages that are less “public” than English in North America?

Like Hoffman, Rodriguez argues that literacy in the dominant language has social transformational power. Thus, he does not blame his Mexican descent for his struggle as a boy to fit into mainstream society, but his parents' lack of education and the fact that they spoke Spanish at home. In the Prologue, entitled “Middle-Class Pastoral,” Rodriguez assumes a representative voice by claiming that his experience is a typically American one: “This is what matters to me: the story of the scholarship boy who returns home one summer from college to discover bewildering silence, facing his parents. This is my story. An American story” (5). Rodriguez describes the scholarship boy, a term he borrows from Richard Hoggart, as a student who imitates his teachers in an attempt to become like them, tries as hard as he can to lose his accent, distances himself as much as possible from his ethnic heritage, and is not able to form an original thought.

By this definition, the scholarship boy seems to be a close relative of the “mimic man.” For Frantz Fanon, mimicry is the result of colonial indoctrination through which Caribbeans have been coerced into seeking cultural identity through the imitation of Western models. Derek Walcott considers the politics of imitation and the dilemma of the mimic man as endemic to all of America, not just the Caribbean: “The Old World, whether it is represented by the light of Europe or of Asia or of Africa, is the rhythm by which we remember” (7). Indeed, “melting pot” ideology is based on the idea of repetition and imitation, and as Robert F. Sayre has shown, the instinct of emulation, “which is imitation and something more” (154), has been identified as the main impulse in the making of self as described in many American autobiographies. Public figures like Benjamin Franklin, in addition to imitating classical and European models, also see their mission as providing role models through their autobiographies, “looking to the West and other directions to the new American who will one day imitate [them]” (Sayre 167). For consent-oriented immigrants from Eastern Europe and members of so-called visible minorities, American models of identity seem to be equally alluring. The attempts of Eva Hoffman's autobiographic self to lose her accent and join the mainstream by imitating role models are just as desperate as those described by Rodriguez.

What seems to legitimate a comparison between Rodriguez's and Hoffman's texts is that in many ways the former asks to be read as immigrant autobiography. As William Boelhower points out, “immigrant autobiography is a schooling text,” describing the “transformation of [the] protagonist from an alien to a sovereign American self” (“The Necessary Ruse” 303). Although Rodriguez, unlike European immigrants, is not able to relive the journey on the Mayflower, his move out of the family enclave, like Zora Neale Hurston's out of the black community of Eatonville, has a symbolic function similar to the trans-Atlantic voyage. What usually separates immigrant experience from that of the second generation is the fact that the American born do not have direct memories of the “Old World”; their understanding of the “Old-World” culture is mediated by their parents. Chicanas/Chicanos of the Southwest, however, live so close to the Mexican border, and Hispanic culture pervades American culture to such a degree, that it could be argued that Mexican-Americans' access to the “Old World” is at once synchronic and diachronic. On the other hand, it is important to keep in mind that Mexican-Americans are mestizas and mestizos, victims of various colonization processes.

The parts of Rodriguez's text which discuss his life could easily be divided into the three sections that Eva Hoffman uses to describe her own assimilation. Although the paradise of Rodriguez's childhood was not in rural Mexico, but in a house on Thirty-ninth Street in 1950s Sacramento. Spanish, the language of family and intimacy, isolated him from the world. His fluency in English, the language of the classroom, finally made it possible for him, so he claims, to integrate fully into mainstream American society at the cost of estrangement from his parents and the loss of fluency in Spanish. He points out that what he needed to learn in school was that he had the right to speak the public language of the “gringos.” His childhood “exile” then, similar to that of Hoffman, was created by his feelings of inferiority and alienation from the mainstream because of the lack of language fluency.

The comparability of Rodriguez's autobiography to immigrant autobiography is also partly sustained by his ambiguous, sometimes even obsequious, discourse on race, his disavowal of Chicano heritage, and his refusal to engage in, and more importantly, to politicize ancestral memory. While Hoffman identifies to a certain extent with the autobiographical experiences of Antin, Nabokov, Kazin, and Podhoretz, all fellow Eastern European immigrants to the United States, Rodriguez does not acknowledge any of his predecessors in the long and rich tradition of Mexican American autobiography,³ giving the impression that he sees himself as separated from the Mexican-American community and its political struggles, outside socio-historical reality and colonial history. At the beginning of his autobiography, Rodriguez claims: “Aztec ruins hold no special interest for me. I do not search Mexican graveyards for ties to unnameable ancestors” (5). Working on his Ph.D. in English Renaissance literature, Rodriguez, when asked by “a group of … Hispanic students [who] wanted [him] to teach a ‘minority literature’ course” (161), replies that he “didn't think that there was such a thing as minority literature” (161). He confesses that after this encounter he “became a ‘coconut’—someone brown on the outside, white on the inside. … some comic Quequeg, holding close to [his] breast a reliquary containing the white powder of a dead European civilization” (162). He eventually refuses to accept a job offer from Yale because he suspects that his race had given him an advantage over other applicants. This conclusion has led him to become a fervent opponent of bilingual education and of affirmative action.

Paradoxically, in his autobiography, Rodriguez is very concerned with a skin color that reveals his “Indian” descent and describes himself as the least European looking in his family: “I am the only one in the family whose face is severely cut to the line of ancient Indian ancestors” (115). In “Complexion,” he discusses the prejudice against dark skin within Mexican culture. He explains, for example, that some Mexican women risk abortion by taking “large doses of castor oil during the last weeks of pregnancy” (116) to lighten their unborn children's skin color and how “children born dark grew up to have their faces treated regularly with a mixture of egg white and lemon juice concentrate” (116), yet he discounts his experience of racism. Admitting that “in public [he] occasionally heard racial slurs,” he minimizes their significance by pointing out that “in all, there could not have been more than a dozen incidents of name-calling” and by concluding that because of the paucity of racist evidence, he “was not a primary victim of racial abuse” (117). Consequently, he claims that he “didn't really consider [his] dark skin to be a racial characteristic” (125), but that he felt his “dark skin made [him] unattractive to women” (125) since the women in his family were so worried about giving birth to “dark-skinned” children. Rodriguez suggests that the panacea for his dilemma and that of fellow Mexican-Americans is monolingual education.

Apparently unaware of the interest postcolonial critics⁴ have taken in the figure of Caliban to demonstrate the complexities of relationships between colonizer and colonized, Rodriguez opens his book with the words: “I have taken Caliban's advice. I have stolen their books. I will have some run of this isle” and “in Beverly Hills will this monster make a man” (3). Although he seems to be alluding to Caliban's subversive potential with these words, Rodriguez puts his education to the service of the status quo. Like Hoffman, who, as mentioned above, refers to her Ph.D. as the “certificate of full Americanization,” Rodriguez argues that education dismantles social and therefore “racial” and “ethnic” boundaries. For a consideration of Rodriguez's diasporic position, it is significant that he fails to problematize and, more important, to politicize his sacrifice, that is, his decision not to complete his Ph.D. and to turn his back on the academic world although he was a promising scholar and enjoyed teaching.

However, the important difference between Hoffman's and Rodriguez's diasporic locations comes to bear when one considers how their texts are being read and by whom. As far as I know, no one has criticized Hoffman for discounting her Polish and her Jewish selves in favor of her public American self in the way Rodriguez has been attacked for selling out to “white America.” Neither does she feel the need to define her audience in her text. Rodriguez, on the other hand, considers it important to draw attention to the fact that his reader is European American, well-educated, male, and “white”: “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)” (182). Despite their similar educational backgrounds and academic and professional achievements, Hoffman will hardly ever find herself in a position where she is addressed by the mainstream as a member of a minority, while Rodriguez will always be constructed as insider informant of a culture that “grates against” (3) that of the United States, to use Gloria Anzaldúa's words.

What Hoffman and Rodriguez do have in common is their nostalgia for a pastoral past. This nostalgia prevents them from linking collective ethnic memory and individual memory in a dialogue, a narrative strategy that, according to Jennifer Browdy de Hernandez, is characteristic of “ethnic autobiography.” Nostalgia, as bell hooks points out, is “that longing for something to be as once it was, a kind of useless act,” which is different from “a politicization of memory,” “that remembering that serves to illuminate and transform the present” (147). Hoffman's and Rodriguez's texts are problematic because they avoid the “politicization of memory.” Gloria Anzaldúa, by contrast, acknowledging the multiplicity of conflicting languages that people who live “between cultures” speak, lists eight languages to which she can resort, ranging from standard English to Tex-Mex and Chicano Spanish. Although Anzaldúa criticizes Mexican-American culture, above all its patriarchal and homophobic tendencies, she does not believe in abandoning Mexican culture altogether, a measure Rodriguez promotes. Instead, she revives Aztec history and mythology in her writing to counter prevailing cultural hegemonies.

Hoffman's and Rodriguez's autobiographic selves, on the other hand, by making mainstream culture the center of their perception, view reality in terms of dichotomies: failure versus success, chaos versus order, private versus public, family versus city, past versus future, insider versus outsider, communal versus individualistic, Old World versus New World, loyalty versus betrayal, masculine versus feminine, macho versus effeminate, and language of the past versus language of the present. They essentialize “English” as a monolithic structure that opens the door to privilege once the novice has “made some run of” it. Since Hoffman and Rodriguez believe in the separation of the private and the public, there is no discussion of homosexuality within the Mexican-American community—in other contexts Rodriguez identifies himself as a gay man—and failed marriage between immigrant and non-immigrant Americans respectively—Hoffman only briefly mentions her divorce from her American-born husband. Neither of the autobiographical selves thinks that it is possible “to go home again,” neither personally nor culturally speaking. Interestingly enough, both Hoffman and Rodriguez do go “home” physically in their subsequent autobiographical ethnographies Exit into History: A Journey through the New Eastern Europe, published in 1993, and Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father, published in 1992, in which they assume the position of the American confronting the Eastern European and the Mexican Other respectively. By creating this alterity, Hoffman and Rodriguez prevent the dialogue between “collective ethnic memory and individual memory” (Browdy de Hernandez) from taking place.

Notes

1. In Beyond Ethnicity, Sollors regards the conflict between descent, Americans' position as “heirs, [their] hereditary qualities, liabilities, and entitlements,” and consent, their “abilities as mature free agents and ‘architects of [their] fate,’” as “the central drama in American culture” (6).

2. The theme that Jewish emigrants ended up in the wrong place in Canada pervades Jewish Canadian autobiography and fiction as Gerson has shown.

3. See, for example, Padilla who discusses the nineteenth and early twentieth-century predecessors of contemporary Mexican-American autobiography.

4. I am thinking here of critics like Brydon, Dorsinville, Walcott, and Zabus.

Works Cited

Antin, Mary. The Promised Land. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1912.

Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987.

Bakhtin, M. M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1987.

Boelhower, William. “The Making of Ethnic Autobiography in the United States.” American Autobiography: Retrospect and Prospect. Ed. Paul John Eakin. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1991. 123–41.

———. “The Necessary Ruse: Immigrant Autobiography and the Sovereign American Self.” Amerikastudien 35.3 (1990): 297–319.

———. Immigrant Autobiography in the United States: Four Versions of the Italian American Self. Verona: Essedue Edizioni, 1982.

Browdy de Hernandez, Jennifer. “The Plural Self: The Politicization of Memory and Form in Three American Ethnic Autobiographies.” Memory and Cultural Politics: New Approaches to American Ethnic Literatures. Ed. Amritjit Singh, Joseph T. Skerrett, Jr., and Robert E. Hogan. Boston: Northeastern UP, 1996. 41–59.

Brydon, Diana. “Re-Writing the Tempest.” World Literature Written in English. 23.1 (1984): 75–88.

Dorsinville, Max. Caliban without Prospero: Essay on Quebec and Black Literature. Erin, Ontario: Press Procepic, 1974.

Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Pluto, 1986.

Franklin, Benjamin. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. Berkeley: U of California P, 1949.

Gerson, Carole. “Some Patterns of Exile in Jewish Writing of the Commonwealth” Ariel 13.4 (1982): 103–14.

Grewal, Inderpal. “Autobiographic Subjects and Diasporic Locations: Meatless Days and Borderlands.” Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices. Ed. Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1994. 231–54.

Hoffman, Eva. Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990.

hooks, bell. “Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness.” Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics. Boston: South End, 1990.

Lim, Shirley Geok-Lin. “Reconstructing Asian-American Poetry: A Case for Ethnopoetics.” MELUS 14.2 (1987): 51–63.

Padilla, Genaro M. My History, Not Yours: The Formation of Mexican American Autobiography. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1993.

Rodriguez, Richard. Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez. New York: Bantam, 1988.

Sayre, Robert F. “Autobiography and the Making of America.” Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical. Ed. James Olney. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980. 146–68.

Smith, Sidonie. “The Impact of Critical Theory on the Study of Autobiography: Marginality, Gender, and Autobiographical Practice.” Auto-Biography Studies 3.3 (1987): 1–12.

Sollors, Werner. Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture. New York: Oxford UP, 1986.

———. “Nine Suggestions for Historians of American Ethnic Literature.” MELUS 11 (1984): 95–96.

Spivak, Gayatri C. and Sneja Gunew. “Questions of Multiculturalism.” The Cultural Studies Reader. Ed. Simon During. London: Routledge, 1994. 193–202.

Walcott, Derek. “The Caribbean: Culture or Mimicry?” Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs 16.1 (1974): 3–13.

Wald, Alan. “Theorizing Cultural Difference: A Critique of the ‘Ethnicity School.’” MELUS 14.2 (1987): 21–33.

Wong, Cynthia Sau-ling. “Immigrant Autobiography: Some Questions of Definition and Approach.” American Autobiography: Retrospect and Prospect. Ed. Paul John Eakin. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1991. 142–70.

Young, Mary E. Mules and Dragons: Popular Culture Images in the Selected Writings of African-American and Chinese-American Women Writers. Westport: Greenwood, 1993.

Zaborowska, Magdalena. How We Found America: Reading Gender through East European Immigrant Narratives. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1995.

Zabus, Chantal. “A Calibanic Tempest in Anglophone & Francophone New World Writing.” Canadian Literature 104 (1985): 35–50.