"Sidelights"

Richard Rodriguez is the author of autobiographical works dealing especially with issues of ethnicity, family, and culture. Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez is an "honest and intelligent account of how education can alter a life," in the opinion of New York Times critic Le Anne Schreiber. Rodriguez's autobiographical account offers a negative view of bilingual education and affirmative action policies that some readers have applauded and others have decried.

Hunger of Memory details Rodriguez's journey through the U.S. public education system and his resultant loss of ethnicity. The son of Mexican-American immigrants, unable to speak English when he entered a Sacramento, California, elementary school, Rodriguez went on to earn a master's degree and was a Fulbright scholar studying English Renaissance literature in London when he abruptly decided to leave academic life. The choice was prompted by the feeling that he was "the beneficiary of truly disadvantaged Mexican-Americans." "I benefited on their backs," he told Publishers Weekly interviewer Patricia Holt.

The alienation from his culture began early in Rodriguez's life; as soon, in fact, as he learned the "public" language that would separate him from his family. Catholic nuns who taught Rodriguez asked that his parents speak English to him at home. When they complied, related the author in a Newsweek article by Jean Strouse, the sound of his "private" language, Spanish, and its "pleasing, soothing, consoling reminder of being at home" were gone. Paul Zweig observed in the New York Times Book Review that "son and parents alike knew that an unnamable distance had come between them." Rodriguez's parents were eventually "intimidated by what they had worked so diligently to bring about: the integration of their son into the larger world of gringo life so that he, unlike they themselves, could go far, become, one day, powerful, educated," noted the reviewer.

While Rodriguez reached the goals his parents had sought for him, he eventually began to fight the very policies that helped him to attain those goals. In ten years of college and postgraduate education, Rodriguez received assistance grounded in merit but based in part on his minority status. He left London and tried to reestablish the long-severed connection with his parents. He failed to recover his lost ethnicity, remaining "an academic ... a kind of anthropologist in the family kitchen."

Rodriguez's revolt against affirmative action began when he turned down several university-level teaching jobs. Schreiber explained: "He wrote letters to all the chairmen of English departments who thought they had found the perfect answer to affirmative action in Richard Rodriguez. He declined their offers of jobs, because he could not withstand the irony of being counted a 'minority' when in fact the irreversibly successful effort of his life had been to become a fully assimilated member of the majority." Rodriguez spent the next six years writing Hunger of Memory, parts of which appeared in magazines before being brought together in book form.

Rodriguez's opposition to bilingual education is just as firm. "To me," he told...