|
|
|
|
Hunger of Identity |
| Section: BOOK WORLD / REVIEWS |
| Author: Robert L. Spaeth |
| Publication:
The World & I Online |
| Issue Date: 1/1/1993 |
| Size: 2,922 Words, 17,710 Characters |
|
DAYS OF OBLIGATION
An Argument with My Mexican Father
Richard Rodriguez
New York: Viking, 1992
240 pp., $21.00
Richard Rodriguez burst into the American consciousness in 1982 with the publications of perhaps the most extraordinary autobiographical memoir of our times disarmingly entitled Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez. Then a young man, only in his thirties, Rodriguez nevertheless has a great deal to tell his fellow Americans, and he told it in a style so compelling and with feelings so tender that one could not help but be moved deeply by his story.
Summarized briefly, Rodriguez' life could hardly be called unique or special. A boy with some Indian blood, he was born in California to parents who had left their native Mexico to seek a better life. He was educated by Catholic nuns in Sacramento, Americanized, assimilated painfully yet successfully. But Rodriguez can not be captured in such a summary; his mind and heart soar far beyond such familiar categories.
Early in life Rodriguez knew and felt that he was living two lives simultaneously. He was Ricardo and he was Richard. At home his Spanish speaking family retained and guarded their Mexican way of life. At school Richard learned English; the nuns demanded he be an American. Surely many thousands of Mexican-Americans have lived the same divided life. But Rodriguez seems to have felt it more deeply, thought about it more systematically, and finally conveyed it more tellingly than others.
His two languages revealed the real meaning of his two lives: Spanish was for home, intimacy, privacy; English became his public voice. At first he thought Spanish to be intrinsically private and English to be intrinsically public. But already at the age of se...
Read Full Article
...democracy so that his ideas proved useful for any society anywhere, anytime so Rodriguez finally is not telling a story just of Mexico and California, just if a Mexican person and an American. Rodriguez is telling us our own story, for we are all either immigrants or Americanized children of immigrants. We are all attached in our hearts to some old country, some culture that is not American.
(1,807 of 17,710 characters)
|
|
|
Publication Details
(The World & I Online) |
|
The World & I Online is a
comprehensive academic resource that encompasses a broad range of
articles by scholars and experts in the areas of Global Studies,
Liberal Arts, Fine & Applied Arts, General Science, and Spanish.
Originally published monthly in print as The World & I, our site
includes the complete contents since 1986 and continues to publish
a new issue online each month. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
