ABSTRACT
The critical reception for Richard Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory has been contentious and sharply divided. In one camp, reviewers for mass media publications like The New York Times, Newsweek, and The Washington Post have championed Rodriguez’s book as a poignant and beautifully written re-rendering of the American dream, as told by a first generation Mexican-American. In the other camp, activists and liberal intellectuals, many of them Mexican-American, have condemned the book as the specious work of an ambitious Mexican-American who denigrates Hispanic culture and challenges bilingual education and affirmative action programs in a effort to win notice and approval from the mainstream American publishing world. If the mass media’s book reviewers have misfired by reading Hunger of Memory as a Horatio Alger story of unqualified triumph, many Mexican-American academics have misfired by attacking Hunger of Memory and accusing Richard Rodriguez of “selling out” the cause of Hispanic culture.
