ABSTRACT

When the author teaches Richard Rodriguez's Hunger of Memory he discuss with the students how the scholarship on this Rodriguez has dominated Chicana/o autobiographical studies. While he point out that the overwhelming attention dedicated to a single book can be problematic to the analysis of the genre, he also discuss what can be learned from the bibliography dedicated to Rodriguez. An essay that he assign alongside Hunger is Tomas Rivera's Richard Rodriguez's Hunger of Memory as Humanistic Antithesis". This allows students to see firsthand the reception of the book within a cultural and historical context; it allows students to see, too, how his opposition to affirmative action and bilingual education was picked up by the ideological conservatives, turning Rodriguez into a celebrity on the right and a bete noir on the left. He teaches Derrida's concept of prosopopeia as that which both defines and kills memory as well as that of Anzaldua and 'making faces' as a politically subversive gesture.