ABSTRACT

When I teach Richard Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory (1982) I discuss with the students how the scholarship on this Rodriguez has dominated Chicana/o autobiographical studies. 1 While I point out that the overwhelming attention dedicated to a single book can be problematic to the analysis of the genre, I also discuss what can be learned from the bibliography dedicated to Rodriguez. How this can shed light on the ideological battles the book was engaged in during the 1980s, and the difficulty of including his work within traditional Chicana/o criticism. An essay that I assign alongside Hunger is Tomás Rivera’s “Richard Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory as Humanistic Antithesis” (1984). 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 bête noir on the left. The aim: to have students explore how Rodriguez’s creative strategies can be analyzed and classified to give us insight into how Hunger has been written and read, in what context, and for what reasons.