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 howHunger has been written and read, in what context, and for what reasons. With this contextual backdrop established, I then have students consider how

Hunger of Memory (and if time allows in a given course, his subsequent books too) can be resituated within Chicano/a autobiography as a tool less for individual recollection and more as a way of exploring issues of writing and identity, aiming at the reclaiming of the dimensions of cultural survival beyond the hunger of memories. I guide the students in their reading of Hunger of Memory to consider how Rodriguez’s turns “experience” into the “autobiographical effect.” I therefore create a pedagogical approach that doesn’t dismiss easily Rodriguez’s autobiographical acts, but rather seeks to analyze Rodriguez’s “I” as a complex technology, intertwined with the de-construction of an ethnic space for Chicano/a expression, and defined by the outlines of a representation that refuses the possibility of a “self” within autobiographical discourse. To effect such a course with my students I reframe Hunger of Memory as one of the

most haunting tales of the gay Mexican American experience. I explain to the students that it is about a journey of desolation that culminates in the final scene-a moment of intense silence, the gap beyond words, as he contemplates his Mexican father. By reading closely the ending students see his struggles with “difference” and his profoundly alienating sense of identity as absence and the lack of language to express the “loss” of culture and family. Here I move into a discussion of the political implications of turning “difference” into silence or absence. I do so by reminding the students that the publication of Hunger of Memory takes place after the Chicana/o Renaissance of

It is after of that activism, relating the identity politics and cultural constructions of the previous two decades to “hunger.” I point out that his experience is “queer” to “I Am Joaquín” (the battle cry poem of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement) and thus Hunger of Memory can also be read as a failure to create a space for queerness within the heteropatriarchal sectors of the Chicano Movement. As we work our way back through the text, the students see examples of just how this queerness is realized as absence and alienation-as a rejection of the more homophobic forms of cultural nationalism. They are able to discover instances by which Rodriguez’s attempt to find a language to manifest silence only reaffirms as inevitable the loss of language, the ghostly shell of any memories destined to create a self, and the paradoxical anguish of success and assimilation. This is most clearly indicated by Rodriguez’s loss of Spanish. Here I point out how

with this loss comes the loss of its memories as well as a physical erasure. The negation of his body and the tragic attempts at negating lo mexicano finds its symbolic representation in the moment where he applies a razor to his skin to scrape off the last vestiges of his ethnicity. I point the students to the following sentence: “I wanted to forget that I had a body because I had a brown body” (126). I point out how homosexuality, like his brown skin and the Spanish language, will also be present as erasure. I indicate to the students how this gesture of expunction turns back against every aspect of his “self” as his sexuality, to the very end, remains a secret. I teach Hunger of Memory as an autobiographical narrative attempting to write the

secrets that cannot be told; as an example of refusing to build a “self” by branding loss (absence) as the alternative option against the hope (presence) of a Chicano identity as the ultimate mark of experience operating at the center of the narrative. I also teach it as a warning. How his words cannot shake a pain that is unable to transcend the dualistic division of experience (hope and loss), or detect any “presence” in between, as the voice, ultimately, vanishes in the void of sexual and cultural assimilation. After discussing the function of presence and absence, to hope and loss in Hunger of

Memory I situate it within more general discussions regarding autobiographical theory such as that of Jacques Derrida (Memoires for Paul de Man) and Gloria Anzaldúa (Borderlands/La Frontera). I teach Derrida’s concept of prosopopeia as that which both defines and kills memory as well as that of Anzaldúa and “making faces”(“haciendo caras”) as a politically subversive gesture. We explore together how “mask” and “face” might offer useful conceptual models for understanding Rodriguez’s versions of truth to offer new options to those inherited repressive values within the community. We also explore Rodriguez within the context of Norma Cantú’s “fictional autobioethnography” and Latin American testimonial writing generally to see how Hunger of Memory might offer a break from dualistic thinking. With my students and Rodriguez’s text we embark on a journey that explores the

tension created by the open-ended quality of a “self” wrestling with personal and communal representation. Along the way we consider how contemporary Chicana/o autobiography offers a critique of Western individualism and its understanding of the person as an individual separable from the collective or communal; how Hunger of Memory is itself designed to confront the workings of those coexisting paradoxical terms (communal wholeness and personal particularity) and to foreground the role of Chicana/o culture as an ever-unfolding communal project filtered through the “I.”