ABSTRACT
There are several different subgenres within the larger rubric of Latino/a literary nonfiction. Among the most popular of these are memoir, essays, historical narrative and journalistic books. Having first suggested that all art is political, that even our artistic sensibilities are influenced by politics, including the politics of our unexamined assumptions and biases, author must now also insist on the aesthetic dimension of texts. Richard Rodriguez's Hunger of Memory is a classic case in point. Even those who were initially critical of the book, in particular for Rodriguez's positions on polarizing political issues such as assimilation, affirmative action, and bilingual education inevitably qualified their criticisms by commending the author's prose style. W. H. Auden words serve as a waggish defense of art and the humanities against overly reductive and empirical approaches imported whole cloth from the social and physical sciences. The epistemological dimension of texts boils down to hermeneutics.
