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Hunger of Identity
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10485 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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1 / 1993 |
2,922 Words |
| Author
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Robert L. Spaeth
Robert L. Spaeth is professor of liberal studies and
codirector of the Christian Humanism project at St. John's
University, Collegeville, Minnesota. He is coauthor (with R.W.
Franklin) of Virgil Michel: American Catholic (Liturgical
Press, 1988) and the author of Exhortations on Liberal
Education: A Dean Speaks His Mind (St. John's University,
1988); The Church and a Catholic's Conscience (Harper & Row,
1985) and No Easy Answers: Christians Debate Nuclear Arms
(Harper and Row, 1983). |
DAYS OF OBLIGATION
An Argument with My Mexican Father
Richard Rodriguez
New York: Viking, 1992
240 pp., $21.00
Richard Rodriguez burst into the American consciousness in 1982 with the publications of perhaps the most extraordinary autobiographical memoir of our times disarmingly entitled Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez. Then a young man, only in his thirties, Rodriguez nevertheless has a great deal to tell his fellow Americans, and he told it in a style so compelling and with feelings so tender that one could not help but be moved deeply by his story.
Summarized briefly, Rodriguez' life could hardly be called unique or special. A boy with some Indian blood, he was born in California to parents who had left their native Mexico to seek a better life. He was educated by Catholic nuns in Sacramento, Americanized, assimilated painfully yet successfully. But Rodriguez can not be captured in such a summary; his mind and heart soar far beyond such familiar categories.
Early in life Rodriguez knew and felt that he was living two lives simultaneously. He was Ricardo and he was Richard. At home his Spanish speaking family retained and guarded their Mexican way of life. At school Richard learned English; the nuns demanded he be an American. Surely many thousands of Mexican-Americans have lived the same divided life. But Rodriguez seems to have felt it more deeply, thought about it more systematically, and finally conveyed it more tellingly than others.
His two languages revealed the real meaning of his two lives: Spanish was for home, intimacy, privacy; English became his public voice. At first he thought Spanish to be intrinsically private and English to be intrinsically public. But already at the age of seven Richard "came to believe what had been technically true since my birth: I was an American citizen.
Inevitably Richard's growing understanding of English, his growing public character, caused hurt at home. The Rodriguez children now spoke better English than their parents, especially their father. To see a gap opening up between father and son perhaps characterizes the life of millions of American immigrant families. In Hunger of Memory Rodriguez tantalizes his readers with anecdotes about his father, stories to sear the heart of any
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