38 pages • 1 hour read
Richard RodriguezHunger of Memory
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1981A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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BetaChapter 5-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 5 Summary: Profession
In college, Rodriguez was identified as a minority student by educators and administrators. At first, Rodriguez was fine with this, but then it started to bother him. He began to feel that, because he had become a serious student, he had transformed, and should no longer be viewed as a minority student.
Starting in 1967, Black American activists pushed for overturning racial boundaries in higher education. Soon, many other minorities joined the movement, including Latinos. As the movement expanded, it began to represent the middle classes, too. As a successful Hispanic graduate student with a promising career in education, Rodriguez felt pressure to become part of the leadership. However, Rodriguez was disturbed by how he benefitted from affirmative action. He believed that some minority recruits would be unprepared for the rigors of college, and that universities were even less prepared to help them succeed.
Within the Third World Student Movement, students who attended college experienced conflicted identities. They were a minority to the university, but they were not at home within their minority cultures. Professors felt pressured to diversify their curricula, and this led to the creation of programs like ethnic studies departments and “field work” to put students in minority settings. Rodriguez was annoyed that some students claimed they were Chicanos (of traditionally lower-class Mexican-American culture) because he saw their level of education as distancing them from authentically living within that identity.
Rodriguez returned to Berkeley, where he felt like a minority on an individual level despite the fact that minority students were admitted as a group. Rodriguez was approached by some Chicano students who asked him to teach a class in minority literature at a Spanish-speaking barrio community center. Rodriguez was uneasy. He believed there was no such thing as minority literature. As he explained his position, he felt the students lose respect for him. Yet he felt intimidated by these students and wished to win their approval. Rodriguez felt like a bogeyman, or a “coconut”: “someone brown on the outside, white on the inside. I was the bleached academic—more white than the anglo professors” (173).
Rodriguez was at Columbia University for graduate school during the 1968 student riots against the Vietnam War. The energy of the time called for broad change. It was common for non-minority middle- or upper-class students to jump in on social movements, like young women who identified with working-class white women by saying they were all oppressed. Rodriguez recognized their hypocrisy.
In June 1978, the Supreme Court ruled that affirmative action was constitutional, but that racial quotas were invalid. Rodriguez publicly noted his lack of support for affirmative action. In 1973, Rodriguez published essays about being educated at a distance from his parents’ culture. Soon he also wrote about how he felt uneasy benefiting from affirmative action. He was invited to speak at major events. He became a sort of celebrity, a public intellectual.
In 1975, Rodriguez was hesitant to apply for professorships because he did not want to succeed just because of his minority status. When his colleague urged him to apply, Rodriguez reluctantly agreed. He received an overwhelming number of job offers, including at prestigious institutions like Yale. A conversation with a fellow graduate student sparked an epiphany: Rodriguez realized he could never escape the taint of affirmative action in academia. He chose to leave academia completely and to focus on his writing.
Chapter 6 Summary: Mr. Secrets
In the final chapter, Rodriguez meditates on the act of memoir. His mother and father were both concerned by his essays, though they did not even realize they had been published until a librarian neighbor told them. Rodriguez’s mother was horrified when she read one of his essays that discussed his childhood and family life. She wrote him a letter, asking him to “write about something else in the future. Our family life is private…. Why do you need to tell the gringos about how ‘divided’ you feel from the family?” (188).
Rodriguez writes of how lonely it is to write, and in particular to write an autobiography. He is dedicated to his job and takes his memoir seriously, but it means that he needs to seclude himself for concentration. He is aware that bringing his experience into the world is a very public act. His mother’s question continues to nag at him.
This question forms the framework for the closing chapter of the memoir: here, Rodriguez explores how his mother and father created a very private home. From a young age, he did not feel comfortable writing about his family because his parents fashioned a culture of secrecy. His private life was intensely private, so he felt that he needed to guard his personal history closely. Still, he became a dedicated creative writer and poet and won admiration from teachers. He felt at ease with fiction but less comfortable writing about his life.
At home, his parents did not understand why someone would reveal their secrets and innermost desires. For example, his mother did not understand the benefits of psychiatry because to her the idea of confessing one’s thoughts, memories, and feelings is a violation. His father showed him a magazine article about a politician’s wife who gave an interview to a magazine about her life and marriage. “Why does she do this?” he asked Rodriguez (199). This question resonates with Rodriguez as he considers why he goes through this act of creating memoir, and how his parents will never truly grasp his reasons.
Rodriguez traces his evolution as a writer and feels that his teachers gave him a gift by forcing him to learn English. It is a skill that has shaped his life and given him advantages. He writes that by speaking English fluently, he is able to be just like the majority of Americans. He is not sequestered by speaking only Spanish, as his parents have been for most of their lives. It gives him confidence to speak in the common public tongue.
Rodriguez describes the few times he sees all of his family anymore—just on Easter, Mother’s Day, and Christmas Day. Now they speak English around the table, and his mother holds forth as the matriarch, leading discussion. Rodriguez notes how his family is becoming more diverse, as one of his sisters has married a fourth-generation American white man with German heritage. His father continues to be withdrawn. At the end of one family evening, Rodriguez brought his father a jacket as he sat outside alone. He asked Rodriguez if he was going home now, too. It was the only thing he had said to him all night.
Chapter 5-6 Analysis
The fifth chapter concerns itself with how the rise of affirmative action led to the decline in Rodriguez’s comfort in academia. Rodriguez, though he identifies as a minority student, believed that he benefitted from affirmative action as an individual before the activist movement pushed colleges and universities to actively begin affirmative action en masse. Rodriguez felt uneasily pushed into leadership roles because he was a respected, emerging scholar who was also a minority. Ultimately, Rodriguez believes that affirmative action had good intentions but was poorly executed.
The Civil Rights Movement paved the way for more minorities to embrace aspects of their heritage. The Chicano Movement captured the interest of some Latino students, who adopted the culture and styles of Mexican Americans and sought to reclaim negative stereotypes. Rodriguez notes that they could never be true Chicanos because they were already benefitting from education and opportunities that Chicanos would never have. To Rodriguez, it was a farce with little self awareness. Yet he still felt nervous around these students; he wanted to impress them and win their approval. His explanation of why he did not believe “minority literature” existed cemented their disapproval of him, and he felt like he failed a test to be a representative of Latinos.
Ultimately, it is affirmative action that drives Rodriguez out of academia. His final year of graduate school, Rodriguez was aware that affirmative action could impact hiring decisions for his professorship applications. Indeed, he received a bounty of offers, including at prestigious universities like Yale. Rodriguez stalled, but a conversation with a fellow graduate student made him realize that he did not want to pursue academia because he would always feel that he was seen as a minority hire, and not for his merits alone.
In the final chapter, Rodriguez considers the act of memoir. His parents do not understand Rodriguez’s chosen career. They cannot grasp why he would want to discuss their family life. To them, it is a betrayal, because it spills their secrets. Rodriguez believes that their inability to fully assimilate, in part because of their lack of ease with English, has sequestered them in the realm of the private. His teachers, however, gave him the gift of forcing him toward fluency with English. This allowed him to overcome restrictions his parents held onto. He could write comfortably in the public language and therefore was treated as an equal.
The final section speaks to Rodriguez’s inability to truly transcend the formality between him and his father. At home, Rodriguez would try to match the machismo and steely silence of his father. At school and in public, he was much more talkative and forthcoming. His father’s silence in old age contrasts with Rodriguez’s career and identification as an American citizen. Like the Mexican alien workers, Rodriguez’s parents have been hindered by silence. Their world will forever be private, Rodriguez understands, because they have not successfully assimilated. His grasp on language, however, has allowed him to reach high levels of public respect. This memoir will, perhaps, be the ultimate betrayal, as in it he discusses his background and his private life. But Rodriguez, from the prologue and his characterization of his memoir as a “middle-class pastoral,” firmly grips control over the narrative. Having spent so long being boxed into the minority label, Rodriguez views this memoir as a way to frame his own narrative. Instead of being co-opted by other people’s version of his story, he has told the story of his life as he understands it.
