Rating: 
Summary: Shameful
Review: Over 20 years ago I served on the working board of a project on Mexican Americans sponsored by a big metropolitan library. Among the things I did was suggest titles for their Chicano collection. One day our link librarian spoke of a "new exciting book"(Hunger of Memory). I purchased it. I am a Cuban who immersed herself in Mexican American culture and literature, both as an educator and a journalist. I hated the book. How dare this character look down on his roots, his language at a time when great people from his ethnic background were instilling pride in their communities. Hinojosa, Anaya, Oscar Zeta Acosta, Tomas Rivera, to name a few.
To put it in perspective, this book came out after ROOTS, a book that made ethnicity popular and acceptable. Rodriguez, a product of affirmative action decries the policy that opened new doors for him. He hates what he sees in the mirror. He comments that when he walks into a London hotel people should assume that his dark skin is not a racial trait, but the result of skiing in the Alps. As an old woman, retired from Academia after 35 years of teaching, having raised children and grandchildren, having spent a number or years at a historically Black university, I hope that my legacy to the youth of this, my adopted country, is to have pride in their roots, respect and feel proud of the deprivations and adversities their forefathers endured and overcame, and rejoice in the diversity of our people. After wo years I still see Richard Rodriguez as a pathetic figure.
Rating: 
Summary: A unique education...
Review: I suspect that the reason I despise the new liturgy is because it is mine. It reflects and attempts to resolve the dilemma of Catholics just like me.' (p. 106) Of all of Rodriguez' writing, perhaps this sentence sums up (for me) one of the primary connections between liturgy, learning, and daily life outside of a church-building context. Rodriguez speaks of his interest and affection for the Latin mass with which he was raised, and the affinity his older family members have for that, and many of the unique elements lost now that the Latin mass, which used a universal yet dead language, has been replaced with mass in the 'vulgar' tongue (p. 98). This relates back to the experiences he had at leaving behind the primary use of Spanish and adopting the more foreign language of English, and the dynamics which that shift set up in his life. A shift in the liturgy was more than a simple rearrangement of the choreography. Liturgy had been, for Rodriguez and many others, a way of experiencing life. (p. 100) The change represented a change of focus, it seemed to Rodriguez, away from God and more toward the community, a community which, ironically, was less strong and less universal than it had been. I would question Rodriguez in his outlook in this manner: is the community less present in his experience not because of the shift in the liturgy, but rather because of the shift in his own life. Leaving grammar school with its religious focus and going on to other schools and then more adult life removed much, and this was to some extent a conscious choice. 'Liturgy was something for Sunday' (p. 103) after grammar school, Rodriguez said, and yet, particularly for a Catholic in an urban setting, this needn't be the case Liturgy had been one way (Rodriguez claims, the only way) in which his parents were treated as thinking people by the institutions around them. It was something that was instructive, and could be interactive on both a public and private level simultaneously (Rodriguez claims this aspect to be missing in the post-Vatican II liturgical reforms). The difference between Mexican and gringo church ornamentation - 'it doesn't feel like a church', Rodriguez' mother complained. (p. 86) - highlights some of the cultural differences - not everything about the universal church was universal, and much of what draws individuals in to a full experience tends to be the accidental, or culturally-specific, elements. Yet, for Rodriguez, even with his own shift in language, culture, and the church's shift in liturgy and language, he is still able to hold onto some elements of faith and worship; he seems to recognise the remaining universal elements, or perhaps his attention has shifted to away intellectually, but not emotionally, from his liturgical experience of the past. It is no wonder to me that, when people reaction so strongly to even the smallest changes in worship services, that such dramatic shifts in personal and public life, and personal and public worship, should concern Rodriguez, bring questioning and confusion on many levels, and yet still claiming personal investment in the life and liturgy of the church, which in many ways served as an extension of family for him, even in the midst of not-always-pleasant change. The context for which I read this work, that of liturgy and learning, provides interesting and unique insights.
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant Analysis of Identity and Culture
Review: This is truly an amazing work by Richard Rodriguez. He touches on the very nature of personal identity, and how one's public identity interacts with the majority culture. Rodriguez is definitely a "pocho," but perhaps that is why I, and I suspect many others, relate to him so fully. Hunger of Memory is much more than a coming of age story; it is a journey of self realization and cultural observation. For anyone who has ever felt a part of two different worlds, yet not fully resembled either, this is the book to read. It compels you to think beyond convention, and search your soul.
Rating:
Summary: BiLingualology
Review: Richard, never calls himself Ricardo, shares his "fictional" family life and his growing up years as a youth in catholic school. The reader sees into the study habits of a middle class spanish speaking child who is shy to learn english and become educated. This reader wonders if Richard the Minority Student was just passed along with good grades, all the way to his PhD degree. Everywhere he studies, he is the token brown/chicano minority student. He doesnt realize it until he is in Grad School. Richard has a way with words, that held my interest. I have started reading Days of Obligation. It is an enjoyable read that offers insight into the life of the brown student in middle class white america.
Rating:
Summary: Una estrella es demasiado.
Review: Este libro no merece ni siquiera una estrella. Es un compendio de observaciones que destilan prejuicios contra el idioma castellano, las costumbres Latino Americanas y la hispanidad en general. Ello resulta particularmente paradojico, puesto que el autor claramente jamas se ha molestado en intentar familiarizarse con la cultura que desprecia. Lectores que lean "Hunger of Memory" para familiarizarse con los latinos y la cultura latina adquiriran solamente una imagen distorsionada, voluntariamente contrahecha. El porque de la distorsion se torna claro cuando consideramos que, al presentarse como una victima de las caracteristicas de sus raices, Rodriguez ha ganado una legitimidad que le permite pasar hoy como portavoz de los hispanos en los Estados Unidos.
Rating:
Summary: few redeeming qualities
Review: How strange - I read this book some years back and yet, coming across it again today all my old angry, negative impressions came rushing back. I too am Mexican, about the same age as the author, raised in California in a Spanish-speaking household by loving immigrant parents, Catholic grammar, high school and college-educated. Rodriguez and I shared many of the same experiences, positive and negative. In fact, up to a certain point his story could have been the story of my own life. But this book left me cold, worse than cold; it made me angry enough to literally throw it across the room, several times. I had to force myself to finish it. It's infuriating, and worse, tragic that this devious, cold-hearted, whiny, self-serving and self-centered author has become so influential. No tiene corazon.
Rating:
Summary: make it stop...
Review: This book could possibly be interesting for minority students, but for anyone else, it is boring beyond belief. His writing style makes me want to find his thesorus and burn it. While he has mastered the art of attempting to make the whole world pity his life, he has completely lost the art of writing a book to be read for enjoyment. I want this book burned. It is a symptom of our overly PC society that an upper middle-class white girl is supposed to read this books and be "uplifted" by it. I find it drivel.
Rating:
Summary: Poor ME.
Review: If Richard Rodriguez was able to publish this self-pitying, self-congratulatory, self-absorbed drivel because he is a minority, then that aspect of affirmative action is the only thing he and I agree on. Is he unaware of the thousands of Americans who have managed to learn English while maintaining close ties to their native cultures, including preserving their native languages? Is he unaware of how minorities have contributed to our country by being different?
Does he think that his experiences with the Catholic church are unique? Does he think his heavy-handed punctuation makes us feel the drama he imagines in his life?
I have never read a worse book on the immigrant experience. It may be that I have never read a worse book. Shame on him for his narrow-mindedness. Shame on anyone who gave him money to pass off his own psychosis as a common experience just because he is a minority.
Rating: 
Summary: An Important Voice on Multiculturalism
Review: While Hunger of Memory has been around for quite some time, I believe it a book of timeless importance in learning of the struggles of the 'non-white' American's coming of age. I find Rodriguez' writing to be quite inspirational. His personal journey to greater self awareness and academic achievement are among the most interesting aspects of the book. At the same time the Hunger of Memory can be absolutely engaging, there is a strained element to the book in Rodriguez' effort to offer his personal story and at the same time to sound scholarly. While not the case throughout the book, the places where I found this occurring were rather annoying. I prefer a simpler 'personal style' over the pedantry of the stiff intellectualization we consider 'scholarly writing.' In my own estimation, 'scholarly' should be a term we reserve for those stories of life that we learn something from -- not from the degree of awkwardness with which something is written. An excellent book overall.
Rating:
Summary: Well-written, informative, and riveting
Review: Well-written, informative, and riveting account of the cost of assimilation in an elitist, nativist, and xenophobic American education system from Catholic parochial school to the hallowed halls of Stanford, Columbia, Berkeley, and finally to the British museum. Richard Rodriguez's intellectual autobiography, "Hunger of Memory," informs me of my very own public and intimate narrative, "Sisyphus and the Struggle Within." I understand and feel his loneliness, marvel at his elitist views on language, literature, and affirmative action, applaud his rise and entrance into the American upper middle-class, yet I am stunned by his lack of self- and cultural identity. Rodriguez, like many of us, learns early in his life to deny, erase, or at least minimize the "horrors" of his own Mexican identity and heritage, as he casts his cultural baggage into Angel Island's smoldering furnace. Unfortunately, it is a high price that many of us pay in becoming American. We often lose ourselves, and our cultural and ethnic identities. Why did the very young Ricardo Rodriguez, English equivalent "Richard," have to forfeit his mother tongue and its intimate and enriching sounds and rhythms for English? Why could he not have equally chosen to learn and freely speak both languages? His choice, or perhaps more accurately, the educational system's choice, renders him alien and distant in his own company, in his own family, and even in the quiet solitude of academia and the British museum. Despite the author's arduously attained education and material wealth, he fails to have learned one vital truth- to seek and "hunger for" like religion, his own identity and to adapt and supplement his elitist literary education with a renewed awareness and appreciation for Spanish and Mexican writings. And finally, the sum total, the root of Ricardo Rodriguez's Mexican heritage that which he so desperately tries to hide, surfaces as he and a disgruntled and equally qualified Jewish graduate student vie for a professorship at Yale. 'Damn!' . . . You're the one who gets all the breaks. . . You're a Chicano. And I am a Jew. That's really the only difference between us' (p. 170). And it is here where both scholars show their ignorance by redefining and reframing the intent of affirmative action. President Kennedy coined the term "affirmative action" in Executive Order 10925; the original operational definition of affirmative action had nothing to do with quotas but goals, timelines, and planning objectives to enhance management; quotas are illegal because they discriminate and ignore standards; goals do not; goals are levels one hopes to attain and are realistic and attainable with effort. So, the intent of affirmative action is to assimilate and open the doors of equal opportunity to "qualified underrepresented groups" into predominately White Anglo Saxon Protestant male organizations to include America's elite public and private institutions of higher learning.
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