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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BetaPrologueChapter Summaries & Analyses
Prologue Summary: Middle-Class Pastoral
Here, Richard Rodriguez reflects on his life—from his beginnings as the child of a second-generation, middle-class, Mexican-American family to becoming the esteemed writer and public intellectual that he is today. Rodriguez notes how the dark color of his skin immediately marks him as an outsider, albeit an exotic one. People tell him he should model, and assume he is part of the upper-class world of the rich, a guest at their parties. He is in demand as a speaker about education, giving speeches at colleges and in ballrooms. He is most known for his essays arguing against two popular education theories of the mid-1980s: bilingual education and affirmative action. Rodriguez writes that he has become a prominent member of “America’s Ethnic Left” (3).
Rodriguez establishes his reason for producing a memoir: “I write this autobiography as the history of my schooling. To admit the change in my life I must speak of years as a student, of losses, of gains” (4). Rodriguez writes that he considers his memoir to be a pastoral, a popular subgenre within the Romantic movement, in which writers and artists glorified the concerns and daily life of the lower classes, such as peasants and shepherds. Rodriguez, however, sees his work as a “middle-class pastoral” (4). The author also notes how intimately his memoir is tied to language and literature, calling it inherently political. In closing, he ponders where bookstores will shelve his book. He has often felt pressured to represent the experience of all Latin Americans. Rodriguez clarifies that his autobiography is meant to speak to his experience alone, and that it deals primarily with his experience of middle-class America.
Prologue Analysis
Rodriguez positions himself as thoroughly middle class in the prologue to his memoir. Class is an important distinction for Rodriguez because he often finds that people believe him to have been more disadvantaged than he actually was. Later in the memoir, with regard to affirmative action, Rodriguez will criticize the initiative to recruit more minority students. He believes that a number of students who are poor and economically disadvantaged are left out of affirmative action because they are white. Rodriguez is often put in a position where people see him as a placeholder for all minorities, expecting that he is from the lower class and did not have opportunities to rise above his circumstances. Rodriguez wants to make clear from the beginning of his memoir that he will not be romanticizing his past or his upbringing as if he grew up poor or was a member of the lower classes.
Key here is the idea of the pastoral, which was a genre of literature and art during the Romantic period. Pastorals depicted members of the lower classes, such as farmers and shepherds, as people who were authentic, brave, and closer to awakening. One example is British Romantic poet William Wordsworth’s “Michael,” published in the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads. This poem concerns itself with a shepherd, Michael, and his relationship to his son, Luke, who rejects his rural inheritance as a shepherd. Their conflict represents a breakdown between the pastoral sphere and the corruptions of the city and modernity. Rodriguez does not want his memoir and his life to be interpreted as a lower-class pastoral in which people, in particular gringos, assume that his life was extremely difficult because he is a minority. He does not wish his life to be misinterpreted as tragic, or romanticized by spectators. Thus, he definitively establishes that he grew up middle class and will be writing a memoir that is a “middle-class pastoral.”
Rodriguez also discusses language as central to his memoir. When he attended elementary school, Rodriguez was forced to speak, write, and read English fluently. This splintered his relationship with his parents, who only spoke Spanish at home. Becoming fluent in English and losing his accent changed Rodriguez’s life, not just because he became a scholar of English literature, but because being able to converse in the “public language” allowed him to assimilate fully as the American citizen he had been born. At the same time, this development alienated him from his parents and other Latinos, as he goes on to illustrate in his chapters.
