Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez

Hunger of Memory is the story of Mexican-American Richard Rodriguez, who begins his schooling in Sacramento, California, knowing just 50 words of English, and concludes his university studies in the stately quiet of the reading room of the British Museum.

Here is the poignant journey of a “minority student” who pays the cost of his social assimilation and academic success with a painful alienation — from his past, his parents, his culture — and so describes the high price of “making it” in middle-class America.

Provocative in its positions on affirmative action and bilingual education, Hunger of Memory is a powerful political statement, a profound study of the importance of language ... and the moving, intimate portrait of a boy struggling to become a man.

Richard Rodriguez has authored a “trilogy” on American public life and his private life—Hunger of Memory, Days of Obligation, and Brown—concerned, respectively, with class, ethnicity, and race in America. He has also worked as a journalist on television and in print. Most recently he wrote Darling, a meditation on the Abrahamic religions after 9/11.