Hunger of Memory- From Class

Richard Rodriguez powerfully shows a transition that he made through life, from his ethnic and intimate family place to an accomplished and assimilated American identity. His past paints a clear picture of what it takes to be successful in the public realm. It involves becoming distant from the people whom you are a part of. Hunger of Memory becomes the story of boy, who tries to cope with the stark difference he finds in his public and private life. Rodriguez gives us background for his beliefs through his personal experiences which make his claims stronger.

Bilingual education, we come to learn through Rodriguez, only separates people and classes. It perpetuates people as being separate entities whereas the notion of being one and the same, one who can achieve and accomplish the same, is lost . In a way, the logic in Rodriguez’ argument is justified. In the realms of higher education, and success in the real world, a second language as your primary language is in fact a second class language that will not get you as far as English. English is a universal language that people all over the world will recognize.

It is this power in English that it will connect you to many that should be passed on to all students. Losing your native language while living in an American English environment is inevitable and can not be helped much, a fate that many of us have to accept. Language is clearly a very important part of each individual but Rodriguez shows how it becomes almost a burden, a pain that has to be dealt with when one loses their private language in search of a public identity. It becomes painfully clear that although Rodriguez convinces himself that intimacy is not transmitted through language, rather through intimates, this is not entirely true. It is through Spanish that he could in fact connect with his parents, his relatives, and his Hispanic brothers and sisters. Through Spanish he can understand them and they him. Although he finds that people try to take advantage of others through their common language, this is a reality. All of us react to people who have more in common with us, or who have tried to somehow become a part of us, and at times, language plays this role of attracting people.

I especially feel a strong connection with Rodriguez’s story because it is in fact a story of many english as a second language students, those who live in two different realms. Our public life really is one where we open our eyes up to world very different from the one at home. The world becomes a trying test that we often have to take without the help of parents who do not know the ways of this American world. They want us to achieve, to succeed yet they are sometimes the least helpful. It is not that they do this purposefully, but because they have resolved to raise their children in world that they do not understand much them self. Except for the basic lessons and morals such as education is the means to a better future, they are not the ones who can tell us what to do when it comes for public and social confrontations of things we do not understand and encounter for the first time.