38 pages • 1-hour read
Hunger of Memory
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Symbols & Motifs
Complexion
Rodriguez’s dark complexion is a source of stress for him and agony for his mother. Rodriguez recalled stories about how pregnant Latina women would sometime take folk precautions to ensure that their children would have lighter complexions. Rodriguez is made keenly aware of the downfalls of his complexion, which makes him instantly recognizable as a minority, as his mother frets about letting him out in the sun lest he tan and darken even more. She also stipulates that she does not want him to be in a job that would require a uniform, and she urges him to avoid wearing clothing that looks like a uniform, lest someone mistake him for a Latino laborer or servant. Rodriguez feels that his complexion makes him ugly and awkward as he grows up.
However, the summer that Rodriguez works in construction, he is out in the sun several hours each day. He begins to accept his dark complexion and learns not to let it rule him; he even takes up jogging, which leaves his face darker than it was when he was a child. Later, as a professor, when Rodriguez brings up his reservations about teaching a minority literature class to some students of the Chicano Movement, he believes this pegs him as a “coconut,” or dark on the outside, but white inside. In other words, he fears that while his complexion is dark, that of a minority, his actions are those of a white man.
Literature
From an early age, Rodriguez finds escape and pleasure in reading. Once he grasps English and can read it fluently, he dives into books, seeking them out through the library and school. By the time he gets to high school, he has read hundreds of books. Later, Rodriguez will study English literature at the graduate level, though he ultimately rejects a teaching career.
Rodriguez’s passion for literature distances him from his parents. His mother, in particular, does not understand why he reads so much. She asks for reading recommendations from him, but she does not make it very far in the book he suggests, My Antonia, by Willa Cather. Literature and writing also put Rodriguez at odds with the stoic machismo that his father embraces, because in his father’s culture, literature is seen as feminine.
Finally, when Rodriguez gets to graduate school, he finds a community of scholars. When he studies abroad in London, Rodriguez feels a powerful acceptance as an academic among an old and sacred network of scholars like him. At the same time, movements within education, such as affirmative action, bring attention to Rodriguez’s Latino minority status. Professors and other academics urge Rodriguez to interpret texts through the lens of his own experiences as a minority. This pressure makes Rodriguez uncomfortable because it makes him uneasy to speak on behalf of all Latinos and minorities, especially since he does not believe that there is such a thing as minority literature. He believes minority identity and literature should be pure and separate from each other.
Money/Class
Rodriguez notes that he did not grow up in a poor neighborhood with other Latino families. Instead, he was raised in a Latino household among middle-class gringos.
Class is important to Rodriguez. In the prologue, Rodriguez situates his memoir as a “middle-class pastoral.” It is important to him to define his memoir as a life within the middle class. When Rodriguez gets to college and graduate school, the affirmative action movement gains steam. Rodriguez feels uncomfortable because he feels that affirmative action fails students who are truly economically disadvantaged by privileging race and ethnicity over other factors, like poverty, that might prevent students from attending college. Rodriguez also wants to clarify that though he is a minority, he had advantages as a member of the middle class. To Rodriguez, economic strain is more restrictive than ethnicity or race.
Rodriguez’s parents raised him to fit in with the middle and upper classes around him. He was taught how to be polite and use elite manners. His parents also advised Rodriguez on his dress and appearance, so he would not be mistaken for a laborer. Rodriguez felt a fascination with the upper class from a young age. Later, as an adult, he began to style himself with expensive clothing and to befriend wealthy people.
Perhaps the single biggest contributor to Rodriguez’s ability to rise above his middle-class circumstance among rich peers at school and college was his fluency with the English language, the public language. Rodriguez’s parents’ failure to adopt English and to lose their accents forever cemented them as minorities with no upward mobility, except through the successes of their children. Notably, when Rodriguez sees his grandmother in her casket at her funeral, her face is arranged in the polite but stiff expression she would wear in public, among the gringos, when Rodriguez would have to translate or speak on her behalf at the grocery store. For Rodriguez, this is symptomatic of her willful failure to assimilate and to learn the public language, English, in order to be truly comfortable both in public and in private.
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