Richard Rodriguez

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Hunger of Memory: Author Biography
Richard Rodriguez was born on July 31, 1944, in San Francisco, California, to Mexican immigrants Leopoldo and Victoria Moran Rodriguez, the third of their four children. When Rodriguez was still a young child, the family moved to Sacramento, California, to a small house in a comfortable white neighborhood.‘‘Optimism and ambition led them to a house (our home) many blocks from the Mexican side of town ... It never occurred to my parents that they couldn’t live wherever they chose,’’ writes Rodriguez in Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez, his well-received 1981 autobiography. This first book placed him in the national spotlight but brought scorn from many supporters of affirmative actionand bilingual education.
Rodriguez’s family was not well-to-do, but his father—a man with a third-grade education who ended up working as a dental technician after dreaming of a career as an engineer—and his mother somehow found the money to send their children to Catholic schools. Ultimately, Rodriguez, who could barely speak English when he started elementary school, finished his academic effortsas a Fulbright scholar in Renaissance literature with degrees from Stanford University and Columbia University. Perched on the edge of a brilliant career in academia, but uncomfortable with what he viewed as the unwarranted advantage given him by affirmative action, Rodriguez refused a number of teaching jobs at prestigious universities. He felt that receiving preference and assistance based onhis classification as a minority was unfair to others. This dramatic decision, along with a number of anti-affirmative action essays published in the early to mid-1970s, made Rodriguez a somewhat notorious national figure.
After leaving academia, Rodriguez spent the next six years writing the essays that comprise Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez, aided for part of that time bya National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship. Before being compiled into book form, many of the essays appeared in publications such as Columbia Forum, American Scholar, and College English. Hunger of Memory was a hugely successful book, garnering reviews in approximately fifty publications after its release. Critics generally praised the book for its clear and concise prose and forRodriguez’s honesty in revealing his conflicted feelings about being a ‘‘scholarship boy,’’ as he refers to himself in the book. In 1983, the book won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and a Christopher Award.
Since 1981, Rodriguez has continued his writing career, occasionally serving as an essayist for the PBS series MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour and also working as an editor with the Pacific News Service inCalifornia. In 1992, he published Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father, another collection of previously issued autobiographical essays. The book, which did not receive the same acclaim and admiration as his first book, covers such topics as Rodriguez’s Mexican and Indian heritage, his homosexuality, and the AIDS epidemic in San Francisco.

Richard Rodriguez
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Richard is acontributing editor at New America Media in San Francisco. He writes regularly for several newspapers and magazines, both in the United States and in England. He has also written an autobiographical trilogy on class, ethnicity and race: "Hunger of Memory" (1982) "Days of Obligation: An Argument With My Mexican Father," (1992) and "Brown: The Last Discovery of America" (2002). He is currently workingon a book concerned with the ecology of the desert and monotheism.Richard received a 1997 George Foster Peabody Award for his NewsHour essays on American life. The Peabody Award is designed to recognize "outstanding achievement in broadcast and cable," and is one of television's highest honors.Richard's awards include the Frankel Medal from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the...