Scott London: In Hunger of Memory, you suggest that supporters of bilingual education are misguided. Our conversation began with the controversial subject of bilingual education - the practice of teaching immigrant children in the language of their families. I spent a morning with Rodriguez following a university lecture he gave in Santa Barbara, California. His essays also appear on public television's NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. He is an editor for the Pacific News Service in San Francisco and a contributing editor of Harper's and the Sunday "Opinion" section of the Los Angeles Times. Rodriguez has been compared with such literary figures as Albert Camus and James Baldwin. The America that he described is a new cross-fertilizing culture, a culture of half-breeds, blurred boundaries, and bizarre extremes. "The best metaphor of America remains the dreadful metaphor the Melting Pot," he wrote. Rodriguez explored the dilemmas of ethnicity and cultural identity more directly in his second book, Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father. He calls himself "a comic victim of two cultures." Others called him a "coconut" - brown on the outside, white on the inside.
Some Mexican Americans called him pocho - traitor - accusing him of betraying himself and his people. While the book received widespread critical acclaim and won several literary awards, it also stirred resentment because of Rodriguez's strong stands against bilingual education and affirmative action. This is a country of people who leave home." "But America isn't a country of family values Mexico is a country of family values. "Americans like to talk about the importance of family values," says Rodriguez. But the journey was not without costs: his American identity was only achieved after a painful separation from his past, his family, and his culture. His first book The Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez, published in 1982, was a searching account of his journey from being a "socially disadvantaged child" to becoming a fully assimilated American, from the Spanish-speaking world of his family to the wider, presumably freer, public world of English. He spent the next five years coming to terms with how education had irrevocably altered his life. Though Rodriguez had his sights set on a career in academia, in 1976 he abruptly went his own way, supporting himself through freelance writing and various temporary jobs. He then pursued a doctorate in English Renaissance literature at Berkeley and spent a year in London on a Fulbright scholarship. Rodriguez went on to earn a degree in English at Stanford and one in philosophy at Columbia. Their effort to bring him into the linguistic mainstream had far-reaching results. " Ahora, speak to us en inglés," they would say. Eager to help their son, his mother and father complied. When his English showed little sign of improvement, the nuns at his school asked Rodriguez's parents to speak more English at home. After school he would return home to the pleasing, soothing sounds of his family's Spanish. He kept quiet, listening to the sounds of middle-class American speech, and feeling alone. When Richard Rodriguez entered first grade at Sacred Heart School in Sacramento, California, his English vocabulary consisted of barely fifty words.
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