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Ethnic Authenticity, Class, and Autobiography: The Case of Hunger of Memory

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Henry Staten
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Abstract

Richard Rodriguez's autobiographical Hunger of Memory (1982) is assigned to Chicano-Chicana literature because the book tells a story of growing up the child of Mexican immigrants, but Rodriguez rejects the term Chicano for himself and denies that it is possible or desirable for Americans of Mexican descent to retain an identification with their culture of origin. Rodriguez has been widely criticized as a sellout to white bourgeois culture, but his life narrative shows that his rejection of Chicano identity is rooted in the class-and-race ideology of his Mexican parents and thus in the contradictions of Mexican history. Chicano-Chicana nationalism assumes a simple dichotomy between the proletarian mestizo or mestiza and the bourgeois white oppressor. Rodriguez's family history, however, points toward race and class divisions within the population of Mexican descent that call into question the monolithic conceptions of Chicano-Chicana identity on the basis of which Rodriguez has been attacked.

Type
Special Topic: Ethnicity
Information
PMLA , Volume 113 , Issue 1: Special Topic Ethnicity , January 1998 , pp. 103 - 116
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1998

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