Hunger of Memory:

...He describes himself as a writer driven to reveal his innermost thoughts, even those thoughts which his family has explicitly asked him to keep "private...

...As everyone leaves, his mother asks him to take a jacket to his father...

...He spent five years polishing this manu-script, working sporadically at various un-named, short-term jobs provided by the many "rich white friends" he has been "fortunate" enough to mingle with since his grammar school days in Sac-ramento and his college days at those prestigious universities...

...In that instant I feel the thinness of his arms...

...We are told that he was ac-cepted at Stanford on his own academic merits, studied journalism at Columbia, then went to Berkeley for graduate work in English Renaissance Literature only to discover in the early 1970s that he was sought after for prestigious jobs at Ivy League universities because of his "skin color," not because of his professional qualifications...

...It is, I realize, the only thing he has said to me all evening...

...He turns...

...We are told, however, that his view is the one most appropriate to the "middle-class status" he worked so hard to achieve...

...American education is the central theme of the autobiog-raphy, language its primary symbol: lan-guage as the conduit for sharing private and intimate thoughts and feelings...

...he advocates...

...While he had taken ad-vantage of many "minority student pro-grams," in the end he became squeamish and, out of principle, rejected all offers...

...I take it to my father and place it on him...

...Kerr RICH-HEARD Road-ree-guess is the phonetic English pronunciation of Richard Rodriguez (nacio Ricardo Rod-riguez) who has written an ironic, dispas-sionate exposition of "the life of a middle-class man...

...We are never told how many of his professors were women, black, or Hispanic (middle-class or otherwise), and therefore perhaps we do not need to be told how many of them were white men chosen, no doubt, only for their abilities...

...lan-guage as the means of entering public spheres of power and participation...

...The book concludes with a description of one of the now rare occasions that he sees his family, a Christmas celebration at which his cocktail party training lets him be witty, voluble, and charming...

...Richard Rodriguez is the quintessential product of the "new" educational direc-tion he advocates...

...He asks if I am going home now too...

...In this he follows a long tradition...

...Ap-parently an unusually thoughtful child, Rodriguez cites this as the moment of his intellectual birth-partly because it freed him forever from the possibility of shar-ing intimacies with his family for which an exact English equivalence could not be found...

...On the way he has be-come monolingual, accommodated him-self to the separation of his "private" familial world and his "public" worlds, and rejected affirmative action on grounds of public policy as well as per-sonal principle...

...Having overcome the feelings, of in-adequacy that his dark skin caused him as a child, he can describe with some humor the many home remedies he tried to lighten his color-including an attempt to shave off the offending epidermis...

...Rodriguez's journey has been a long and painful one...

...Having started school as a monolin-gual Spanish-speaker, Rodriguez recalls that he remained silent in his English-speaking Catholic grammar school until, under direction of the nuns, his parents banished Spanish from their home for the sake of their children, thereafter using it only furtively between themselves...

...Disclaiming the universality of his ex-perience because of differences between him and more disadvantaged Mexican-Americans, he nonetheless uses it as evi-dence for what he thinks are fallacies in "bi-lingual" and "affirmative action" programs...

...lan-guage as the tool for an education which should enable people to distinguish be-tween and keep separate those private and public spheres...

...By his own testimony he has become acceptable to the majority society...

...In interviews promoting the book he has been widely quoted as believing that skin color should not be a cause for discrimi-nation, but neither should it be used for favored treatment...

...He feels that retaining Spanish, even as a second language, would have retarded his mental growth and makes no conjecture about how such retention might have expanded it...

...Now, that "bronze skin," he says, is thought to be a product of Swiss or Caribbean vacations, a fashionable match for the well-fitted, expensive Ital-ian clothes he wears to cocktail parties in London, New York, and Los Angeles...

...He tells us of the silver champagne bucket he and his siblings gave their working-class parents and reveals a distance far greater than that between San Francisco, where, he lives, and Sacramento...

...In retrospect, he finds the school's mandate justifiable, perhaps essential...