Cycle 2 Blog Post

Throughout Hunger of Memory, Rodriguez speaks again and again about his alienation from Mexican/Mexican-American culture. Initially, he writes about how learning English (academic English in particular) separated him from his family and made their interactions with one another feel less intimate. Later, he talked about his negative feelings towards the “Third World Student Movement.” I can’t quite put my finger on the right word to describe how he talks about the students in this movement… I almost want to describe it as “disdain,” although that’s maybe too strong a word. At any rate, he certainly doesn’t agree with their ideas. Frankly, he’s pretty condescending when he talks about these students. They don’t ‘view’ themselves as “belonging to two very different societies,” but rather they “imagine” themselves to be so (p. 168). He refers to the ways that they display themselves as cultural beings (their accents, the way they dress) as a “clownish display” (p. 171) (maybe disdain isn’t so far off, after all). They made “claims” that they didn’t have to give up their culture in order to join the culture of academia, while Rodriguez had accepted the “fact” that such change is necessary. He describes white women agitating for gender equality as taking on the mantle of “victim” and decries this as “ludicrous” (p. 176).

Yet, Rodriguez also talks multiple times about the ways that he and his family members faced stereotyping or oppression just because of their racial and cultural background. How he was invited to join minority leaders on trips that he felt were ill-suited to his own work. How painful it was when others made comments implying that he had only been offered jobs because the departments “need their minority” (p. 178). How his sister suffered for her dark complexion, and how he felt ugly due to his own, similar skin color. Regardless of whether a person feels plugged into the culture of their background, regardless of whether a person maintains their first language as their primary language or if they abandon it for English, regardless of how educated or upwardly mobile or wealthy a person is, their race/ethnicity (deeply intertwined, and deeply connected to their home culture) is still one of the most visible things about them. A person’s race mediates how they interact with the world, because it affects how they are seen by others, by strangers who don’t get the chance to learn much else about them during a passing interaction. This is apparent when Oprah Winfrey, one of the richest and most influential women in the world, is shopping and the clerk assumes that she can’t afford theexpensive handbag she’s eyeing. When young black boys are perceived as olderthan they actually are, and receive harsher punishments than white boys for the same misbehavior. When black men and boys are viewed as inherently dangerous and are shot with little to no provocation by law enforcement officers over and over and over (as are Hispanic men and women).

Rodriguez talks about a distinction between public and private selves, and about choosing the public self at the expense of the private self, but it seems to me that it’s not possible to 100% leave behind your private identity – your culture, gender, race – when participating in public society. As described above, even if you disavow these things, they will follow you and influence how you’re seen by others. If that’s the case, then what would even be the benefit of sacrificing that private self? Why does Rodriguez deem it necessary? If a person draws strength from shining a light on their own culture, rather than keeping it hidden away at home, and if this doesn’t impact their ability to participate in public, societal culture, then why should they be pressured to cast their culture aside? For example, Dr. Adrienne Keene, who writes extensively about representations of Native American peoples and cultures on her blog, Native Appropriations, found it immensely powerful and moving to hear a graduation prayer at Brown University’s Baccalaureate ceremony given in the language of Wampanoag people, who originally lived on the area around the school. Far from giving up the language of their ancestors, the students who delivered the prayer must have been actively working with a project to revive the language. These students are graduating from an Ivy League school – it doesn’t seem that their commitment to retaining their Native culture has made them less capable of succeeding in public society.

It is very interesting to me that Contreras seems to imply that Rodriguez has “evolved” and possibly adjusted some of his divisive positions. One of Contreras’s critiques stood out to me, though, since it reminded me of a piece I read a while back. Contreras undermines the idea that “If everyone has sex with everyone else, we’ll get a world of mestizo-looking people, peace and love would reign supreme, and racism, as we know it, will disappear.” Similarly, Jia Tolentino wrote about PolicyMic’s commentary on National Geographic’s predictions for what humans will look like in 2050: “look how nice we look, as a people, when white gets to be more interesting and minorities get to look white. Look at this freckled, green-eyed future. Look at how beautiful it is to see everything diluted that we used to hate.” In Tolentino’s view (and mine), the idea of racial and cultural identities being erased and disposed of isn’t likely to be a simple or purely good thing.