Civil Rites: Hunger of Memory and the Rituals of Self-Erasure

In the dominant public sphere, Richard Rodriguez continues to be one of the most well known and widely read contemporary Chicano/a authors. Among Chicano/a academics, however, Rodriguez remains an object of controversy and... [ view full abstract ]

In the dominant public sphere, Richard Rodriguez continues to be one of the most well known and widely read contemporary Chicano/a authors. Among Chicano/a academics, however, Rodriguez remains an object of controversy and critical suspicion. As José Limón (1998) has argued, “we are confronted with a perplexing issue, namely that the only public intellectual from Mexican America has been rejected by most, if not all, of a … [Chicano/a] intelligentsia that would also claim some substantial…representation of Mexicans in the United States.”
Ironically, within this skirmish over access to public representation, studies of Rodriguez’s works have so far not directly examined the ways in which the author often presents a self-conscious complaint in his writings precisely about what is required to participate in so-called civil forms of public expression and visibility. Indeed, for Rodriguez, achieving the status of a ‘public man’ is actually predicated on certain forms of strategic self-erasure – both the erasure of stigmatized class, gendered, and racial identities, which must then struggle to acquire the legitimacy to be visible at all, as well as (on the other hand) the erasure of substantive forms of privilege and cultural capital which present themselves as neutral and universal, when in fact they are highly particular, exclusive, and differentially available.
In my essay, I trace Rodriguez’s ethical discomfort with achieving a certain inclusion in civil life which, by definition, should have been democratically available to everyone to begin with. My essay also traces the historical connections between Rodriguez’s early work Hunger of Memory and sociological discourses circulating in the mid-20th century about the new “loneliness” within, and contradictions of, the American public and the emergence of a new, more diverse, middle class in the post-war era. I compare Rodriguez’s melancholic dissatisfactions and pained assimilation to the middle classes with Octavio Paz’s ironic descriptions of “el hombre público” [public man] in The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950), David Reisman’s analysis of the middle class individual trapped by The Lonely Crowd (1969), and Richard Sennett’s analysis of The Fall of Public Man (1974). Do these sociological analyses provide a way of framing Rodriguez’s own experience of the middle class? Does Rodriguez’s story affirm or challenge the conceptualization of public life and the public man being described in these texts? In what ways can Rodriguez’s work be read as a melancholic exposure of the incivility of civility – that is, the manner in which participation in civil life (the life of the citizen) actually masks a violence of normalization and self-erasure?