This paper takes up the conference call to examine structural systems designed “to keep Latinas/os ‘in line’” through an analysis of two autobiographical works, Richard Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez and Luis Rodríguez’s Always Running: La Vida Loca: Gang Days in L.A. My paper will explore how these texts portray the educational system in this country and will investigate the psychological damage this educational system inflicts on Latina/o youth. I will look at the similar themes found in these books and will question why it is that despite the similar issues presented in both narratives, the writers arrive at starkly distinct conclusions.
Invoking the title of Julia Alvarez’s novel How the García Girls Lost Their Accents in my paper title, I seek to underscore the similar attention to language in Hunger of Memory and Always Running. Both writers show how their schoolteachers emphasized how important it was that they acquire and master English (if and when their teachers paid any substantive attention to them at all) while insisting that the loss of Spanish was essential to their educational success. I read these scenes as ones of coercion, or what Gloria Anzaldúa would call linguistic terrorism (namely the hegemonic insistence that one language is right and another wrong). And I argue that this coercion exacts what Anzaldúa would call an intimate terrorism on its subjects, causing them to experience confusion, loss, and a devalued sense of worth.
Both writers, however, respond differently to such loss. Richard Rodriguez, who notably adopts the Anglicized version of his given name, Ricardo, and drops the accent from the i in his surname, ultimately asserts that “the loss implies the gain,” arguing that his educational success was worth all of the losses—cultural, linguistic, familial—he experienced thanks to the school system, or that it at least was predicated on them (1983, 27). According to him, without them, he would not have achieved educational success. Luis Rodríguez, by contrast, maintains, “As long as some students were deprived of a quality education, they all were” (2005, 221). For him, the loss experienced by one student is a loss experienced by all: there is no gain where there is loss or deprivation, for gain is communal.
Rodriguez and Rodríguez alike painfully detail how they were disciplined in school to give up their home language and, by extension, home culture. Through an analysis of such disciplining, my paper seeks to undiscipline. It will do so by interrogating how an educational system that creates differential pathways to “success” for Latina/o students, others them, and makes them feel less than can ever really educate in the ethical understanding of the term.
Cultural Studies , Education , Latinidades , Literature and Literary Studies , Chicano/a -- Mexican , Humanities
