Reimagined Communities

The tendency towards panethnicism in this country comes at a great cost to certain individuals like Richard Rodriguez. Americans no longer see themselves as members of a specific native subgroup but seek identity amongst a vast assortment of people of similar skin tone. In this sense, race is a relatively easy barrier to overcome. If people from various warring parts of Africa find alignment with one another in America, how is it that other groups of people in opposing conflicts cannot find solace among one another? Perhaps skin color is only the tip of the ice berg. Perhaps the uniting factor lies within one’s overall cultural, social and economic experience.

In a way, I felt Richard Rodriguez hit the nail on the head. Using his own educational experience as an example, he argued that affirmative action did not get to the root of the problem. In regards to African Americans affected by this program, Rodriguez wrote, “Most blacks simply couldn’t afford tuition for higher education. And, because the primary and secondary schooling blacks received was usually poor, few qualified for admission,” (155). As a result, he noted that those African Americans that were fit to benefit from affirmative action were those least affected by racism in America (155).

And as a white female applying to college, I found the process of affirmative action slightly frustrating. Albeit, I was born into a privileged family – a family that could afford my private education and private tutorials for the standardized tests. Yet I took firm advantage of what ever opportunity came my way, and the thought of being denied acceptance to college because of my sex and skin color did not seem fair. Affirmative action, in that sense, seemed slightly counterproductive – almost like a blast from the past.

Since people seemingly find self-identity in America along no one particular line, the need to address the issue of inequality in America must also take the same course of action. Richard Rodriguez appears to believe the problem with this program lies within its neglect of class and overemphasis on racism. “In the era of affirmative action it became more and more difficult to distinguish the middle-class victim of social oppression from the lower-class victim,” he argues (160). However, I believe the issue is still contains more variables than the image he presents of the situation. No one problem has one cure-all answer, just as an American does not belong to one overarching category of people.

Therefore, identity is no longer so simple. This vastly complicates the idea of nationalism in America if there is more than a White America and a Black America. Yet in through differences comes the potential for unification. It comes to a point where we realize we are all in the same boat – an understanding that comes by way of recognizing the way our various different identities intertwine and become interdependent. As a result, the idea of affirmative action developed perhaps from an undercurrent of unspoken knowledge that we have more in common than we would like. And, consequently, before we can all claim to be the same through this program, Americans must take a step back to better assess and then address those differences that bring us to the same town, the same country and, if circumstances allow, the same educational institution.

Richard Rodriquez’s Hunger of Memory is, I believe we can agree, an extremely heart-felt fast read. However, in his final chapter, “Mr. Secrets,” Rodriguez puts a word to the overarching tone that is ingrained and voiced throughout the book: loneliness (189). This, in and of itself, is merely a literary observation but the loneliness that is endemic throughout also suggests Rodriguez’s, and possibly anyone’s, perpetual personal battle with community. Hunger of Memory is a personal narrative of the trials and tribulations that occur over the course of a portion of a lifetime in the struggle for imagining a community. As our course title suggests, Rodriguez, time and time again, finds himself re-imagining the communit(y)(ies) in which he is present.

His first chapter, “Aria,” looks at this from a linguistic perspective through the notion of public and private language. In Rodriguez’s eyes, his decision to switch his mindset to one of the public domain, English in his case, creates a sense of true Americanism within him (22). However, as he re-imagines himself linguistically and socially, Rodriquez loses his private language and the joy and comfort he once felt at home. “No longer bound tight by the pleasing and troubling knowledge or our public separateness … the house would be empty of sounds,” he says (22). To Rodriguez, this notion of public language becomes a nationalist-like mentality, as he believes that only the public language should be taught and not the private one because it promotes overall inclusion rather than “feelings of public separateness” (33). He holds on the ideas of intimacy and sound from the past, but Rodriguez has clearly been re-imagined and finds himself in a new community, one that cannot truly coexist with his former self. Nationalism becomes all encompassing.

Other strains of this imagined sense of self pop up throughout the rest of the autobiography with references to his identification, both inwardly and outwardly, as a scholarship boy in “Credo” and his imagined exclusion from society because of his dark skin in “Complexion.” What is so interesting about Rodriguez’s story is the fact that he can unabashedly write of his movements to and from different communities within society; he has various and differing senses of self, each one a community. His life seems to be one giant character development with a dual movement of him budding personally and factors around him molding him in to a precise image.

With this in mind, one has to come full circle and realize that throughout this process, no matter how involved the forces of society may have been on Rodriguez or how frequently he had been directly aided and influenced, he is lonely throughout the book. This leads to a series of questions that revolve around a central dichotomy: the individual or the group. Clearly, an array of forces help determine Rodriguez’s self-imagining but the sense of loneliness that is so strident from the time he loses his private language, suggests that nationalism or the process of public identification must come from the individual and be struggled with by the individual. Rodriguez’s experience with imagining and re-imagining himself is a drastically independent one. The question is whether or not all movements like these are so individual-based like this in theory and in practice or whether or not there is more of a group component. Rodriguez was integrated into existing communities but there is little indication that he was brought into them. Once his private language had been lost, he was no more than a lonely imaginer.