His father worked at several jobs before becoming a successful dental technician and introducing his family to middle-class life in California. His mother worked as a clerk-typist. Both parents emigrated from Mexico at a young age and met and married in the United States. Richard moved with his family to Sacramento as a child, where he graduated from Sacred Heart, a Catholic private school. He graduated with a B.A. degree in English from Stanford University in 1967 and received an M.A. degree in religious studies from Columbia University in 1969. Rodriguez did graduate work at the University of California, Berkeley (1969-1972, 1974-1975), and at the Warburg Institute in London (1972-1973) as a Fulbright fellow. He was awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities for 1976-1977. Rodriguez left a promising career as a university professor to become a writer and has written full-time since 1981, both as an essayist and as a journalist. When his autobiography,
Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez, appeared in 1982, Rodriguez was awarded a gold medal from the Commonwealth Club, the Christopher Award for autobiography, and the Anisfield-Wolfe Award for Race Relations.
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