SOURCE: Alarcón, Norma. “Tropology of Hunger: The ‘Miseducation’ of Richard Rodriguez.” In The Ethnic Canon: Histories, Institutions, and Interventions, edited by David Palumbo-Liu, pp. 140–52. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995.

In the following essay, Alarcón discusses Rodriguez's exploration of what it means to be an “American” in Hunger of Memory and Days of Obligation.

The historical condition of our times is to have “ethnicity,” albeit reconfigured and remapped in the aftermath of the civil rights movement in the United States. The Marxist mandate to acquire a class consciousness has been too limited to account for all the elements in the formation of raced ethnic groups in the context of the Americas. It increasingly appears as well that in the Euro-American terrain the formation of a proletarian class consciousness has become more of a step on the way to the formation of an unstable bourgeois liberal subject, given...