Richard Rodriguez Biography | Author of Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez

Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez Author Biography

Richard Rodriguez was born on July 31, 1944, in San Francisco, California, to Mexican immigrants Leopoldo and Victoria Moran Rodriguez, the third of their four children. When Rodriguez was still a young child, the family moved to Sacramento, California, to a small house in a comfortable white neighborhood. "Optimism and ambition led them to a house (our home) many blocks from the Mexican side of town. . . . It never occurred to my parents that they couldn't live wherever they chose," writes Rodriguez in Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez, his well-received 1981 autobiography. This first book placed him in the national spotlight but brought scorn from many supporters of affirmative action and bilingual education.

Rodriguez's family was not well-to-do, but his father—a man with a third-grade education who ended up working as a dental technician after dreaming of a career as an engineer—and his mother...
(read more)