Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez.

Hunger of Memory, Richard Rodriguez, Bantam, $14.95, 208 pp.

It is a complex fate to be an American. James Baldwin liked to quote Henry James on the topic: "America's history, her aspirations, her peculiar triumphs, her even more peculiar defeats, and her position in the world--yesterday and today--are all so profoundly and stubbornly unique that the very word 'America' remains a new, almost completely undefined and extremely controversial proper noun. No one in the world seems to know exactly what it describes." The rise of multiculturalism, which perceives the melting pot as a soup of diverse and at times incompatible backgrounds, has made the word "America" even more troublesome, more evasive and abstract. Is America a compact whole, a unity? Is it a sum of ethnic groups unified by a single language and a handful of patriotic symbols? Or is it a Quixotic dream where total assimilation is impossible, and where multiculturalism leads to disintegration?

Baldwin's statement acquires a totally different connotation when one realizes that historically "America" is not only a nation but also a vast continent made up of many peoples and nations. From Alaska to the Argentine pampas, from Rio de Janeiro to East Los Angeles, the geography Christopher Columbus mistakenly encountered in 1492 and Amerigo Vespucci baptized a few years later, is also a linguistic and cultural multiplicity. America the nation and America the continent exist in a complex symbiosis. Thus, Latinos in the United States, some 22 million according to the 1990 census, encompass various subgroups that include Cubans, Mexicans, Dominicans, and Puerto Ricans (who are twice American): as children of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, and, also, as citizens of the so-called New World.

Richard Rodriguez, arguably the most visible and controversial Chicano intellectual, epitomizes their plight. Born in a white neighborhood in Sacramento in 1947, and an editor at the Pacific News Service in San Francisco, he is part Mexican and all U.S. citizen: twice American. Sociologists and politicians persist in seeing his ancestors as the newest wave of immigrants, second-class citizens at the bottom of the social hierarchy. But the truth is that Rodriguez's ancestors were in the territories north of the Rio Grande before the Mayflower Pilgrims. It was only after the Guadalupe Hidalgo Treaty signed in 1848, in which Generalisimo Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna gave away and subsequently sold half of Mexico to the White House, that many of them unexpectedly, even unwillingly, became a part of an Anglo-Saxon, English-speaking reality.

A decade ago, at thirty-five, Rodriguez (spelled without the required Spanish accent) published his first book, Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez, an explosive autobiographical narrative detailing his humble beginnings in California, and how he was raised with expectations that led to graduate school at the University of California at Berkeley and a dissertation on John Milton researched at the British Museum. His parents were first-generation immigrants from Mexico, thoroughly traditional in their Catholicism. Spanish, what Rodriguez calls "the private language," was used at home; English, the entrance door to the melting pot, prevailed in public places. He was sent to Catholic school where rigid Irish nuns oversaw his assimilation. His bilingual experience resembles that of Amy Tan, Eva Hoffman, and thousands of others. In this regard, Hunger of Memory was not the first U.S. / Hispanic memoir. A number of other remarkable personal narratives by Hispanics, many seasoned with fictional ingredients, opened up the field. In 1972, for example, Oscar "Zeta" Acosta, a Chicano lawyer and activist, wrote The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo in the style of Hunter Thompson's "gonzo journalism." And before Acosta there were Ernesto Galarza's Barrio Boy: The Story of a Boy's Acculturation, actor Anthony Quinn's The Original Sin, singer Joan Baez's Daybreak, and Jesus Colon's A Puerto Rican in New York and Other Sketches.

Hunger of Memory, comprised of five separate essays, was an engaging analysis of the writer's journey from silence to voice, from anonymity to celebrity, from South to North. In it Rodriguez issued a vociferous personal attack against bilingual education and minority quotas as well as exploring his personal Catholicism and, although indirectly, his homosexuality. Before Linda Chavez and other neoconservatives, he attacked liberals for rejoicing in the promotion of blacks and Hispanics as "victims," and for allowing their guilt to shape affirmative-action programs. He argued vehemently, for example, that requiring Spanish instruction in the classroom is dangerous because it creates an abyss--a sense of separateness between the student and mainstream America.

A true agent provocateur, Rodriguez's first book, already a minor classic, became a favorite target of attack for student activists and politically correct university professors, who sometimes seemed eager to demonize the writer. But the truth is, as Ruben Martinez and other critics have perceived, that Rodriguez is not any sort of fight-winger. Political analysis is neither his interest nor his strength. Rather he is offended when his writing is used for the partisan endorsement of government programs, and he responds accordingly. He gets even angrier when his work is exploited for ideological reasons. In interviews and articles, he has described the book as another Labyrinth of Solitude, the groundbreaking study of the Hispanic psyche published in 1950 by the Mexican essayist Octavio Paz. But I find this characterization incomplete. Rodriguez's voice is alienated, anti-Romantic, often profoundly sad. While Paz embarks on an archeology of the Hispanic cultural idiosyncracy, Rodriguez is strictly personal. He does not offer historical analysis so much as meditative and speculative autobiography--a Whitmanesque "song of myself," a celebration of individuality and valor in which, against all stereotypes, a Mexican-American becomes a winner.

Unfortunately, Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father, meant as a sequel to Hunger, is a disappointment. Rodriguez's Mexican father perceived the world to be a sad place; as a child, his son saw it as a fiesta. Adulthood, however, has taught Rodriguez to reverse his childhood view. He now sees California, with a Hispanic population of over 7.5 million (34.4 percent of the state population), as a culture of comedy while Mexico personifies tragedy. In California the present lives; in Mexico history continues to count.

Like Hunger, Days of Obligation is a collection of essays. But this new volume lacks the coherence of the first book. The recurring themes--AIDS, barbarism vs. civilization among Hispanics, religion-- are developed independently. "Late Victorians," the third essay, examines Rodriguez's circumspect homosexuality. "The Latin American Novel," a misleading title, is a study about the impact and value of both Catholicism and Protestantism south of the Rio Grande and among the Chicano population in California. Rodriguez talks to a number of Anglos and South Americans who see Jesus Christ as the embodiment of the centuries-old suffering collectively endured since the arrival of the conquistadores. Yet he ponders the impact of Protestant missionaries who are succeeding in convening poor, Spanish-speaking believers (there are some 50 million Protestants from Mexico to Argentina), seeing in it a sign of Catholicism's unadaptability and fragile standing in modem times. As a believer who regularly attends Sunday Mass, his analysis offers powerful insights into traditional Catholic symbols. "Catholicism," says Rodriguez, "may be administered by embarrassed, celibate men, but the institution of Catholicism is voluptuous, feminine, sure. The church is our mother; the church is our bride." He thanks the church for the schooling he received--his views of life, death, sex, and happiness--and yet, throughout the years not only has he lost the strength in his faith but he foresees immediate crisis for the church. "Should a Mass in San Francisco be performed in Spanish?" he wonders. English, after all, is this nation's "unofficial" official language. Will multilingualism eventually divide the church? Unfortunately, he never gives solid answers to these questions.

"The Head of Joaquin Murrieta" is the most engaging and powerful essay. It studies a well-known legend of a nineteenth-century, Mexico-born bandido in Fresno County. Murrieta was an outlaw, a kind of Robin Hood who fought the Anglo establishment out of grief and outrage, giving money and happiness to the poor and dispossessed. His death, like that of Pancho Villa, has been turned into legend. During the Gold Rush, Murrieta, from Sonora, Mexico, traveled to California with his brother, wife, and probably other relatives and friends. His fate remains obscure. Apparently, a bunch of drunken Anglos raped his wife, tortured him, and hanged his brother. During the next few years, disguised as an old man, an Indian, or what have you, he searched for every one of his torturers and killed them. The American authorities placed a bounty on his head. He turned into a vengeful criminal, a symbol of the Chicano animosity against the English-speaking establishment.

Murrieta has metamorphosized into a hero among Chicanos. He often acquires different citizenships and identifies: Pablo Neruda, for instance, the 1967 Nobel Prize winner, portrayed him as a Chilean in a poem. Rodriguez's obsession is with Murrieta's bounty-branded head--according to rumors it was returned to the United States by state troopers for reward money. Where is it? Who has it? The author of Days of Obligation comes across a Chicano academic and priest, Alberto Huerta, who is anxious to find it in order to bury it with dignity as a gesture of reconciliation. As Huerta puts it: "All of us need to face our guilts and fears, if we are to become reconciled with one another." Turned into detectives, the writer and Huerta follow one clue after another until they eventually meet a curious antiquarian who claims that the deformed and monstrous head he keeps hidden is that of Murrieta.

In imaginatively exploring the life of such a myth, Rodriguez comes to see the Rio Grande as a psychic injury dividing the idiosyncrasies of Mexico and the United States. Murrieta is an emblem, a symbol of divergence, part American and part Mexican. Unfortunately, this image, much like others in the book, lacks sufficient historical and cultural weight. The reader finds insightful comments that explain the tension between these two countries described by Alan Riding as "distant neighbors," but never an overall perspective that truly penetrates history. The results are fragmentary.

Shortcomings aside, Rodriguez is an extraordinary writer and a man of polarities-- a chameleon, a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde of sorts who considers himself first a gringo and then a Mexican. Such divided loyalties remind me of Saul Bellow's cultural allegiances. His craftsmanship as an essayist, the artful playing of ideas and incidents, although in the spirit of Montaigne and John Stuart Mill, fits well the American tradition of transcendentalists like Thoreau and Emerson and twentieth-century masters like Mary McCarthy. Inevitably, his contribution stands next to James Baldwin's legacy, perhaps because the two have so much in common: their homosexuality, their deeply felt voyage from the periphery of culture to center stage, their strong religiosity and sense of sacredness. Rodriguez is a brilliant actor: without sentimentality or fear, he plays the part with great subtlety and intelligence. He is the embodiment of that complex fate shared by those born twice American: hybrids always living in the hyphen, with one leg here and the other across the Rio Grande.