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American writer (born 1944)

Richard Rodriguez (born July 31, 1944) is an American writer who became famous as the author of Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (1982), a narrative about his intellectual development.

He was born on July 31, 1944, into a Mexican immigrant family in San Francisco, California where he spoke Spanish until age 6. As a youth in Sacramento, California, he delivered newspapers and worked as a gardener.

Rodriguez went to Catholic school starting from age 6 at Sacred Heart School in Sacramento and graduated from Christian Brothers High School. He received a BA from Stanford University in English in 1967, an MA in philosophy from Columbia University in 1969, and was a PhD candidate in English Renaissance literature at the University of California, Berkeley from 1969 to 1972. He also attended the Warburg Institute in London on a Fulbright fellowship in order to conduct research for his doctoral dissertation but ultimately did not complete the degree.

Instead of pursuing a career in academia, Rodriguez suddenly decided to write freelance and take other temporary jobs. Rodriguez worked as a contributing editor to newspapers and magazines, including Harpers and the Los Angeles Times. His first book, Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez, was published in 1982. It was an account of his journey from being a "socially disadvantaged child" to becoming a fully assimilated American, from the Spanish speaking world of his family to the wider, presumably freer, public world of English. However, the journey was not without costs: his American identity was achieved only after a painful separation from his past, his family, and his culture. "Americans like to talk about the importance of family values," said Rodriguez. "But America isn't a country of family values; Mexico is a country of family values. This is a country of people who leave home." While the book received widespread critical acclaim and won several literary awards, it also stirred resentment because of Rodriguez's strong stands against bilingual education and affirmative action. Some Mexican Americans called him pocho, Americanized Mexican, accusing him of betraying himself and his people. Others called him a "coconut," brown on the outside, but white on the inside. He calls himself "a comic victim of two cultures." A noted prose stylist, Rodriguez has worked as a teacher, international journalist, and educational consultant. His work has been published in Harper's Magazine, Mother Jones, and Time. He has appeared regularly on the Public Broadcasting Service show, NewsHour. Rodriguez's visual essays, Richard Rodriguez Essays, on "The News Hour with Jim Lehrer" earned Rodriguez a Peabody Award in 1997. Rodriguez's most recent book, Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography (2013), explores the important symbolism of the desert in Judaism, Islam and Christianity. In an interview before the book came out, Rodriguez reported that he was "interested in the fact that three great monotheistic religions were experienced within this ecology." A sample of the project appeared in Harper's Magazine (January 2008). In this essay, "The God of the Desert: Jerusalem and the Ecology of Monotheism," Rodriguez portrays the desert as a paradoxical temple, its emptiness the requisite for God's elusive presence.

Rodriguez is gay.