A Single Life Reinvented: Personal Writing as the Negotiation of Identity in Richard Rodriguez’s Autobiographical Trilogy

Abstract

Through ongoing circulation and discussion, personal narratives are continually resituated among different social bodies and institutions. The cultural impact of these stories then extends well beyond their initial publication. They perpetually renegotiate both the authors’ individual identities as well as their communal alliances. As an example, this essay considers how Richard Rodriguez’s autobiographical trilogy and its critical reception shifted not only his own self-description but also the boundaries of Chicano, Mexican-American, and queer communities. Personal writing becomes not a mere reflection of self, but a becoming—a way to write ourselves into other worlds and communities.

Notes

1. ¹I owe a great deal to the peer reviewers from Rhetoric Review, Adela C. Licona and Jacqueline Rhodes, whose feedback proved invaluable. Thanks, always, to Debra Hawhee for her guidance, and to Ebony Coletu for helping me navigate the complicated terrain of personal writing.

2. ²Bruce Horner’s “Mixing It Up: The Personal in Public Discourse” describes the “commodified” personal narrative that is treated as “in itself producing a specific kind of work” (185–86), and Cynthia Franklin’s Academic Lives discusses the recent proliferation of memoirs that focus on feelings of marginalization without interrogating their social and institutional contexts.

3. ³See Crowley’s Toward a Civil Discourse and Gross’s The Secret History of Emotion.

4. ⁴McCooey’s review of Living Autobigraphically criticizes Eakin for avoiding the distinction between autobiographical thought and writing. In his latter chapters, Eakin encounters more complicated models of discursive power and confesses his own difficulty in accounting for the interaction between self and society (101).

5. ⁵Though Rodriguez’s 2013 Darling is his fourth autobiographical book, his first three are still frequently referenced as a “trilogy” respectively focused on class, ethnicity, and race. Though I do not have the space to discuss it here, I believe Darling fits with this same trend and adds yet another dimension to Rodriguez’s problematization of identity-based discourses: class, ethnicity, race, and spirituality.

6. ⁶Hunger of Memory is still one of the more widely anthologized memoirs in composition readers (R. Saldívar 26; Marquez 238). Excerpts from both Hunger and Days of Obligation also appear frequently in English Literature Advanced Placement exams.

7. ⁷For negative reviews of Hunger by self-identified Chicano/a critics, see R. Saldívar; Paredes; Alarcón; Moya.

8. ⁸In interviews, Rodriguez has described his later books as direct responses to his critics (Arias).

9. ⁹For example, Raymund A. Parades criticizes Hunger of Memory for ignoring the traditions out of which his experiences emerge, instead interpreting social and cultural phenomena “as functions of his own experience” (25). Other readings of Hunger as unreflective and assimilationist include Alarcón’s “The Tropology of Hunger,” Fachinger’s “Lost in Nostalgia,” and Moya’s account of Richard Rodriguez as a “neoconservative minority.”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

V. Jo Hsu

Jo Hsu is a doctoral candidate at Pennsylvania State University. Her research focuses on the role of personal writing in different cultural and institutional contexts. She also has an MFA in creative writing from Penn State, and her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Tinge, Kartika Review, Breakwater Review, Consequence Magazine, and others. She can be reached at [email protected].