SOURCE: Villanueva-Collado, Alfredo. “Growing Up Hispanic: Discourse and Ideology in Hunger of Memory and Family Installments.” Americas Review 16, nos. 3–4 (fall–winter 1988): 75–90.

In the following essay, Villanueva-Collado examines the concepts of cultural separation and cultural alienation as explored in Hunger of Memory and Edward Rivera's Family Installments: Memories of Growing Up Hispanic.

An analysis of Family Installments: Memories of Growing Up Hispanic, by the Neorican novelist Edward Rivera, and Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez by the Chicano writer Richard Rodriguez, reveals some surprising parallels. Not only do both writers deal with identity in terms of family, education, language and religion, but there is a conscious decision in each case to deal with biographical material. Rodriguez openly labels his narrative in the title. Rivera chooses to create a distance between himself and the text by adopting a first-person narrative persona, his protagonist Santos Malanguez, to whom the...