SOURCE: Shuter, Bill. “The Confessions of Richard Rodriguez.” Cross Currents 45, no. 1 (spring 1995): 95–105.

In the following essay, Shuter examines Rodriguez's descriptions of the formation of new cultures in Hunger of Memory and Days of Obligation.

Singular and somber, the voice of Richard Rodriguez has arrested the wandering attention of many viewers of the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour on the evenings when he is the guest commentator. (Whether it also arrests the attention of today's students I cannot be certain, but essays by Rodriguez appear in seven recent freshmen readers.) And just as firmly as it arrests attention, the voice resists characterization. Rodriguez can hardly be described as an “ethnic writer” in any usual sense of the phrase. His sense of his own ethnic identity is, as he repeatedly acknowledges, too conflicted, too uncertain. In fact, he is probably best known as a skeptic of much that has been undertaken in...