Rodriguez's Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez was published in 1981 to a great fanfare of publicity. Here was a young Mexican American who resisted being called a minority and condemned affirmative action programs even though he had benefited from them. He accepted the gulf that lay between his parents and himself as the price immigrants must pay to become assimilated into American culture. And he admitted that when he saw other Hispanic students and teachers on campus striving to maintain their ethnicity and culture by demanding such things as Chicano studies departments and minority literature classes, he was confused. Many critics denounced him as a traitor to his heritage, while others saw him as a clear-headed voice against the political excesses of the 1960s and 1970s.

Paul Zweig, reviewing Hunger of Memory in The New York Times Book Review, acknowledges that Rodriguez's "superb autobiographical...