Hunger of Memory: Chapter 5

When I sought admission to graduate schools, when I applied for fellowships and summer study grants, when I needed a teaching assistantship, my Spanish surname or the dark mark in the space indicating my race--‘check one’—nearly always got me whatever I asked for.

Fittingly, it falls to me, as someone who so awkwardly carried the label, to question it now, its juxtaposition of terms—minority, student.

Seeing the problem solely in racial terms (as a case of de facto segregation), they pressured universities and colleges to admit more black students and hire more black faculty members.

Administrators met their angriest critics’ demands by promoting any plausible Hispanic on hand.

In conversations with faculty members I began to worry the issue, only to be told that my unease was unfounded.

(The civil rights movement in the North depended upon an understanding of racism derived from the South.)

In the South, where racism had been legally enforced, all blacks suffered discrimination uniformly.

This was the crucial lesson that survived the turbulence in the South of the fifties and sixties.

The southern movement gave impetus initially to the civil rights drives of nonwhite Americans in the North.

Leaders of these groups described the oppression they suffered by analogy to that suffered by blacks.

It was not coincidence that the leadership of the southern civil rights movement was drawn mainly from a well-educated black middle class.

The policy of affirmative action, however, was never able to distinguish someone like me (a graduate student of English, ambitious for a college teaching career) from a slightly educated Mexican-American who lived in a barrio and worked as a menial laborer, never expecting a future improved.

Such was the foolish logic of this program of social reform: Because many Hispanics were absent from higher education, I became with my matriculation an exception, a numerical minority.

The movement that began so nobly in the South, in the North came to parody social reform.

And after the pool of ‘desirable’ minority students was depleted, more ‘provisional’ students were admitted.

Cruelly, callously, admissions committees agreed to overlook serious academic deficiency.

Teachers confronted with evidence of a student’s inadequate comprehension found it easiest to dispense a grade that moved a student toward meaningless graduation.

They insisted that the courses would alleviate the cultural anxiety of nonwhite students by permitting them to stay in touch with their home culture.

But it annoyed me to hear students on campus loudly talking in Spanish or thickening their surnames with rich baroque accents because I distrusted the implied assertion that their tongue proved their bond to the past, to the poor.

But then came the crisis: the domed silence; the dusty pages of books all around me; the days accumulating in lists of obsequious footnotes; the wandering doubts about the value of scholarship.

Then, changing the subject to Alex Haley’s Roots: That book tells us more about his difference from his illiterate, tribal ancestors than it does about his link to them.

(For me there were deferments and then, when I was vulnerable to the draft, a high lottery number.)

I wanted, however, something more from the new middle-class institution than either the decadent romanticism of the sixties or the careerism of the seventies.

We just looked at your dossier with extra care, and, frankly, we liked what we saw.

Once there were quotas to keep my parents out of schools like Yale.