Excerpt from "Hunger of Memory"

The subtitle of the memoir is "The Education of Richard Rodriguez" because "it is education that has altered my life" and carried the author far into American society and away from his Mexican parents.

Here are all the word lists to support the reading of Grade 10 Unit 2's texts from SpringBoard's Common Core ELA series: Where I'm From, Funny in Farsi, Kaffir Boy, Pick One, If You Are What You Eat, Persepolis, poems about parents, Hunger of Memory, Thanksgiving: A Personal History, Time to Assert American Values, Rough Justice, On Civil Disobedience, On Surrender at Bear Paw Mountain, On Women's Right to Vote, Declaration of the Rights of the Child, School's Out for Summer, One Word of Truth, Hope, Despair, and Memory
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Full list of words from this list:

words only definitions & notes
  1. alienation
    separation, often resulting from hostility
    Mine was a childhood of intense family closeness. And extreme public alienation.
  2. assimilate
    become like one's environment
    Thirty years later I write this book as a middle-class American man. Assimilated.
  3. fellowship
    money granted for advanced study or research
    When I began this book, five years ago, a fellowship bought me a year of continuous silence in my San Francisco apartment.
  4. notorious
    known widely and usually unfavorably
    I have become notorious among certain leaders of America's Ethnic Left.
  5. podium
    a platform raised above the surrounding level
    A dainty white lady at the women's club luncheon approaches the podium after my speech to say, after all, wasn't it a shame that I wasn't able to 'use' my Spanish in school.
  6. reconciliation
    the reestablishment of cordial relations
    There are those in White America who would anoint me to play out for them some drama of ancestral reconciliation.
  7. indelible
    not able to be forgotten, removed, or erased
    Perhaps because I am marked by indelible color they easily suppose that I am unchanged by social mobility, that I can claim unbroken ties with my past.
  8. consolation
    the comfort you feel when soothed in times of disappointment
    But what consolation can that fact bring against the knowledge that my mother and father have never heard of Garcia Lorca or Garcia Marquez?
  9. endure
    undergo or be subjected to
    What preoccupies me is immediate: the separation I endure with my parents is loss.
  10. bewilder
    cause to be confused emotionally
    This is what matters to me: the story of the scholarship boy who returns home one summer from college to discover bewildering silence, facing his parents.
Created on Sat Oct 11 19:49:30 EDT 2014 (updated Mon Oct 13 15:07:16 EDT 2014)

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