Hunger of Memory: Prologue–Chapter 1

One time my audience is a convention of university administrators; another time high school teachers of English; another time a women’s alumnae group.

I have argued particularly against two government programs—affirmative action and bilingual education.

I have become notorious among certain leaders of America’s Ethnic Left.

I am considered a dupe, an ass, the fool—Tom Brown, the brown Uncle Tom, interpreting the writing on the wall to a bunch of cigar-smoking pharaohs.

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.

Mistaken, the gullible reader will—in sympathy or in anger—take it that I intend to model my life as the typical Hispanic-American life.

Finally, my history deserves public notice as no more than this: a parable for the life of its reader.

It was more troubling for me to hear my parents speak in public: their high-whining vowels and guttural consonants; their sentences that got stuck with ‘eh’ and ‘ah’ sounds; the confused syntax; the hesitant rhythm of sounds so different from the way gringos spoke.

The very first chance that I got, I evaded his grasp and ran on ahead into the dark, skipping with feigned boyish exuberance.

It was thus a ghetto Spanish that I heard and I spoke.

Silent, waiting for the bell to sound, I remained dazed, diffident, afraid.

From the doorway of another room, spying the visitors, I noted the incongruity—the clash of two worlds, the faces and voices of school intruding upon the familiar setting of home.

In an instant, they agreed to give up the language (the sounds) that had revealed and accentuated our family’s closeness.

At the end of a day, I was often bemused, always relieved, to realize how ‘silent,’ though crowded with words, my day in public had been.

Mother and Father; Ma, Papa, Pa, Dad, Pop (how I hated the all-American sound of that last word especially)—all these terms I felt were unsuitable, not really terms of address for my parents.

One night his children and even his wife helplessly giggled at his garbled English pronunciation of the Catholic Grace before Meals.

Another time, standing beside my mother in the visiting room of a Carmelite convent, before the dense screen which rendered the nuns shadowy figures, I heard several Spanish-speaking nuns—their busy, singsong overlapping voices—assure us that yes, yes, we were remembered, all our family was remembered in their prayers.

(Bilingual schooling was popularized in the seventies, that decade when middle-class ethnics began to resist the process of assimilation—the American melting pot.)

The fact is that only in private—with intimates—is separateness from the crowd a prerequisite for individuality.

Yet despite the anonymity of the crowd and despite the fact that the individuality I achieve in public is often tenuous—because it depends on my being one in a crowd—I celebrate the day I acquired my new name.

Such moments were never as raucous with sound as past times had been when we had had ‘private’ Spanish to use.

Their argument goes something like this: Children permitted to use their family language in school will not be so alienated and will be better able to match the progress of English-speaking children in the crucial first months of instruction.

In earlier decades, persons newly successful and ambitious for social mobility similarly seized upon certain ‘family words.’

I listen with excitement as the words yield their enormous power to sound—though the words are never totally obliterated.

As public artifact, the poem can never duplicate intimate sound.