Summary of the Book Hunger of Memory and Response to It.

In a world where we can’t agree on the simplest things from the correct pronunciation of GIF to the best music or even the next president of the United States, it’s hard to believe we can ever just get along. However, has anyone ever thought that we weren’t meant to agree and live in harmony? Because our races and ethnicities make us unique, we don’t trust each other, and we all have different points of view, we can never live in harmony as “one human race”.

In Hunger of Memory, Richard Rodriguez situates his individual experiences with education in such a way as to expose what he sees as the fallacious logic behind bilingual education and affirmative action. He uses arguments to propagate the systematic problems with such programs. His autobiography explains in great detail the entangling problems all American children face by instituting bilingual programs and affirmative action endorsements.

Rodriguez lost all connection with his family. He was unable to converse with them he had grown so far apart. Rodriguez felt “embarrassed” to embrace his personal background. He spoke of when his parents came to school and could not not speak English fluently and how it made him embarrassed because he did not want to profess his ethical background.

In the excerpt from The Hunger of Memory Rodriguez faced adversity early on in his life. As a little kid he described himself to be a “socially disadvantaged” child (Rodriguez 1). This was due to the “...extreme public alienation” he and his family faced (Rodriguez 1). Being Native American in today's society makes one stick out like a sore thumb. Discrimination is still very much alive today. Assimilating what it’s like to be any race other than caucasian is a task that we are too inadequate to imagine. Following a passion will in some cases require losing things in return. Instead of pursuing a regular job Rodriguez stuck to writing. When he began this book the “...words wouldn’t come” (Rodriguez 2). The money ran dry and he was “...forced to take temporary jobs” (Rodriguez 2). This sacrifice proved to be nothing to him as writing was his life. His choice to persevere subsequently led him to towns such New York, Los Angeles, and even a cocktail party in Bel Air! With all this being said his works eventually led to non-existent relationship with his parents. This really affects Rodriguez emotionally as he says “the separation I endure with my parents is a loss” (Rodriguez 2). His parents ridiculed his decisions and that ultimately led to the absent relationship.

Memory is used as a powerful conduit into the past; childhood experiences held in the subconscious illuminate an adult’s perception. Harwood uses tense shifts throughout her poetry to emphasise and indicate the interweaving and connection the past and the present hold. By allowing this examination of the childhood memories, Harwood identifies that their significance is that of an everlasting memory that will dominate over time’s continuity and the inevitability of death.

Hunger of Memory is an autobiography of the writer Richard Rodríguez and his transition from youth to manhood told through a series of recollected stories. The premise of his writing was centered mainly on his struggle to maintain both his Mexican heritage and closeness to his Spanish-speaking family, while at the same time being assimilated into American culture and obtaining an advanced education. Within the book Richard Rodríguez illustrates his contempt for affirmative action and bilingual education, two practices that had directly burdened his life while growing up. One of his main conflicts was grounded in his own family unintentionally being pulled away from him by

Memory is a set of cognitive processes that allow us to remember past information (retrospective memory) and future obligations (prospective memory) so we can navigate our lives. The strength of our memory can be influenced by the connections we make through different cognitive faculties as well as by the amount of time we spend devoting to learning specific material across different points in time. New memories are created every time we remember specific event, which results in retrospective memories changing over time. Memory recall can be affected retrospectively such as seeing increased recall in the presence of contextual cues or false recall of information following leading questions. Memory also includes the process

There exists in the majority of people a schism between their public lives and their private lives. People should desire to have their public selves match their private selves as closely as possible. A rift between the two causes nothing but pain and suffering for everyone around those people and places a heavy burden on the spirit of the ones responsible. Trust and honesty are essential to our society and the truth should be complimentary, not earned. Richard Rodriguez, a writer and public speaker, expertly illustrates his own experience with this type of double life in his autobiography, Hunger of Memory.

During the pinnacle of his bittersweet life, Rodriguez eventually realized that he had sacrificed one of the biggest things in life to do what is best for himself, his family. Being from a different

Do you think an experience can be so traumatizing that the brain pushes it into an inaccessible corner of the unconscious to later recall it years later? This concept on the mind is expressed as repressed memories. These are types of memories that are blocked unconsciously due to the high levels of stress experienced during the event. This theory on memories are based on the idea that even though the memory is repressed it is still affecting the individual in their conscious aspects of life. Repressed memories are often associated with childhood sexual abuse. This relies on the idea that these memories of sexual abuse can be brought up either in therapy or by the victim themselves years after the abuse. The concept of repressed memories has been a huge controversy in psychology from the beginning of time. Many people believe that repressed memories in regards to childhood sexual abuse are possible while others believe they can’t be as accurate as some people believe.

The two concepts that I resonated with are Memory and the Psychodynamic theory. Starting with the Psychodynamic theory is an approach to psychology that studies the psychological forces underlying human behavior, feelings, and emotions, and how they may relate to early childhood experience. This theory is most closely associated with the work of Sigmund Freud, and with psychoanalysis, a type of psychotherapy that attempts to explore the patient’s unconscious thoughts and emotions so that the person is better able to understand him or herself. The second one is Memory; understanding how memory works will help you improves your memory. Which is an essential key to attaining knowledge. Memory is one of the important cognitive processes. Memory involves remembering and forgetting. I chose the two concepts because throughout the class they stood out to the most. Understanding the conscious, subconscious mind and also memory. I’m interested in understanding the human behavior.

Although visual art is looked upon differently by all, everyone has a either a favorite piece or at least something that catches their eye. Personally, I don’t have a piece of art that I would label my absolute favorite, but during a Spanish research project found that Salvador Dali’s work really stood out. “The Persistence of Memory” painted in 1931 by Dali, a highly renowned surrealist painter, is among the most interesting works I have ever seen. Even though the painting itself is rather simple in quality at first glance, what Dali’s must have been thinking about while creating this work is strikingly complex. The painting is attractive to me because it deals with the concept of time, something

Memory is defined as "the persistence of learning over time through the storage and retrieval of information." Our memory can be compared to a computer's information processing system. To remember an event we need to get information into our brain which is encoding, store the information and then be able to retrieve it. The three-stage processing model of Richard Atkinson and Richard Shiffrin suggests that we record information that we want to remember first as a fleeting sensory memory and then it is processed into a short term memory bin where we encode it ( pay attention to encode important or novel stimuli) for long-term memory and later retrieval. The premise for the three step process is that we are unable to focus on too much

Memory makes us. It is, to an extent, a collection of unique and personal experiences that we, as individuals, have amassed over our lifetime. It is what connects us to our past and what shapes our present and the future. If we are unable remember the what, when, where, and who of our everyday lives, our level of functioning would be greatly impacted. Memory is defined as or recognized as the “sum or total of what we remember.” Memory provides us the ability to learn and adjust to or from prior experiences. In addition, memory or our ability to remember plays an integral role in the building and sustaining of relationships. Additionally, memory is also a process; it is how we internalize and store our external environment and experiences. It entails the capacity to remember past experiences, and the process of recalling previous experiences, information, impressions, habits and skills to awareness. It is the storage of materials learned and/or retained from our experiences. This fact is demonstrated by the modification, adjustment and/or adaptation of structure or behavior. Furthermore, we as individuals, envision thoughts and ideas of the present through short-term memory, or in our working memory, we warehouse past experiences and learned values in long-term memory, also referred to as episodic or semantic memory. Most importantly, memory is malleable and it is intimately linked to our sense of identity and where we believe we belong in the world.

Also it ties into how Rodriguez begins telling the audience about himself, “as a middle aged man with a boy’s secret to tell, and how he is sitting alone in his car, in front of his parent’s house” (Rodriguez 221). He is tempted to tell his parents about his lifestyle that he has hid from them, but suddenly he become very concerned about the way his parents may feel about his lifestyle, and should still go follow through on telling his parents. Similarly, Kingsolver is feeling somewhat the same but in different way , when she states, “Even though you are statistically no oddity, it’s probably been suggested to you in a hundred ways that yours isn’t exactly a real family, but an imposter family, a harbinger of cultural ruin, a slapdash substitute something like counterfeit money (Kingsolver 138). She explains how people see divorce, that generally people look at families that have gone through divorced are broken families and just plain insane like its taboo or something, because the mother and father are no longer married and it seems that the family has been ruined. Also as if the family is fake, but trying to maintain to be a “real family”. Both of these quotes reveal how society looks at certain situations that are going on in the midst of families and how some people choose to live as a certain way than society has made it out be. Rodriguez maybe facing rejection because of his lifestyle, along while Kingsolver is facing the same