If you had asked me to name my five favorite books the year I was graduating from college, one of the names on that list would have certainly been Richard Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory. Although I came to disagree with some of his perspectives on affirmative action when I was older, I was deeply impacted by his story of transitioning from his working class, close-knot Hispanic community into the world of academia. He describes himself as a young academic with the label “scholarship boy”. He wrote beautifully, and a little painfully, of himself as that scholarship boy:
They expect—they want—a student less changed by his schooling. If the scholarship boy, from a past so distant from the classroom, could remain in some basic way unchanged, he would be able to prove that it is possible for anyone to become educated without basically changing from the person one was. The scholarship boy does not straddle, cannot reconcile, the two great opposing cultures of his life. His success is unromantic and plain. He sits in the classroom and offers those sitting beside him no calming reassurance about their own lives. He sits in the seminar room—a man with brown skin, the son of working-class Mexican immigrant parents.”
The Scholarship Boy resonated to me because I was a scholarship child myself.
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