The writer Richard Rodriguez is the son of Mexican immigrants who pole-vaulted into the American middle-class. He grew up in Sacramento during the 1950s, was educated at Catholic schools, graduated Stanford and Columbia, and in the early 1970s set to work on a Ph.D. in English Renaissance literature at Berkeley. It was the dawn of affirmative action, and though, he wrote later, “I was not really more socially disadvantaged than the white graduate students in my classes,” affirmative-action officers directed generous grants and prestigious teaching posts his way. This seemed unfair to Rodriguez, and he said so. In a series of essays published in national magazines, he bravely protested. Most beneficiaries of affirmative action, he said, either were like him, and unneedful of the advantage, or they were unprepared for it, products of the inner city often left “illiterate in two languages” by bilingual education.

But the more Rodriguez protested, the better he was treated. Civic organizations and universities flew him around the country to be exhibited at fancy hotels and before groups of academics. Finally, his dissertation still unfinished, he was offered a professorship at Yale. This was too much. Again bravely, rather than accept the job, he quit academia altogether to write—yet more about himself. The charming and incisive book he published in 1982, Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez, wrenchingly described the isolation he felt from his less assimilated parents. He decided to write another largely autobiographical work. With regular assignments from