Richard Rodriguez was born July 31, 1944 into a Mexican immigrant family in San Francisco, California. He spoke Spanish until he went to a Catholic school at age six. As a youth in Sacramento, California, he attended Don Bosco High School.

Rodriguez received a B.A. from Stanford University, an M.A. from Columbia University, was a Ph.D. candidate in English Renaissance literature at the University of California, Berkeley, and attended the Warburg Institute in London on a Fulbright fellowship. A noted prose stylist, Rodriguez has worked as a teacher, international journalist, and an educational consultant, in addition to writing, lecturing and appearing regularly on the PBS program, The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, for which he received the 1997 George Foster Peabody Award.

Rodriguez’s books include Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (1981), a collection of autobiographical essays; Mexico’s Children (1990); Days of Obligation: An

Argument With My Mexican Father (1992), which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize; and Brown: The Last Discovery of America. In addition, he has been published in The American Scholar, Change, College English, Harper's Magazine, Mother Jones, and Time.

Instead of pursuing a career in academia, Rodriguez suddenly decided to freelance write and pursue other temporary jobs. His first book, Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez, was published in 1981. It was an account of his journey from being a "socially disadvantaged child" to becoming a fully assimilated American, from the Spanish-speaking world of his family to the wider, presumably freer, public world of English. But the journey was not without costs: his American identity was only achieved after a painful separation from his past, his family, and his culture. "Americans like to talk about the importance of family values," says Rodriguez. "But America isn't a country of family values; Mexico is a country of family values. This is a country of people who leave home." While the book received widespread critical acclaim and won several literary awards, it also stirred resentment because of Rodriguez's strong stands against bilingual education and affirmative action.