Instead of pursuing a career in academia, Rodriguez suddenly decided to write freelance and take other temporary jobs. Rodriguez worked as a contributing editor to newspapers and magazines, including ''
Harper's and the Los Angeles Times.'' His first book,
Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez, was published in 1982 and won the
Christopher Award. 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. However, the journey was not without costs: his American identity was achieved only after a painful separation from his past, his family, and his culture. "Americans like to talk about the importance of
family values," said 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. Some Mexican Americans called him
pocho, Americanized Mexican, accusing him of betraying himself and his people. Others called him a "coconut," brown on the outside, but white on the inside. He calls himself "a comic victim of two cultures." Rodriguez has worked as a
teacher, international
journalist, and educational consultant. His work has been published in
Mother Jones and
Time. He has appeared regularly on the
Public Broadcasting Service show,
NewsHour. Rodriguez's visual essays,
Richard Rodriguez Essays, on "The News Hour with Jim Lehrer" earned Rodriguez a
Peabody Award in
1997. Rodriguez's most recent book,
Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography (2013), explores the important symbolism of the desert in Judaism, Islam and Christianity. In an interview before the book came out, Rodriguez reported that he was "interested in the fact that three great monotheistic religions were experienced within this ecology." A sample of the project appeared in ''Harper's Magazine'' in January 2008. In his essay, "The God of the Desert: Jerusalem and the Ecology of Monotheism," Rodriguez portrays the desert as a paradoxical temple, its emptiness the requisite for God's elusive presence. == Personal life ==