리처드 로드리게스의 『기억의 굶주림』에 나타난 언어적 아비투스와 문화자본

Linguistic Habitus and Cultural Capital in Richard Rodriguez's Hunger of Memory

Richard Rodriguez is a Mexican-American author and intellectual who is famous for his strong opposition to affirmative action and bilingual education in the United States. His first book, Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez, is an autobiographical account of Rodriguez in which he learned English as a dominant language and then became a ‘middle-class American man’ from a ‘socially disadvantaged child,’ separating from a Spanish-speaking Mexican immigrant family. The purpose of this paper is to examine the function and significant influence of public education and to discuss what mechanism is working behind it in that education reproduces the value system of the dominant class. Based on the concepts of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, this paper will analyze the symbolic violence and influence of dominant language on the American middle class and Mexican immigrant working class, respectively. And it will explore how linguistic habitus acquired in public education can function as cultural capital and can be converted into social capital and economic capital.