Aria: Billingual CHildhood

As a son of Mexican American immigrants, Richard Rodriguez recounts the story of his childhood and his struggle to assimilate into American culture. In Aria: A memoir of a Bilingual Childhood, Rodriguez always felt like an outcast whenever he set foot outside of his house. As a young child, he exclusively spoke Spanish to members of his household and tried his best to learn and speak English in the real world. He “regarded Spanish as a private language. It was a ghetto language that deepened and strengthened [his] feeling of public separateness” (Rodriguez 505) because it identified him as a member of his family and it served as a link to his own Mexican heritage. By speaking Spanish, he communicates a certain level of intimacy with all of his relatives. However, as his narrative progresses, he finds himself slowly breaking away from that intimacy as he begins to speak more English, both by force and social pressure. Teachers scolded him if he spoke anything but English and his peers Americanized his name into Richard (rather than calling him Ricardo.) He began to feel like a traitor by mastering this “public language” when his relatives began treating him differently. His bilingual childhood was an enormous adversity that Rodriguez had to overcome. Language and toys both serve a similar role in Aria: A memoir of a Bilingual Childhood and Toys respectively. I believe that they both act as a kind of catalyst that helps children mature and see the real world faster. In Barthes’ essay Toys, he argues that current French toys may stifle a child’s creativity by subtly infiltrating their minds with premade ideas of what society is like and it discourages creativity. In his essay, he also uses an interesting technique and depicts the timeline of a human life. His introductory paragraph heavily conveys a picture of infantry Yu, 2 and his conclusive paragraph heavily conveys a picture of death (as argued in Deepening Exercise 3.) Toys have been the cause