Summary Of The Hunger Of Memory By Richard Rodriguez

When Richard Rodriguez entered first grade at Sacred Heart School in Sacramento, California, his English vocabulary consisted of barely fifty words. All his classmates were white. He kept quiet, listening to the sounds of middle-class American speech, and feeling alone. After school he would return home to the pleasing, soothing sounds of his family's Spanish.
When his English showed little sign of improvement, the nuns at his school asked Rodriguez's parents to speak more English at home. Eager to help their son, his mother and father complied. "Ahora, speak to us en inglés," they would say. Their effort to bring him into the linguistic mainstream had far-reaching results. Rodriguez went on to earn a degree in English at Stanford and one in philosophy at Columbia. He then pursued a doctorate in English Renaissance literature at Berkeley and spent a year in London on a Fulbright scholarship.
Though Rodriguez had his sights set on a career in academia, in 1976 he abruptly went his own way, supporting himself through freelance writing and various temporary jobs. He spent the next five years coming to terms with how education had irrevocably altered his life. His first book The Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez, published in 1982, was a searching 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. Some Mexican Americans called him pocho — traitor — accusing him of betraying himself and his people. Others called him a "coconut" — brown on the outside, white on the inside. He calls himself "a comic victim of two cultures."
Rodriguez explored the dilemmas of ethnicity and cultural identity more directly in his second book, Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father. "The best metaphor of America remains the dreadful metaphor [of] the Melting Pot," he wrote. The America that he described is a new cross-fertilizing culture, a culture of half-breeds, blurred boundaries, and bizarre extremes.
Rodriguez has been compared with such literary figures as Albert Camus and James Baldwin. He is an editor for the Pacific News Service in San Francisco and a contributing editor of Harper's and the Sunday "Opinion" section of the Los Angeles Times. His essays also appear on public television's NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.
I spent a morning with Rodriguez following a university lecture he gave in Santa Barbara, California. Our conversation began with the controversial subject of bilingual education — the practice of teaching immigrant children in the language of their families.
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Scott London: In Hunger of Memory, you suggest that supporters of bilingual education are misguided. You write, "What they don't seem to recognize is that, as a socially disadvantaged child, I considered Spanish to be a private language." In what way was Spanish a private language for you?
Richard Rodriguez: In some countries, of course, Spanish is the language spoken in public. But for many American children whose families speak Spanish at home, it becomes a private language. They use it to keep the English-speaking world at bay.
Bilingual-education advocates say it's important to teach a child in his or her family's language. I say you can't use family language in the classroom — the very nature of the classroom requires that you use language publicly. When the Irish nun said to me, "Speak your name loud and clear so that all the boys and girls can hear you," she was asking me to use language publicly, with strangers. That's the appropriate instruction for a teacher to give. If she were to say to me, "We are going to speak now in Spanish, just like you do at home. You can whisper anything you want to me, and I am going to call you by a nickname, just like your mother does," that would be inappropriate. Intimacy is not what classrooms are about.
London: Some would argue that students are stripped of their cultural identity by being instructed in the dominant language. Isn't there some truth to that?
Rodriguez: My grandmother would always tell me that I was hers, that I was Mexican. That was her role. It was not my teacher's role to tell me I was Mexican. It was my teacher's role to tell me I was an American. The notion that you go to a public institution in order to learn private information about yourself is absurd. We used to understand that when students went to universities, they would become cosmopolitan. They were leaving their neighborhoods. Now we have this idea that, not only do you go to first grade to learn your family's language, but you go to a university to learn about the person you were before you left home. So, rather than becoming multicultural, rather than becoming a person of several languages, rather than becoming confident in your knowledge of the world, you become just the opposite. You end up in college having to apologize for the fact that you no longer speak your native language.
I worry these days that Latinos in California speak neither Spanish nor English very well. They are in a kind of linguistic limbo between the two. They don't really have a language, and are, in some deep sense, homeless.
London: Many people feel that the call for diversity and multiculturalism is one reason the American educational system is in such dire trouble.
Rodriguez: It's no surprise that at the same time that American universities have engaged in a serious commitment to diversity, they have been thought-prisons. We are not talking about diversity in any real way. We are talking about brown, black, white versions of the same political ideology. It is very curious that the United States and Canada both assume that diversity means only race and ethnicity. They never assume it might mean more Nazis, or more Southern Baptists. That's diversity too, you know.
London: So how would you define diversity?
Rodriguez: For me, diversity is not a value. Diversity is what you find in Northern Ireland. Diversity is Beirut. Diversity is brother killing brother. Where diversity is shared — where I share with you my difference — that can be valuable. But the simple fact that we are unlike each other is a terrifying notion. I have often found myself in foreign settings where I became suddenly aware that I was not like the people around me. That, to me, is not a pleasant discovery.
London: You've said that it's tough in America to lead an intellectual life outside the universities. Yet you made a very conscious decision to leave academia.
Rodriguez: My decision was sparked by affirmative action. There was a point in my life when affirmative action would have meant something to me — when my family was working-class, and we were struggling. But very early in life I became part of the majority culture and now don't think of myself as a minority. Yet the university said I was one. Anybody who has met a real minority — in the economic sense, not the numerical sense — would understand how ridiculous it is to describe a young man who is already at the university, already well into his studies in Italian and English Renaissance literature, as a minority. Affirmative action ignores our society's real minorities — members of the disadvantaged classes, no matter what their race. We have this ludicrous bureaucratic sense that certain racial groups, regardless of class, are minorities. So what happens is those "minorities" at the very top of the ladder get chosen for everything.
London: Is that what happened to you?
Rodriguez: Well, when it came time for me to look for jobs, the jobs came looking for me. I had teaching offers from the best universities in the country. I was about to accept one from Yale when the whole thing collapsed on me.
London: What do you mean?
Rodriguez: I had all this anxiety about what it meant to be a minority. My professors — the same men who taught me the intricacies of language — just shied away from the issue. They didn't want to talk about it, other than to suggest I could be a "role model" to other Hispanics — when I went back to my barrio, I suppose. I came from a white middle class neighborhood. Was I expected to go back there and teach the woman next door about Renaissance sonnets? The embarrassing truth of the matter was that I was being chosen because Yale University had some peculiar idea about what my skin color or ethnicity signified. Who knows what Yale thought it was getting when it hired Richard Rodriguez? The people who offered me the job thought there was nothing wrong with that. I thought there was something very wrong. I still do. I think race-based affirmative action is crude and absolutely mistaken.
London: I noticed that some university students put up a poster outside the lecture hall where you spoke the other night. It said "Richard Rodriguez is a disgrace to the Chicano community."
Rodriguez: I sort of like that. I don't think writers should be convenient examples. I don't think we should make people feel settled. I don't try to be a gadfly, but I do think that real ideas are troublesome. There should be something about my work that leaves the reader unsettled. I intend that. The notion of the writer as a kind of sociological sample of a community is ludicrous. Even worse is the notion that writers should provide an example of how to live. Virginia Woolf ended her life by putting a rock in her sweater one day and walking into a lake. She is not a model of how I want to live my life. On the other hand, the bravery of her syntax, of her sentences, written during her deepest depression, is a kind of example for me. But I do not want to become Virginia Woolf. That is not why I read her.
London: What's wrong with being a role model?
Rodriguez: The popular idea of a role model implies that an adult's influence on a child is primarily occupational, and that all a black child needs is to see a black doctor, and then this child will think, "Oh, I can become a doctor too." I have a good black friend who is a doctor, but he didn't become a doctor because he saw other black men who were doctors. He became a doctor because his mother cleaned office buildings at night, and because she loved her children. She grew bowlegged from cleaning office buildings at night, and in the process she taught him something about courage and bravery and dedication to others. I became a writer not because my father was one — my father made false teeth for a living. I became a writer because the Irish nuns who educated me taught me something about bravery with their willingness to give so much to me.
London: There used to be a category for writers and thinkers and intellectuals — "the intelligentsia." But not anymore.
Rodriguez: No, I think the universities have co-opted the intellectual, by and large. But there is an emerging intellectual set coming out of Washington think tanks now. There are people who are leaving the universities and working for the government or in think tanks, simply looking for freedom. The university has become so stultified since the sixties. There is so much you can't do at the university. You can't say this, you can't do that, you can't think this, and so forth. In many ways, I'm free to range as widely as I do intellectually precisely because I'm not at a university. The tiresome Chicanos would be after me all the time. You know: "We saw your piece yesterday, and we didn't like what you said," or, "You didn't sound happy enough," or, "You didn't sound proud enough."
London: You've drawn similar responses from the gay community, I understand.
Rodriguez: Yes, I've recently gotten in trouble with certain gay activists because I'm not gay enough! I am a morose homosexual. I'm melancholy. Gay is the last adjective I would use to describe myself. The idea of being gay, like a little sparkler, never occurs to me. So if you ask me if I'm gay, I say no.
After the second chapter of Days of Obligation, which is about the death of a friend of mine from AIDS, was published in Harper's, I got this rather angry letter from a gay-and-lesbian group that was organizing a protest against the magazine. It was the same old problem: political groups have almost no sense of irony. For them, language has to say exactly what it means. "Why aren't you proud of being gay?" they wanted to know. "Why are you so dark? Why are you so morbid? Why are you so sad? Don't you realize, we're all okay? Let's celebrate that fact." But that is not what writers do. We don't celebrate being "okay." If you want to be okay, take an aspirin.
London: Do you consider yourself more Mexican or more American?
Rodriguez: In some ways I consider myself more Chinese, because I live in San Francisco, which is becoming a predominantly Asian city. I avoid falling into the black-and-white dialectic in which most of America still seems trapped. I have always recognized that, as an American, I am in relationship with other parts of the world; that I have to measure myself against the Pacific, against Asia. Having to think of myself in relationship to that horizon has liberated me from the black-and-white checkerboard.
London: Do you think of yourself as an Indian?
Rodriguez: Yes, although it was something I did not know about as a child. I had an Indian face, but I never saw it as Indian, in part because in America the Indian was dead. The Indian had been killed in cowboy movies, or was playing bingo in Oklahoma. Also, in my middle-class Mexican family indio was a bad word, one my parents shy away from to this day. That's one of the reasons, of course, why I always insist, in my bratty way, on saying, Soy indio! — "I am an Indian!" I think it's an important thing for a Mexican to say, especially now with the rebellion in Chiapas. Mexico has to confront her Indian face, and yet she refuses to do so. When you turn on Mexican television, it's like watching Swedish TV: everyone is blond.
London: That's true in the U.S. as well. What you see on television is a very distorted picture of American life.
Rodriguez: That's right. I don't deny people their fantasy life, but I do think that we desperately need to start realizing just how complicated our reality is in America. Sitcoms just don't show us that. I keep trying to tell people that Los Angeles is already the largest Indian city in the U.S., that there are Toltecs playing Little League baseball in Pasadena, Mayans making beds at the Marriott in Westwood, and Chichimecs driving buses in L.A. Los Angeles is a majority-Indian city. Of course, since we don't see the Indian as a living figure — having turned the Indian into a kind of mascot for the ecology movement, a symbol of prehistory — we can't see the Indian among us. But what really terrifies Americans right now is the prospect that the Indian is very much alive, that the Indian is having nine babies in Guatemala, and that those nine babies are headed this way. This is one reason why Americans hold on so dearly to the myth of the dead Indian.
London: At the same time, we turn our backs on real Indians.
Rodriguez: Yes. The myth of the dead Indian goes back to the Protestant settlement of the U.S. The Pilgrims wanted to start a new life in America. They wanted to believe that in some sense they had come to a new Eden and that they could leave history behind in Europe. So they convinced themselves that this land had no history, that this was "virgin" land. This made the Indians' presence inconvenient. The Indians had to be either killed, or herded into reservations, which were essentially concentration camps, and forgotten. Their history had to be absolutely obliterated so that we could believe that we were living on virgin soil.
London: Another place the Indian turns up today is in books about spirituality and native wisdom.
Rodriguez: Suddenly the land is haunted by all these dead Indians. There is this new fascination with the Southwest, with places like Santa Fe, New Mexico, where people come down from New York and Boston and dress up as Indians. When I go to Santa Fe, I find real Indians living there, but they are not involved in the earth worship that the American environmentalists are so taken by. Many of these Indians are interested, rather, in becoming Evangelical Christians.
London: In Days of Obligation you write about spending a week in the "twin cities" of Tijuana and San Diego. It occurs to me that, if you take the two cities as one, the combination offers a glimpse of what America might look like in another generation or two.
Rodriguez: Absolutely.
Of course, San Diego chooses not to regard the two cities as one. Talk about alter ego: Tijuana was created by the lust of San Diego. Everything that was illegal in San Diego was permitted in Tijuana. When boxing was illegal in San Diego, there were boxing matches in Tijuana; when gambling was illegal, there was always Tijuana. Mexicans would say, "We're not responsible for Tijuana; it's the Americans who created it." And there was some justification for that. But, in fact, the whore was a Mexican, the bartender a Mexican. Tijuana was this lovely meeting of Protestant hypocrisy with Catholic cynicism: the two cities went to bed and both denied it in the
morning.
To this day, you will see American teenagers going to Mexico on Saturday nights to get drunk. Mexico gives them permission. The old Southern Catholic tradition gives permission to the Northern Protestant culture to misbehave. But what has happened in the last generation is that Tijuana has become a new Third World capital — much to the chagrin of Mexico City, which is more and more aware of how little it controls Tijuana politically and culturally. In addition to whorehouses and discos, Tijuana now has Korean factories and Japanese industrialists and Central American refugees, and a new Mexican bourgeoisie that takes its lessons from cable television.
And then there is San Diego — this retirement village, with its prim petticoat, that doesn't want to get too near the water. San Diego worries about all the turds washing up on the lovely, pristine beaches of La Jolla. San Diego wishes Mexico would have fewer babies. And San Diego, like the rest of America, is growing middle-aged. The average age in the U.S. is now thirty-three, whereas Mexico gets younger and younger, retreats deeper and deeper into adolescence. Mexico is fifteen. Mexico is wearing a Hard Rock Cafe T-shirt and wandering around Tijuana looking for a job, for a date, for something to put on her face to take care of the acne.
It is not simply that these two cities are perched side by side at the edge of the Pacific; it is that adolescence sits next to middle age, and they don't know how to relate to each other. In a way, these two cities exist in different centuries. San Diego is a post-industrial city talking about settling down, slowing down, building clean industry. Tijuana is a preindustrial city talking about changing, moving forward, growing. Yet they form a single metropolitan area.
London: In the U.S. we always hear a lot of rhetoric about "restoring the American Dream." But the American Dream seems alive and well in Tijuana.
Rodriguez: Very much so. Maybe the American Dream is too rich for us now in the U.S. Maybe we're losing it because we are not like our Swedish grandmother who came across the plains, hacked down the trees, and took the Spanish words she encountered and made them hers. Now her great-great-grandchildren sit terrified, wondering what to do with all these Mexicans. The American Dream is an impossible affirmation of possibility. And maybe native-born Americans don't have it anymore. Maybe it has run through their fingers.
Those people who say that America is finite are some sense right. The environmental movement, for example, has a great wisdom to it: we need to protect, to preserve, to shelter as much as we need to develop. But I think this always has to be juxtaposed against the optimism of old, which is now represented in part by immigrants. I would like to see America achieve a kind of balance between optimism and tragedy, between possibility and skepticism.
London: Why do we always talk about race in this country strictly in terms of black and white?
Rodriguez: America has never had a very wide vocabulary for miscegenation. We say we like diversity, but we don't like the idea that our Hispanic neighbor is going to marry our daughter. America has nothing like the Spanish vocabulary for miscegenation. Mulatto, mestizo, Creole — these Spanish and French terms suggest, by their use, that miscegenation is a fact of life. America has only black and white. In eighteenth-century America, if you had any drop of African blood in you, you were black.
After the O.J. Simpson trial there was talk about how the country was splitting in two — one part black, one part white. It was ludicrous: typical gringo arrogance. It's as though whites and blacks can imagine America only in terms of each other. It's mostly white arrogance, in that it places whites always at the center of the racial equation. But lots of emerging racial tensions in California have nothing to do with whites: Filipinos and Samoans are fighting it out in San Francisco high schools. Merced is becoming majority Mexican and Cambodian. They may be fighting in gangs right now, but I bet they are also learning each other's language. Cultures, when they meet, influence one another, whether people like it or not. But Americans don't have any way of describing this secret that has been going on for more than two hundred years. The intermarriage of the Indian and the African in America, for example, has been constant and thorough. Colin Powell tells us in his autobiography that he is Scotch, Irish, African, Indian, and British, but all we hear is that he is African.
London: Census figures show that two-thirds of children who are the products of a union between a black and a white call themselves black.
Rodriguez: The Census Bureau is thinking of creating a new category because so many kids don't know how to describe themselves using the existing categories. I call these kids the "Keanu Reeves Generation," after the actor who has a Hawaiian father and a Welsh mother. Most American Hispanics don't belong to one race, either. I keep telling kids that, when filling out forms, they should put "yes" to everything — yes, I am Chinese; yes, I am African; yes, I am white; yes, I am a Pacific Islander; yes, yes, yes — just to befuddle the bureaucrats who think we live separately from one another.
London: There is a lot of talk today about the "hyphenating" of America. We no longer speak of ourselves as just Americans — now we're Italian-Americans, African-Americans, Mexican-Americans, even Anglo-Americans.
Rodriguez: The fact that we're all hyphenating our names suggests that we are afraid of being assimilated. I was talking on the BBC recently, and this woman introduced me as being "in favor of assimilation." I said, "I'm not in favor of assimilation." I am no more in favor of assimilation than I am in favor of the Pacific Ocean. Assimilation is not something to oppose or favor — it just happens.
London: Time magazine did a special issue on the global village a couple of years ago. The cover photo was a computer composite of different faces from around the world. It was a stunning picture — neither man nor woman, black nor white. This is the kind of assimilation that many worry about — the loss of things that make us separate and unique.
Rodriguez: Jose Vasconcelos, Mexico's great federalist and apologist, has coined a wonderful term, la raza cósmica, "the cosmic race," a new people having not one race but many in their blood.
But Mexicans who come to America today end up opposing assimilation. They say they are "holding on to their culture." To them, I say, "If you really wanted to hold on to your culture, you would be in favor of assimilation. You would be fearless about swallowing English and about becoming Americanized. You would be much more positive about the future, and much less afraid. That's what it means to be Mexican.
I'm constantly depressed by the Mexican gang members I meet in East L.A. who essentially live their lives inside five or six blocks. They are caught in some tiny ghetto of the mind that limits them to these five blocks because, they say, "I'm Mexican. I live here." And I say, "What do you mean you live here — five blocks? Your granny, your abualita, walked two thousand miles to get here. She violated borders, moved from one language to another, moved from a sixteenth-century village to a twenty-first-century city, and you live within five blocks? You don't know Mexico, man. You have trivialized Mexico. You are a fool about Mexico if you think that Mexico is five blocks. That is not Mexico; that is some crude Americanism you have absorbed."
London: You mentioned Canada a moment ago, and now Mexico, and it reminds me of a comparison someone made between the countries of North America and Sigmund Freud's three levels of mind: Canada represents the superego, or the higher self; the United States is akin to the ego, or the personality self; and Mexico, of course, is the id, or unconscious self.
Rodriguez: Yes, that's quite accurate. And isn't it curious how it corresponds to the topography of the body, too? Mexico is sex and Canada is mind. There is much about Canada that I find admirable — the treatment of immigrants, for example, particularly those from Central America during the recent civil wars there. But there is confusion too: I know of Croatian Nazis who are subsidized by the Canadian government to maintain their racist culture. There is Canada, trying to sustain diversity without knowing exactly what it's doing.
London: You have described Los Angeles as the "symbolic capital" of the United States.
Rodriguez: I find L.A. very interesting, partly because I think something new is forming there, but not in a moment of good fellowship as you might think from all this "diversity" claptrap. It's not as if we'll all go down to the Civic Center in our ethnic costumes and dance around.
After the L.A. riots in 1992, my sense was not that the city was dying, as the expert opinion had it, but that the city was being formed. What was dying was the idea that L.A. was a city of separate suburbs and freeway exits. What burned in that riot was the idea that the east side was far away from the west side. People went to bed that first night watching television, watching neighborhoods they had never seen before, streets they had never been on, and they were chagrined and horrified by what they saw. Sometime in the middle of the night they could hear the sirens and smell the smoke, and realized that the fire was coming toward them — that the street they lived on, the boulevard they used everyday, was in fact connected to a part of town where they had never been before, and that part of town was now a part of their lives.
That moment of fear, of terror, of sleeplessness, was not a death, but the birth of the idea that L.A. is a single city, a single metropolitan area.
What we have seen in the last three or four years is, if not optimistic, at least something very young and full of possibility. Women have been telling men forever that childbirth is painful, that life begins with a scream, not with little butterflies and little tweeting birds; life begins with a scream. In 1992, L.A. came to life with a scream.
London: If L.A. represents the future, does that mean we're looking at more riots?
Rodriguez: We're looking at complexity. We're looking at blond kids in Beverley Hills who can speak Spanish because they have been raised by Guatemalan nannies. We're looking at Evangelicals coming up from Latin America to convert the U.S. at the same time that L.A. movie stars are taking up Indian pantheism. We're looking at such enormous complexity and variety that it makes a mockery of "celebrating diversity." In the L.A. of the future, no one will need to say, "Let's celebrate diversity." Diversity is going to be a fundamental part of our lives. That's what it's going to mean to be modern.
If you want to live in Tennessee, God bless you, I wish for you a long life and starry evenings. But that is not where I want to live my life. I want to live my life in Carthage, in Athens. I want to live my life in Rome. I want to live my life in the center of the world. I want to live my life in Los Angeles.

[pic]
This interview was adapted from the radio series Insight & Outlook. It appeared in the August 1997 issue of The Sun magazine under the title "Crossing Borders." Portions of it also appeared in the December 1997 issue of The Witness magazine. In addition, it has been reprinted in several books, including The Writer's Presence, edited by Donald McQuade and Robert Atwan (Bedford/St. Martins Press, 2003), and, most recently, the Eleventh Edition of The Little, Brown Reader, edited by Marcia Stubbs, Sylvan Barnet and William E. Cain (forthcoming from Longman/Prentice Hall, 2009).
Copyright 2008 by Scott London. All rights reserved.
Richard Rodriguez On Bilinguel Education

Richard Rodriquez on Bilingual Education In “Memories of a Bilingual Childhood,” Richard Rodriquez argues against Bilingual Education with reflection to his own experiences. He states that “It is not possible for a child, any child, ever to use his family’s language in school. Not to understand this is to misunderstand the public uses of schooling and to trivialize the nature of intimate life.” Rodriquez believes that school is a place in which people develop their public identity. To merge “intimate” aspects with public ones creates no distinction between the two and in result, both could be lost. As a child, Rodriquez associated intimacy with language. As time passed, the realization was that the language itself was not the source for Rodriquez. He concluded, “to seek intimate sounds is to seek the company of intimates.” So therefore, intimacy does not rely solely on words but rather on the presence of people. In defining public and private identity, he reminds us that one cannot be public and remain private at the same time. It would be as if he used his “private” language randomly in public, than the intimacy would be lost forever. It is important to keep some aspects of your life separate, but according to Rodriquez, success depends on your fluency in the public language. Without knowing the dominant language, it is very hard to obtain a job, or even go to the supermarket. As long as Bilingual Education is allowed, minorities will be put at a disadvantage in society. Richard Rodriquez believes that bilingual education hinders minorities from developing a public identity and is disadvantageous to their success because it does not push them to use the dominant language.
Richard Rodriguez- Aria: Memoir of a Bilingual Childhood Research Papers
Richard Rodriguez has garnered significant media attention over the last twenty years by presenting the unique figure of a Hispanic person who is vocally against such policies as bilingual education and affirmative action. In “Aria: Memoir of a Bilingual Childhood,” Rodriguez recounts his own harsh initiation into the world of English speaking. Although this experience represented a traumatic break from the insulated comfort of his Spanish-speaking early childhood, Rodriguez now views his English education as a life-changing event, one that instilled in him the belief that he had something of value to add to the public discourse. In this essay, I will discuss the role that perseverance played in helping Rodriguez to form a public identity.
Perseverance is generally understood to mean unremitting persistence in adhering to a course of action, a belief, or a purpose, regardless of the obstacles or hindrances that exist. Also, the term has the connotation of being a commendable diligence in pursuing a particular end, rather than having the negative connotation of inflexibility or inability to change of words like ‘stubborn’ or ‘obdurate.’
Although perseverance is key in helping the young Rodriguez begin on his course of learning the English language, it is initially not his own perseverance that accounts for his realization of the social and psychological importance of knowing the primary language of the dominant culture. In fact, Rodriguez first met the efforts of his would-be teachers with a stubborn resolve to resist his immersion in the new language.
Rather than his own perseverance, it is the perseverance of the adult authority figures around him that finally breaks him out of his sentimental attachment to the Spanish language and suggests to him the advantages of being fluent in English. Initially, Rodriguez describes himself as being “angry” and feeling “grief” at the persistent efforts of his teachers to inculcate him into the English language, and he defies their efforts to connect with him for nearly an entire school year before his teachers take the step of taking further action. He describes his teachers as having an “unsentimental” view of their duty to teach English, and they are unrelenting in their attempts to engage Rodriguez in the class’s English conversation.
With the realization that Rodriguez is not going to respond to their attempts without further external motivation, the teachers pay a visit to the Rodriguez household, where they suggest that the family begin speaking some English in the home to encourage their children’s progress in the language. At this point, Rodriguez’s parents’ perseverance is highlighted. His parents immediately agree to forsake their native language, in which they are much more proficient and able to express themselves, in order to ensure “their children’s well-being.” Despite their own lack of fluency, they are committed to bestowing this advantage on their children, and they continue to do so throughout the span of time described in the essay, even when their children’s level of English proficiency far exceeds their own.
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Rodriguez took his stance against bilingual education, despite the shock he underwent the day his parents stopped speaking their native tongue in the home. They switched to English-only conversation for the sake of six year-old Richard, but they jolted the foundations of his young life. Before then, Richard knew he was at home, among trusted family members when the warm, welcome sounds of Spanish greeted him; and that he was out in public with the gringos when he was surrounded by the strange twangs and cadences of English. He suffered because he sensed that English was robbing him of the intimacy he had enjoyed with his family. It was many years before he understood that intimacy is not automatically communicated by a language, but rather that it is the result of the special relationship among those who are communicating. Regardless of the pain it caused him, he argues that learning English was a necessary prerequisite to his becoming a participating member of society, aware of his rights and responsibilities, and, paradoxically, of his individuality.
Individuality and the processes of change that define individuality are major themes in Rodriguez’ essays. He is extremely sensitive to the things that both define and separate us. His essay on “The Achievement of Desire” will strike a familiar chord with any of his readers whose formal education far surpasses that of their parents. At some point along the road to enlightenment, the talented student understands that the adult world that has been modeled for him by his parents is not the one in which he will live. The student regrets that he is leaving behind the family life that he cherishes, yet finds himself more and more frequently ashamed of his unlearned parents. From the parental standpoint, there is a mixture of pride and hurt: pride in the loved one whose education they have encouraged and supported; hurt by the loved one’s rejection of their world view.
For all of his interest in the process of change, Rodriguez respects the past. Perhaps this is because his dark skin and Indian features are built-in reminders of his ancestry. Or perhaps it is because Rodriguez seeks an understanding of things that is beyond skin deep. His “information superhighway” is a challenging trail that winds through forests and hills of events, ideas, memories, and experiences. Every turn in the trail offers a fresh view of past, future, and present.
Rodriguez spends much of the beginning of “Hunger of Memory” sharing with us the story of his early childhood education, and the isolation and struggles he dealt with throughout it. In adulthood he spends a great deal of time, during the composition of his dissertation, scouring books on educational theory, searching for any mention of students having followed similar paths with similar struggles. His search was rather unsuccessful, and the cases he did find were “infrequent and slight” (48). He finally found an example he identified with in Richard Hogart’s “The Uses of Literacy”. In his writings Hogart introduced Rodriguez to what he christened the Scholarship Boy. Rodriguez tells us that the Scholarship Boy is what he himself was, a “good student, troubled son” (50). Finding the mention of this Scholarship Boy was an important and meaningful event in Rodriguez’s life; it meant that he had some sort of camaraderie in regards to his early struggles. He describes this to us as an extremely type A personality, a high strung perfectionist. Like himself, the Scholarship boy would initially strive for a balance with his incredibly separated school and home lives. Slowly though, as he showed us in “Aria” the equilibrium between the two eventually dissolves, and the Scholarship boy eventually retracts into his schoolwork and lets go of his home life. He says that becoming this is a conscious decision, that “education is not an inevitable or natural step in growing up” (51). As he increases to embrace schoolwork he spends more and more time studying and as he expands and grows his family life stays relatively static. Being the definition of a Scholarship Boy has enabled him to move to an elevated economic strata and become an academic success. Academic knowledge ambition provided Rodriguez with a path to linear learning and reliable, predictable future. With the knowledge he was embracing he could both strive and achieve, and plan far ahead for the future; this contained nothing of the “spontaneity and nonrational ways of knowing” (49) that family life is supposed to provides us. As he embraced this life of the Scholarship Boy he did make attempts to “balance allegiances” or combine the two lives he had. He tried to share the knowledge he had been given at school with his parents back home, in an almost cruel manner. He would correct them and try to fix them with “”my teacher told us…”” (52). It bordered on not so much educating his family and sharing his learning as much as hurting them for forcing him to learn english and, in a way, become the Scholarship Boy. While the somewhat coerced adaption of the Americanized education system is mainly responsible for his successful career that he has today it also brought its share of negative consequences as well. Rodriguez utilized his ambition and grew and learned, yet when he came home he found that his family life had not necessarily changed with him. This had the unfortunate result of creating a chasm between his education and his culture. While Rodriguez may be against bilingual education, the consequences also must be considered. Is the price of a general loss of culture actually worth the rewards it reaps. While the answer to this difficult question is most likely different depending on the person and their situation; Rodriguez most definitely embraces the decision he made, and is content with his achievements. Hogart’s Scholarship Boy did not change Rodriguez; it only offered him the knowledge that he was not alone in his experiences. What is important is what the Scholarship Boy represents for Rodriguez, the ambitions he had for his education, as well as the choice he made to somewhat sacrifice his culture to achieve these ambitions. While the path and opinions that Rodriguez idolizes may not be ideal for a generalization of educational needs, it led to an exceptional outcome for Rodriguez in his successes.
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Hunger Of Memory

The universal "growing pains" that all children experience

in one form or another are easily recognized in Richard

Rodriguez's autobiographical excerpt from Hunger of Memory.

Rodriguez's childhood was particularly unique given the fact

that while he was born and raised in the United States, he

was strongly influenced in the ethnic environment of a

Spanish family. Although the reader is introduced to only a

short excerpt from the autobiography, he learns a great deal

about Rodriguez's family and his relationship to it, his

conflict of speaking English versus Spanish, and the

paradox that became evident as he used English as his

primary language. Furthermore, the reader learns that

Rodriguez's experiences have contributed to his beliefs that

a bilingual education is harmful.

First of all, Richard Rodriguez came from a family

where his parents had been born and raised in Mexico. After

moving and settling in America, Rodriguez's parents gave

birth to him and his siblings. Rodriguez refers many times

to "los gringos" , a colloquial, derogatory name charged

with "bitterness and distrust" with which his father

described English speaking Americans. This evidence made it

apparent to the reader that definite animosity existed

between his parents and the society around them.

Resultingly, assimilation into the American culture was not

a very comfortable process for his parents. Despite this,

the authors parents created a comfortable haven for him and

his siblings in their adopted country. The author shares

with the reader how close and tightly-knit his family was.

He describes in numerous instances the "special feeling of

closeness" that he shared with his family. He also mentions

the fact that he used to feel a "desperate, urgent, intense"

feeling of wanting to be home. Spending time at home,

speaking his "personal" language of Spanish,...

Side Effects Of English

The Side Effects of English

Aria: A Memoir of a Bilingual Childhood by Richard Rodriguez is an eye-opening essay that shows his readers a part of life many have never seen before. Rodriguez uses this piece to show how he fights through his childhood to understand English. Speaking clear English will help him to fit in to society. Rodriguez's tone is ever-changing as he progresses in school. He faces society while forfeiting his happy home life, to try to become a typical English speaking student.
Rodriguez's tone is constantly metamorphosing as he grows up. As a young child, Rodriguez finds comfort and safety in his noisy home full of Spanish sounds and music. Everyone uses their private language at home. Spanish, is his family's' intimate language that comforts Rodriguez by surrounding him in a web built by the family love and security which is conveyed using the Spanish language. "I recognize you as someone close, like no one outside. You belong with us. In the family. Ricardo" ( 225). The mood quickly changes with the nun's Saturday visit to his home. They inform Rodriguez's parents that it would be more beneficial for the children to speak only English in the home. Torn with a new since of confusion, his home is turned upside down. His sacred family language, now banished from the home, transforms his web into isolation from his parents. "There was a new silence in the home" ( 229). Rodriguez is resentful that it is quiet at the dinner table, or that he can't communicate with his parents about his day as clearly as before. He is heartbroken when he overhears his mother and father speaking Spanish together but suddenly stop when they see Rodriguez. This was lets him know that he is now an outsider, no longer included in their private language. This is one of the most saddest moments of his childhood.
Rodriguez begins to become more involved in his classroom by his new grasp on the English language. He shares fewer and fewer words...

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Already a Member? Logi Richard Rodriguez’s Aria is a personal memoir about bilingual education. Throughout his essay he represents the power of the individual to defeat the language barrier and he tells how he overcame this particular problem as a child. He is very happy to celebrate his new name because he feels that he is part of the American society as a public individual, he is no longer afraid to express himself in public and by loosing the language of home he began to feel that his childhood started to end. The acquisition of his new name was beneficial to Richard because it was the first step that made him realize he is indeed American and he is part of the American society. As a result of the language barrier he could not communicate with his teachers, hence he could not learn because his environment did not really foster an understanding of the English language. His words could not form complete thoughts and he stayed quiet all the time in school. Throughout this memoir Rodriguez tells us how he started to use the English language more and more. As soon as he started to speak the public language he learned that he had a public identity. When his name was pronounced “Rich-heard” instead of “Ri-card-o” he started to loose the strings that were attached to his other name. He always thought that outside the house there was public society; inside the house was private. Richard got nervous whenever he heard the sounds of the gringo what was foreign to him and reminded him that he was foreign in this big world. Whenever he returned home he heard voices talking in Spanish and he felt safe being around his family. After he started to use the English language at home, at school, with the neighbor kids and through the telephone he was no longer a socially disadvantaged child. He learned the public language of his country where he was a citizen. He wasn’t an alien in gringo society anymore. He became a public individual. “The social and political advantages I enjoy as a man result from the day that I came to believe that my name, indeed, is Rich-heard Road-ree-guess” (Rodriguez). With this statement he refers how beneficial the acquisition of his new name was. Richard was always very quiet in school but he became silent in class because he thought that Spanish was a private language and English was a public language and he didn’t believe that he has the right and the obligation to speak the public language. He was scared to speak up because he didn’t just have to express himself, but also he had to be understood by others. After the nuns were visiting Richard’s home his family started to speak English at home and he begun to feel that he was loosing the strong attachment to his private language. Everywhere he went in his home the family members were speaking in English. After he couldn’t hide behind his private language anymore the silence was broken in public language. One day in school he spoke out loud and got very confident because he wasn’t even thinking that it was strange that his classmates understood him. He wasn’t a socially disadvantaged child anymore and he started to feel that he belonged in public as a public individual. As Richard learned the English as a public language more and more he started to find himself in a different world. The world where he can represent himself. To gain this; to be the public individual as he is today he had to loose something private. His very last sentence says “the day I raised my hand in class and spoke loudly to an entire roomful of faces, my childhood started to end” (Rodriguez) His childhood was very painful because he was scared to speak up in public and he couldn’t express himself. As soon as he gained confidence in public his life changed. He became social with the neighbors and he started to use the telephone as a tool for communication. He started to loose hearing intimate family voices and began to hear words. He was no longer “Ri-card-o” and he was very happy to celebrate his new name “Rich-heard” and put his painful childhood behind him. The acquisition of a new name was very beneficial to Richard because it helped him to became a new person; a “member of the crowd” (Rodriguez) a part of the American society as an individual. He’s no longer a socially disadvantaged child because he can communicate through the public language, hence he can express himself and he can be understood by others in society. He also celebrates his new name because he is no longer a person who’s life is painful by not be able to use the public language when it is required to be able to represent himself. Richard was able to think himself as an American who has the right to speak and the obligation to belong in gringo society.