A Christmas Narrative Of Rodriguez By Richard Rodriguez

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Rodriguez completes his book with this Christmas narrative to show that trying to move forward without looking back can drive families apart. When Rodriguez was a child, he found intimacy in his family’s language. He segregated the people around him based on what language they were speaking, whether it was el gringo’s English or the intimacy of Spanish. He refused to speak English at first, because he “wrongly imagined that English was intrinsically a public language and Spanish an intrinsically private one,”(19) the reason being that his parents were extremely private people and that he assumed his parents’ language was what made them private. He only learned to speak English because his parents and teachers forced him to.
Once he “grew

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