Commentary On The Essay 'Workers' By Richard Rodriguez

In his autobiographical essay, “Workers”, Richard Rodriguez tells about a summer in which he gets a job at a construction site in order to show that not all construction workers are poor and uneducated. Toward the conclusion of his essay, he explains that your skin color does not give people the right to judge others based on their skin color or their occupation selection. The speaker makes an obvious case people should not judge a book by its cover while also implying that skin tone should mean nothing. At the beginning of his essay, Rodriguez remembers a conversation he had with a friend when they were at Stanford. He uses quoted dialogue to explain how his friend and he would talk about the new job opening at a construction site. Rodriguez

Rodriguez believed that although he experienced a drastic physical changed, his mental state stayed the same. He states that, “After that summer, a great deal-and not very much really-changed in my life. The curse of physical shame was broken by the sun; I was no longer ashamed of my body. No longer would I deny myself the pleasing sensations of my maleness.” Richard Rodriguez has finally accepted himself as who he is after his hard work at his summer job. In his essay, he uses imagery to show who he became when he wrote, “The torso, the soccer player’s calves and thighs, the arms of the twenty-year-old I never was, I possess now in my thirties.” He urges the reader to indulge in their body work and to change their body for their personal likings and not for others. Rodriguez depicts a moment in life when he visited a school in the ghetto. He says that, “Ghetto girls mimic high-fashion models. Their dresses are of bold, forceful color; their figures elegant, long; the stance theatrical. Boys wear shirts that grip at their overdeveloped muscular bodies… Bad nutrition does not yet tell.” He states this to show how the youth are taking advantage of what they were born with and have yet to accept themselves without being flashy or trying to mimic others that they believe look better than