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Private or Public? In Aria: A Memoir of a Bilingual Childhood, the author Richard Rodriguez argues that since there is a lack of bilingual education taught in American schools, many students face a loss of intimacy to their native language, leaving them identifiable-less. He makes this claim by expressing that although native language can cause divisions in communication, it is the basis structure to a person. In his essay, Rodriguez, a Mexican, reasons that when he is learning the new language, English, he faces the difficulty to balance his own native customs with the new culture he’s absorbing, causing him to slowly forget his own Mexican traditions. Since Rodriguez and his family now live in the United States, he decided that he should
Bilingualism should be celebrated and encouraged, rather than stamped out. Anzaldúa recalls that a teacher told her, “If you want to be American, speak ‘American.’ If you don’t like it, go back to Mexico where you belong” (2947). The irony in her teacher’s statement is that Mexicans and Native Americans inhabited North America long before it was colonized; so, technically speaking, Anzaldúa belonged in America more than her teacher did.
Aria: A Memoir of a Bilingual Childhood by Richard Rodriguez is an essay that shows his readers a part of life that many have never experienced. Rodriguez uses this essay to show how he fights through his childhood to understand English. Speaking clear English will help him to fit in to society. He faces society while forfeiting his happy home life, to try to become a typical English-speaking student.
Immigrants have helped shape American identity by their languages they speak from their home country. Richard Rodriguez essay “Blaxicans and Other Reinvented Americans” reveals Rodriguez’s attitudes towards race and ethnicity as they relate to make people know what culture is really identified a person rather than their race. For example, in the essay, it states that Richard Rodriguez “ that he is Chinese, and this is because he lives in a Chinese City and because he wants to be Chinese. But I have lived in a Chinese City for so long that my eye has taken on the palette, has come to prefer lime greens and rose reds and all the inventions of this Chinese Mediterranean. (lines 163-171)”. Although Rodriquez states”he is Chinese”, what he actually
Throughout Richards early childhood development he quickly understood that in order to succeed in America he would have to learn to confidently speak in English. Richard is Hispanic American and although he was born in America, Spanish was the only language that he was exposed to as a young child. He grew up in a home where Spanish flowed freely, but he soon realized outside of his home the language that he primarily knew was foreign. His parents spoke fluent Spanish along with all of his relatives. The brief encounters he experienced of his parents speaking English were only in public places and the proficiency was very poor. Rodriguez’s home was as a safety net for him and his Spanish speaking family with they are his only real connections to the outside world. It wasn’t until Richards encounter with his teachers that he and his family was heavily impressed on the importance of developing a public language. After the encouragement of the visit home from a teacher as a family
Firstly, in the author’s childhood, he felt ashamed of his parents poor English. To support this experience, Rodriguez shows his embarrassment by saying, “I tried not to hear anymore… I
(Rodriguez 18). All of this starts when he begins reading books about his culture and important figures like, Pedro Albizu Campos, this makes his culture feeling increased, not wanting to follow the American standards. He is also discriminated against by his teachers and others at school due to his feelings of not participating in the national anthem “Some smart-ass”. I stuck him in the corner. Thinks he can pull that shit.
Richard Rodriguez offers an alternate yet equally profound truth: While our heritage and culture may remain forever tied to and expressed in our native or "home" language, only through the dominant language of our country (English in most cases) can we achieve a place in society that gives us a feeling that we belong amongst everyone else. The only way we can truly become a part of our community and fit in is to dominate the current spoken language. In the United States, the dominant language is Standard English. In this excerpt from "Aria," a chapter in his autobiography entitled "Hunger of Memory": The Education of Richard Rodriguez, Rodriguez discusses public and private languages, and agrees that his achievements in English separated him from his Spanish family and culture but also brought him "the belief, the calming assurance that [he] belonged in public." We as human beings want to feel we belong. We search for that place in society where we are most comfortable all our lives. One should consider the benefits of mastering the dominant language of the society they live in, but should also take into account the harm of taking your native language for granted. I will attempt to explore both of these considerations and examine Rodriguez place in life now, by stating the facts of who is now by the childhood decisions that were made.
It was almost like he was learning two languages at once. This made it a bit more difficult for him and his parents to understand what the whole schooling/ education system was. Rodriguez spent a lot of his time reading while Hoggart says, “reading is a woman’s game.” (PDF). By him saying this, he is implying that men are more likely and more accustomed to do activities outside, while women are supposed to stay inside and read. Rodriguez’s parents did not understand this whole concept because of their lack of the language. This changed Rodriguez’s life in a very big and impactful way. The education helped Rodriguez in a weird way with him saying that “ If, because of my schooling, I had grown culturally separated from my parents, my education finally had given me ways of speaking and caring about that fact.” (355). This means that he had grown distant to his parent from being involved with his parents through the whole education process. It took time away from them being together, taught him different cultures, and made him make decision in which his parents were not fond
My parents decided to immigrate to the United States when I was six years of age. As we established ourselves in the United States, my first language was only Spanish. Spanish was the language that I was taught at home, and it was the only language to be spoken at home. Rodriguez describes when he first entered his classroom where he was introduced to a formal English-speaking context, writing that, ?I remember to start with that day in Sacramento-a California now nearly thirty years past-when I first entered a classroom, able to understa...
Rodriguez views the same as a public and private language. He explains that the term “private” relates to Spanish language, while the term “public” is the kind of English language he speaks outside home. As he writes “… I wrongly imagined that English was intrinsically a public language and Spanish an intrinsically private one…” (513). In addition, Rodriguez’s reference to the English language as a gringo sound gives an impression of a child’s resentment towards said language. The term gringo in Spanish means los gringos which is a “derogatory term for English-speaking Americans” (512). When Rodriguez parents stopped communicating at home in Spanish, the laughter at home faded along with his private language. This further supports Rodriguez’s statement that “… as we learned more and more English, we shared fewer and fewer words with our parents” (515). Thus the end of a once full of laughter home, yet the beginning of Rodriguez’s mastery of the English language. Similar to Tan’s experience, the writer’s rebellious nature challenged her critics by proving that Asian’s skills are not limited to Math and Science. Thus, the decision behind to shift from pre-med to English major. As Tan writes, “I happen to be rebellious in nature and enjoy the challenge of disproving assumptions made about me” (510). Hence Tan’s strong conviction to resist the convention of
In his autobiography, “Hunger of Memory”, Richard Rodriguez works on the theory that there are public and private languages. As he goes through his life story, we get to see how he chooses between them and how he decided to let go of his original language and culture. With “Hunger of Memory”, Richard Rodriguez tries to explain and justify the way he disdained speaking Spanish as a child. In his memoir, Rodriguez lays out the argument that assimilating into mainstream American culture, giving up his Spanish language and his Mexican culture, allowed him to become successful in life. Rodriguez talks about how language (Spanish in this case) is related to culture. He seems to have made a conscious decision to do away with both language and culture, trading them for an American identity that he values more than his native heritage.
Richard Rodriguez was born in a Mexican immigrant family, the first years of his life he only spoke Spanish; it wasn’t until he started attending a Roman Catholic school that he was introduced to the English language. In his autobiography, Rodriguez describes his journey through education in California as a Mexican American Student with immigrant parents; he had difficulties with both languages, he found himself caught up in between his private and public life. His culture at home involved the most appreciated things in his life such as his family and Spanish, the home language. At the beginning of his education Richard learned to separate his privacy from his everyday life at school; he valued education and spent most of his time reading and studying with the nuns at his school in order to learn English. He felt really close to his family until one day three nuns from school visited their home and told his parents that it would be better if their children spoke English at home in order for them to advance in their education; from that day his parents decided that they would practice their English at all times and that changed things for Richard, he became embarrassed at his parents lack of education and it broke the relationship and comfort he had at home.
From my experience, bilingual education was a disadvantage during my childhood. At the age of twelve, I was introduced into a bilingual classroom for the first time. The crowded classroom was a combination of seventh and eighth grade Spanish-speaking students, who ranged from the ages of twelve to fifteen. The idea of bilingual education was to help students who weren’t fluent in the English language. The main focus of bilingual education was to teach English and, at the same time, teach a very basic knowledge of the core curriculum subjects: Mathematics, Social Sciences, and Natural Sciences. Unfortunately, bilingual education had academic, psychological, and social disadvantages for me.
Bilingual programs build on students’ prior education, what W. E. Lambert (1975) called an ‘additive’ bilingual education. On the other hand, ‘subtractive’ bilingual education is when one language is substituted for another, as found in assimilative approaches, resulting in the students struggling to become literate in either language (Nieto). In 1998, achievement test scores from San Francisco and San Jose showed that students who completed a bilingual education generally performed better than native English-speaking children in reading, math, language, and spelling (Asimov, 1998). Bilingual programs also motivate students to remain in school and decrease the dropout rate, they make school more meaningful, and the generally make the students’ school experience more enjoyable (Nieto). Bilingual education can strengthen relationships between peers and family members, resulting in more communication at home than there would be if the student was only taught in English and lost their native language (Nieto). Native-language use at home can increase family relationships which has shown to lower rates of substance use, juvenile delinquency, and alcohol use (August, et al). Bilingual approaches improve cognitive flexibility. Students that are learning in both their native language and in English not only learn the English language, but they become more adaptable and are more
Language is one of the most beautiful techniques that humans have developed to allow us to communicate among each other; we can share and understand our and others’ feelings, opinions, and ideas. Because technologies, schools, and everything else is complex, we have made language difficult with the different language created. With lots of language around the world, it is difficult to share, understand, and connect each other feelings, opinions, and ideas. Bilingual students can break this barrier with their culture and schools. Bilingualism breaks the language barrier and opens more opportunities, different views, and better relationship. Culture, history, and language are important because it is a description that separates individuals from one another. The world needs to encourage students to learn more languages to become open-minded and respectful of others’ culture.