Reflection on Richard Rodriguez

      Richard Rodriguez struggled his whole childhood growing up in a bilingual home. He would speak non-stop spanish at home with his family but when he was at his catholic school, he was expected to be able to speak English like the rest of the kids. His problem was that he didn't speak English like his fellow classmates. It wouldn't flow and it wasn't comfortable for him to speak English but being in the school he was in, he had to learn to be comfortable with it. In his essay, he talks about how things changed for him once teachers from his school made a visit to his home. At his home they asked his parent's if they could start speaking more spanish at home, which they did. From there, he got more and more familiar to speaking English that hearing people speak Spanish became strange to him. Richard said that learning to speak English better definitely helped him go farther and be more successful which was something that would of never happened if he stuck to only speaking spanish. Learning to speak more English than Spanish did push his family apart a great deal."The family's quiet was partly due to the fact that, as we children learned more and more English, we shared fewer and fewer words with our parents." (Rodriguez 37) I see his situation as a win one, lose one. 

      

     While I was reading this piece of writing, I couldn't help but relate this story to the struggles that my little sister is still dealing with. My sister is sixteen now but when we were all growing up, my grandmother lived with us and all she spoke was Portuguese. Not a single word of English. I can understand a few words but I was never close to being able to have a full on conversation with someone. On the other hand, my sister Bethany can. Along with my grandmother, her godparents also don't speak a word of English. Basically, she has been around the Portuguese language way more than me for example, so she can have a conversation with someone in another language and it is more comfortable for her. She can speak more English but for some reason, she has always been more comfortable speaking in Portuguese. This comes to be a struggle for her because she starts to stutter and get nervous whenever she has to talk to someone in English outside my family. She's always saying how she think she sounds funny and how she can't pronounce anything right. When we go to Dunkin Donuts, she just now ordered what she wanted  for herself about a week ago. She has trouble being comfortable talking English and that relates to what Richard Rodriguez went through because she's learning to adjust and always talk English because that's what everyone else around her is speaking. 

      

       I related Richard Rodriguez's struggle in life to the issues that were brought up in the SCWAAMP activity.(Grinner) The fact that Richard went to a catholic school relates right to the christianity aspect of the activity. Also, I notice the connect to White-ness and also Americanness. White-ness because throughout this entire piece, you can pick up on the fact that the English language was the center of attention and it's because we value it so much, we expect everyone to speak it. Americanness relates also in a similar way because we see the language of American's to be only English. 

Questions/Comments/Points to Share:

I was always told that I should pick up on another language because it could only help me later on in life with my career, etc. , but this article kind of makes me think that it's bad to learn anything else besides English because is it really useful?  

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