...Richard Rodriguez Richard Rodriguez is an essayist, writer and journalist. He was born on July 31, 1944 in Sacramento, California, United States. He went to a Catholic school named Christian Brothers High School at age six, where he graduated from. He studied in a lot of universities. Rodriguez got a B.A. from Stanford University, an M.A. from Columbia University. A noted prose stylist, Rodriguez has worked as a teacher, international journalist, and educational consultant and has appeared regularly on the PBS show, NewsHour. He is known for opposition to bilingual education and affirmative action. He wrote a lot of books like: Days of Obligation: An Argument With My Mexican Father, Brown: The Last Discovery of America and Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez which made him popular. Harper's Magazine, Mother Jones, and Time published his works. Rodriguez is a Roman Catholic and homosexual. He came out in his book of essays Days of Obligation. This caused some readers and critics, especially Latinos, to be less critical of his ideas. He is married and his wife’s name is Jim. He has received several awards like Fulbright Fellowship, 1972-73, National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship, 1976-77, and Frankel Medal, Commonwealth Club gold medal, 1982 and etc. At present, Rodriguez is writing a book on Judaism, Islam, Christianity, and the desert. Rodriguez reports that he is "interested in the fact that three great monotheistic religions were experienced...
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...The academic career of Richard Rodriguez can be looked at as a very textbook definition of the experiences a student may encounter in their path through the academic system. However, what Rodriguez’s encounters in school cannot be defined as a universal application for all students. Many children begin reading and writing with a similar passion that Rodriguez had, but many students have different experiences that shape their own unique story. Richard Rodriguez did not begin school like any normal student in a predominately English speaking region. Rodriguez grew up in a Spanish-speaking household, so the initial start of school, reading and writing in an unfamiliar language would have been challenging. Once Rodriguez overcame the language barrier, his love for reading began to blossom. At the young ages of either eight or nine...
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...I found that Richard Rodriguez's argumentative essay was compelling and persuading. The structure of his personal narrative drew my attention in how he would express his emotions in such rhetoric frases. “In the early 1970s, Nixon instructed the Office of Management and Budget to identify the major racial and ethnic groups in the United States. OMB came up with five major ethnic or racial groups.” His claim in his essay is that all the groupings of people only exist in this country but do not really split all races apart how President Nixon labeled them. “But I was reinvented by President Richard Nixon.” Rodriguez stated that President Nixon reinvented him because President Nixon was the one categorizing all races into the races we have today. “For “Hispanic” is a gringo contrivance,[3] a definition of the world according to European patterns of Colonization.” Rodriguez emphasizes that the term “Hispanic” is a term that was...
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...Richard Rodriguez’s essay “ ‘Blaxicans’ and Other Reinvented Americans,” Rodriguez argues about cultures specifying a person’s identity. Using a race to base their identity as an non valid American life; he argues that a culture is what defines a person. In the essay, he illustrates, “Culture is fluid. Culture is smoke. You breathe it. You eat it. You can’t help it…”(134-137). Rodriguez uses the word “culture” to reveal how a person who moves to a new country can not help to adapt the culture or the tradition the commune celebrates. Usually, this is what happens, people want to blend in the community and make it seem as if they were born there. Another way Rodriguez’s argues that culture is a way to define themselves is through his own self....
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...In “The Achievement of Desire,” author Richard Rodriguez warns that “he has used education to remake himself”, but in doing so isolated himself from his past, and those he cared about. Rodriguez wrote this essay in the context of how we teach (are we just memorizing without understanding ), and that with age he’s able to see the importance and pitfalls of education. He wants to warn his audience those much like his younger self first and second generation immigrants, but also those well educated or in college who are still making the same mistakes he once did. Rodriguez’s purpose is to persuade the audience that education is not a ladder to forever climb, that education is not just memorizing facts, but about bettering ourselves and learning to think critically, or we may end up like a “scholarship boy”...
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...Richard Rodriguez assimilated at a very young age into American mainstream culture, but political and social instabilities of the early nineteen sixties created a dilemma for Rodriguez, who all of the sudden became a minority student. In the early sixties, the unrest of Civil Right Movements prompted the idea affirmative action. The Affirmative Action came as a result of minority groups demanding integration of socially disadvantaged students into the higher education. They argued that those students should be given priority placement regardless of educational factors and preparation because of discrimination existing in the higher education. Thus, the dilemma for Rodriguez was that his physical features labeled him as a minority student while...
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...Comparing and Contrasting Backgrounds of Authors Mike Rose and Richard Rodriguez The biggest similarity between Mike Rose and Richard Rodriguez is they both love books and reading. Personally, I enjoy reading. Reading soothes the mind; it also reduces stress by distracting you from over thinking. From my experience I also came to realize reading increased my vocabulary and spelling. It forced me to come across new words, consequently improving my writing skills and analytical thinking. Rose and Rodriguez became writers mostly because they read all kinds of texts and became critical thinkers and at the same time motivated to pursue higher education. Their stories have common messages about literacy. Mike Rose’s “Lives on the Boundary” and Richard Rodriguez’s “Achievement of Desire” focus on prominent issues of education in society. The former tackles the problem of personal struggles and achievements of student, while the latter tackles cultural differences between home and school most especially for the working class children. Both authors came from a similar background with parents who were immigrants and poorly educated. Their family backgrounds were characterized by poverty and as a result of their upbringing; their top priorities did not include academics. Both use their personal experiences as examples of what they want in life. Mike Rose recounts his personal experiences describing his experiences in vocational education and elaborated on the problems of such a system...
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...Richard Rodriguez's use of irony in his dissertation titled “Blaxicans’ and Other Reinvented Americans” was not an effective writing style to persuade his audience. The authors opening statement consist of derogatory terminology and offensive vernaculars to the immigrant community specifically Mexicans, but according to OMB the phraseology Hispanic is politically accurate. In Rodriguez’s opening remarks he converses about how immigrants speaking in their language of preference is disturbing. In neighboring lines he also conversates about how immigrants just want to “undo America” as Rodriguez writes “There is something unsettling about immigrants because...they chatter incomprehensibly, and get in everyone's way. Immigrants seem to be...
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...Critique The Hunger Of Memory: And the Education of Richard Rodriguez “Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez” is an autobiography, that vividly paints and reveals a journey in which Rodriguez withstood numerous struggles in order to become the American he is currently known for. He endured what most would call a life set up for failure, yet he challenged himself and transformed from a young Mexican American to a genuine man. However Rodriguez remembers his own experience being a minority, questioning his own value and self as he grew older. Through his narrative we are able to see his core obstacle of learning to become the ideal American. Rodriquez consistently...
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...The issue of bilingual education in the United States has come up quite frequently throughout history, and whether it would benefit the students whose mother tongue is a language other than English. In Aria by Richard Rodriguez, he goes into the past and present of his life growing up with Spanish being his first language in school in the U.S. He later goes on to say, how he in fact, was and is against having a bilingual education in the school system, for it took away an individual's private language and turned it into a public language. However, such a statement seems to contradict to how he ended up to be with language, which is the fact that Spanish ultimately faded away from his life, no longer making it the private language he strongly...
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...Rodriguez uses his transformation from a primarily Spanish speaking person to a primarily English speaking person to promote the rewards of assimilation by describing his struggles as an English language learner. By describing his life as an English language learner, Rodriguez highlights the struggles a non-English speaker has to face and implies that someone who knows English will not have a problem. Rodriguez begins describing his life before his introduction to English. As a Spanish speaker through his infancy and his toddler-hood, Rodriguez had difficulty adjusting to a new language when he was forced to learn English. Although Rodriguez garnered enough English to perform basic tasks, he still struggled to adapt and understand complex...
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...little by little, what I was taught as a child in Catechism and Church had an effect on everything I did; holidays, interactions with friends and family, views on things taught in school, and my identity in regards to those around me. It seemed like everything always came back, in one way or another, to my religious experiences as a child. I didn’t realize this, though, until I was older (late teens, early twenties) when I consciously made the decision to convert to Eastern Orthodoxy. This changed my view of self and further influenced the effect the culture of the Church had on my life (shifting from a Western view to a more Eastern one). This essay will be about how my experience with Catholic (and later Orthodox) culture can relate to Richard Rodriguez’s experiences in Late Victorians and how they effected my reading of the story. The first name mentioned in...
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...I chose chapter one because Richard Rodriguez is going through family problems and having trouble with academics at school. Rodriguez was learning to speak English and it was very difficult for him in class. He did not want to participate in class, so the nuns from the school visited his house and had a discussion with his parents. The family started speaking more English at home, so the children can learn faster to speak the American way in America. Rodriguez soon began forgetting to speak Spanish and eventually he had forgotten. Whenever his relatives came from another town to visit and talk to everyone in the household. Rodriguez would just stare and not respond because he forgot how to speak Spanish. Everyone called him “Pocho” because...
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...Richard Rodriguez in his “Aria: Memoir of a Bilingual Childhood”, uses imagery to illustrate, throughout his memoir, how he felt and what his life was like when he was younger. An example of that would be in the first sentence, where he talked about how he started going to school, “I remember to start with that day in Sacramento-a California now nearly thirty years past-when I first entered a classroom, able to understand some fifty stray English words.” (1). In this sentence, Rodriguez uses imagery to illustrate how he felt when he first entered a classroom by saying that he could barely understand any English, “... able to understand some fifty stray words.” (3). This really shows us how bad his English was. He also used words to illustrate...
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...Richard Rodriguez was a young boy who grew up with Spanish as his first language. Both of his parents are Mexican immigrants and tried to provide a better life for their son. Rodriguez explains going to his school for the first time with only about fifty known English words. In 50 Essays; A Portable Anthology, Richard Rodriguez expresses, “Outside the house was public society; inside the house was private” (294). Rodriguez’s families identity was very different in the house than outside. Their identity was hidden from others as they went in public. The house was where they felt comfortable and at ease rather than in public where they could not be their true selves. For example, in the household when nobody else was around Rodriguez explains “We are speaking now the way we never speak out in public. We are alone—together. . .” (295). His explanation is referring to them all speaking their fluent language in a nonjudgmental and safe environment for them which is their household. Rodriguez loved hearing his dad speak Spanish to his mother and that only happened at home. Due to English constantly spoken around them, their identities were concealed as Spanish speakers in America. They felt the need to disguise that identity they have always had because of not knowing how to speak English and having a hard time trying to as minorities. His parents “. . . regarded the people at work, the faces in the crowds, as very distant from us” (Rodriguez 291). This was the life...
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