Richard Rodrigues used the words
Public and Private to explain his
experience with a bilingual education, immigrant parents, and the importants of learning
english.
"Language is a city to the building of which every human
being brought a stone (Ralph Waldo
Emerson). As a child of immigrant parents but born in the United States,
growing up Richard only knew Spanish. As he briefly stated in his essay” My
mother and Father addressed me only in Spanish, in Spanish I learned to reply. When
Richard was 6 years old, he attended a Catholic school where it was there he
heard his name being spoken in english for the first time. Although he learned
some english from hearing his parents speak it, he couldn’t understand why he
had to learn or use it in school. As he quoted in his essay, “It would have
pleased me to hear my teachers address me in spanish when I enter the class. “I
would have felt less afraid, “I would have trusted them and responded with
ease.
Richard then addresses the facts that growing up in a middle class family, he often
felt unwelcomed and judged by his neighbors because he was Mexican and lacked the
English language. In addition , he often spoke about how he watched his parents
struggle with pronoucing english words and how tense they would get when talking to others. Richard went on to say
“Optimism and ambition led them to have a house (our home) many blocks from the
Mexican south side of town. “My mother and father were more annoyed than
intimated by two or three neighbors who tried initially to make us unwelcome.
Richard discussed the struggle of
not knowing how to speak English or understand it. As he quoted” I knew very
well that I spoke English poorly. “My words could not stretch far enough to
form complete thoughts and the words I did speak I didn’t know well enough to
make into distinct sounds. Even though Richard struggled with English, he knew
the only way he would understand others (gringos) or communicate with people
outside his ethnicity, is if he learned English. He felt that even though
Spanish was his primary language, he also consider it to be private, only
spoken at home. As oppose to English in which he felt the needed to learn
because it’s a language that everyone mostly spoke. In addition, Richard
realized that English can aslo be a private or public language too.
