Richard Rodrigues Essay

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.