I believe the most interesting thing about Richard Rodriguez’s passage from Aria was how he detailed the progression of his feelings on the language barrier that Spanish speaking people in America encounter. He details his experience as a child beginning school in America barely understanding English. He was very insecure and reluctant to speak out or make friends. As a small child, he was led to believe this was because of the language barrier. As he grew his feelings about himself, his heritage, and his family evolved through many stages ultimately coming to a deep realization about words and their meaning and feeling; and the difference between the two.
When Ricardo’s family first moved to America they immediately felt like outsiders. He describes their yellow house in a row of white bungalows in the Sacramento neighborhood as well as the neighbors either ignoring them or intentionally making them feel unwelcome. He associates this unwelcoming with the English language. He mentions watching his parents strain and tense their bodies as they tried to understand people speaking to them in English. He associates English with “high nasal notes”, and “whining vowels and guttural consonants”, while associating Spanish with his heritage, not simply sounds and communicative devices. Hearing and speaking Spanish gave Rodriguez a “pleasing, soothing, consoling reminder of being at home.”
At 5 or 6 years old, Rodriguez began to associate Spanish as being a “private language”. It was the language spoken to him by the ones that loved him most, his family. He associated that which makes the Spanish language different from English with the unique love he received from his family. Having established this train of thought, English became the language of the public. Because he was not familiar with the English language, Richard felt like even more of an outcast.
When Ricardo was forced to speak English at home he was immediately defiant and uncertain, but within a few days, with determination from his parents he began to open up to it, and immediately realized the importance of speaking the public language saying “That day, I moved very far from the disadvantaged child I had been only days earlier. The belief, the calming assurance I belonged in public, had at last taken hold.” The harsh sounds of the English language had gotten softer; more familiar. He began to interpret people’s tones and the feeling of the language, not just the vocabulary.
Soon the language skills of Ricardo and his brothers and sisters surpassed those of their parents and they began to feel a different kind of alienation. He noticed a vulnerability In his father he had never seen before when he fumbled through a saying of Grace in English before dinner. He observed the difference in confidence his father displayed when speaking Spanish over English. The language barrier was now separating Ricardo from his parents and his grandmother. As he became more Americanized he detached himself from his family and traditional Mexican culture.
Ricardo and his brothers became more familiar with English than Spanish. When his Grandmother and other relatives would speak to him in Spanish, he would not always understand the translation of the words but would be able to interpret what they are saying based on tone and sincerity. Older members of his family would be offended when he Ricardo would have to tense up and really pay attention in order to understand conversations. He began to feel guilty, like he had turned his back on his culture.
As Ricardo began to mature he began to truly feel the English language; “I began to distinguish intimate voices speaking through English.” English began to have as passionate of an effect on him as Spanish had. When he says “Intimacy is not created by a particular language, it is created by Intimates.” he clearly shows he understands that human emotion in terms of communication transcends language.
He eventually came to the realization that many hardships he experienced through life that he had previously blamed on the language barrier may have less to do with language and more simply be the trials that adolescent kids of any culture may go through.
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