Race and Richard Rodriguez

He was born and raised in Columbus, Ohio. An important element about him is that he played basketball throughout his entire life. Up until the end of high school, he was his teams point guard. This being, he was offered a scholarship to Otterbein university as a basketball player. He later declined; he saw a songwriter perform and was inspired to make music soon after.

“Our culture, our traditions, our languages are the foundations upon which we build our identity.” - Unknown. Bilingualism has many different interpretations and definitions and can cause problems in the community or unite it. The concept of bilingualism represents several different ideas, two writers, Martin Espada and Richard Rodriguez share in their essays their personal stories about being immersed into the English culture and learning the language. They share their views of what bilingualism means to them personally and make arguments about the importance of the concept. The two essayists bring awareness to the major role bilingualism plays in the communities today and highlight the effects of disagreements between cultural groups.

Richard Rodriguez had faced a lot of problems that most students in America do not have to deal with. Richard had to deal with parents that couldn’t help him in school and wanting to be successful academically. He had become embarrassed of his background and where he came from and did not want to embrace his culture.

The 1965-1980 the Mexican Americans, were over the discrimination and the poor life conditions. They looked to find a new way of living from building a Chicano identity. The Pride and Prejudice action stated through a few farm workers named Ceasar Chavez and Dolores Huerta who protested on Sacramento for fair pay and justified working conditions. The level headed discussion over undocumented outsiders erupts, with a backfire that in the long run incorporates calls for fixed fringes, English-just laws and endeavors to mark undocumented workers as a deplete on open assets. All the while, the Latino impact is blasting in

He attended the University of Chicago and after serving in the Navy he attended the Northwestern University Law School and graduated with the highest grades in the law school history. He has been married twice and has a son and three daughters from his first wife.

After graduating he studied for a time at Columbia University, taking classes that interested him to learn, but never seemed to stay focused for long. He left with a Degree in Law, and an understanding of French, Spanish, and

Alternatively, Chavez was born in Yuma, in the state of California. Likewise, Chavez moved to California with his parents to work in the fields. As Chavez, experienced the disturbing conditions that he and his fellow farm pickers encountered, he knew that he will soon devote his life in changing, the horrible migrant camps, untrustworthy labor contractors, bitter racism and insufficient wages.

Gary Soto was born April 12, 1952, in Fresno, California to Mexican-American parents. His grandparents emigrated from Mexico during the Great Depression and found jobs as farm laborers. Soto grew up poor in the San Joaquin Valley and learned that hard work pays off through chores, such as moving lawns, picking grapes, painting houses, and washing cars.

The memoir Aria by Richard Rodriguez expresses his personal experiences and feelings of his native-speaking family becoming Americanized by the English language and culture. Through elementary school and constant persistence from the nuns of the Church as well as his mother and father, Richard learned the public language and gained his public identity. As Richard continued to be silent and unwilling to speak English at school during class time, the Church's nuns visited Richard's home to discuss with his parents about the difficulties of their three children adapting to the English language. At the clash of the public and private world, the visitors asked if the Rodriguez family only spoke Spanish at home and suggested that the family should start practice speaking English at home to better the slow progress the children were showing at school. From that moment onwards, the Rodriguez family had lost its intimacy through their native language as they became Americanized. The memoir took place within

His early education was at Jean Parker Elementary In San Francisco Calif (in China Town), Kirby Middle School in Houston, Texas, and Forest Brook High school in Houston, Texas.

degree from Yale. He has spent a great deal of his life abroad, first in

It would be almost impossible to write the history of the Old West without giving credit to the Hispanic people who influenced its customs, culture, towns, and lives. The contributions of Hispanics to the evolution and success of America are woven into almost every portion of the nation 's history. To visualize America untouched by Latinos is to imagine a country without much of its folklore and many of its achievements.

The prevailing attitude of white supremacy was the justification Americans used to “rescue the wilderness from backwardness, indolence, and disorder”(De Leon 65). Mexico in its earliest days was primarily Indian, but the infusion of both Spanish and black blood made it harder to define Mexicans. White Anglo-Americans believed “their contrast to ‘white’ and salient kindred to ‘black’ and ‘red’ made Mexicans subject to treatment commensurate with the odious connotations whites attached to colors, races, and cultures dissimilar to their own” (De Leon 6).

Dinaw Mengestu, Richard Rodriguez and Manuel Munoz are three authors that have been through and gone through a lot of pain to finaly get accepted in their societies. They are all either immigrants or children of immigrants that had trouble fitting in America’s society at the time. They struggled with language and their identities, beucase they were not original from the states and it was difficult for others to accept them for who they are. They all treated their problems differently an some tried to forget their old identeties and live as regulalr Americans others accepted themselves for being who they are, but they all found a way to deal with their issues.

By 17 he moved to Canada to avoid the mandatory military service and attended Queen’s University. He then moved on to study at University of Pennsylvania.