Essay on Richard Rodriguez, "The Achievement of Desire": Analysis

Another way Rodriguez explores and conveys his conflicted feelings is with use of tropes. He uses rhetorical question, which is asking a question, not for the purpose of eliciting an answer but for the purpose of asserting or denying something obliquely. The most effective rhetorical questions in conveying his feelings is in the second to last paragraph. He questions things such as “How shall I present the argument between comedy and tragedy, this tension that describes my life? Shall I start with the boy’s chapter, then move toward more

Simmons uses senior high school student Isabella, as well as other students repeatedly as a foundation for his main arguments. By using Isabella’s essay Simmons is able to paint a picture as to the education system and how it impacted the outlook of higher education on students. Instead of emphasizing the impact of a good education, there was emphasis on economic status and what a

Through the narrative “The Scholarship Boy” I find few turning points that I notice a shift in the demeanor of Richard Rodriguez as well as how I perceive the story. First of all, it is made apparent to me that people acknowledge him for his successes by making remarks such as, “Your parents must be proud” or “How did you manage it? According to the opening paragraphs Rodriguez is seen as a model student. Although this may be true, the first turning point I find suggests otherwise as Rodriguez conveys, “For although I was a very good student, I was also a very bad student…Always successful, always unconfident. Exhilarated by my process. Sad.” This quote changed my perspective of Rodriguez because of the negative emotion he expresses toward his family. By the same token, I recall my sister being an outstanding achiever throughout school, yet, she was similarly depressed as well as annoyed towards me and the rest of our family. This flashback assisted me in relating to Rodriguez’s emotions towards his successes. In the same fashion, I am supplied a grasp of his shift in tone and direction in the narrative.

By contrast, Richard Rodriquez, in his article entitled "Aria", strongly believes in surrendering to learning the proper English language, despite how strongly he feels his native tongue is a private language that once functioned to unite his family. Rodriguez creates a division of a public and a private discourse. He feels that he has a ‘right to learn the public language of los gringos'. He creates a visual clash of two worlds: a public world as represented by school and the need to learn English; and a private world as represented by his family and the use of Spanish within the home. He feels that in order to adapt and create assimilation that he needs to abandon the comfort of using Spanish to communicate and force himself to learn English – even if it meant alienating his family members.

Rodriguez begins to become more involved in his classroom by his new grip on the English language. He shares fewer and fewer words with his mother and father. His tone now transforms into guilt. As Rodriguez's public language becomes more fluent, he forgets how to speak Spanish. "I would have been happier about my public success had I not recalled, sometimes, what it had been like earlier, when my family conveyed its intimacy through a set of conveniently private sound.? He begins to break out of the cocoon as a slow or disadvantaged child and blooms into a regular kid in his white society that only uses English. He feels a great sense of betrayal of his Mexican past. His connection that held him so close to his family is destabilized.

In his article “Scholarship Boy”, Richard Rodriguez discusses his past as a scholarship boy, how that impacted his future and how he feels looking back on the situation. Rodriguez chronologically tells his story about growing up within a bilingual family and how his struggle to become a successful student alienated him from his family. His use of italics emphasizes his main point like when he says “… I couldn’t forget that schooling was changing me and separating me from the life I enjoyed before becoming a student” (Rodriguez 6). Along with the use of italics to emphasize his main points Rodriguez uses parentheses to express his inner thoughts, such as. when he reiterates the comments of others and how he reflects upon those questions, an

I find it interesting that while Rodriguez and Anzaldua came from comparable backgrounds they feel very differently about similar issues. Rodriguez believes that education should not be bilingual for children who come from Spanish speaking homes. Anzaldua on the other hand thinks that people should not be squashing the culture of these people, and should do what they can to help them preserve it. I think that in that sense one could compare Anzaldua and Rodriguez to the idea of American culture, as each are one extreme of how we view it. On the one hand we have Anzaldua, the idea that America is a melting pot, combining all of the different cultures of the different people living here to come up

This separation from his family caused a longing in his life. But this longing was superseded by what he suspected his teachers could give him. Rodriguez develops a double personality of sorts. The person he is at home, the polite child who lovingly does what his parents ask of him. And then the academic persona he

The particular focus of Rodriguez’s story is that in order to feel like he belonged to the “public society” he had to restrict his individuality. Throughout his story, Rodriguez discussed such topics as assimilation and heritage. He goes into depth about the pros and the cons of being forced to assimilate to the American culture. Growing up Hispanic in America was a struggle for Rodriguez. This was due to the fact that he was a Spanish-speaking boy living in an English-speaking society, and he felt like he was different than the other children. Rodriguez writes, “I was fated to be the ‘problem student’ in class” (Rodriguez 62). This is referring to Rodriguez’s improper knowledge of English. It made him stand out as the kid that was behind. He wanted to find the balance between the public and private face. He believed both were important to develop. As I read this story it changed the way I looked at people who speak different languages, and how it must be hard to fit in with society if you are not all fluent in English.

Throughout the essay, Lugo-Lugo wants one to become informed on prevalent issues in the average college classroom by allowing the reader to appeal to her through emotions. She uses personal stories and thoughts on college profiting accordingly to portray the issue amongst her classroom. As she mentions in her essay that her “...position within both U.S. society and academia is an important component of [her] discussion… A woman of color who is a Puerto Rican…. And those markers mean something at the beginning of the twenty-first century in and outside the U.S. academy” (Lugo-Lugo 190). She also describes how her image and identity is automatically judged, “These identities, they inform the way I position myself in relation to other gendered and

In Richard Rodriguez’s “The Achievement of Desire,” he compares himself to author Richard Hoggart’s “scholarship boy,” the type of student anyone can become. The “scholarship boy” is “anxious and eager to learn,” but is overbearing in his ways of learning and conveying knowledge (Rodriguez 534). Born as a son of two Mexican immigrants, Rodriguez quickly detached his life at school from his life at home. Hoggart helped Rodriguez to see near the end of his education exactly how harmful this type of lifestyle would become for Rodriguez’s learning. In my own experience, and specifically in my four years of high school, I tried my best to avoid being a “scholarship boy,” because that would prove detrimental to myself in relationships, my education, and my health and wholeness.

Rodriguez was torn apart his “private” life and his “public” life. Private as in referring to the language spoken and home and the Spanish heritage at home. Public as in referring to his quite life at school where Rodriguez was intimidated by “high syllables” and the way people talked fast English. This quote illustrated how the need of

When reading this autobiography it reminded me of my adolescent years; I remember feeling like I knew all there was to being a grown up, I also felt like my parents didn’t know much because they didn’t go to college. I strongly feel like they could have always done more than they were doing. Upon reading this, I felt as though I was reading Richard Rodriguez’s journal and he was a very unhappy kid living in the ghetto. He was also embarrassed of his own life and he seemed unhappy in his own skin... “(Ways of reading pg.339) A primary reason for my success in the classroom was that I couldn’t forget that success was changing me and separating me from the life I enjoyed before becoming a student”.

Rodriguez begins to actively distance himself from his family and heritage. On nights when the house is filled with Spanish speaking relatives, he leaves the house as a way of breaking the connection. He begins to imitate his teachers? accents and use their diction. As time goes on, he desires more solitude. Again, this is all normal according to Hoggart. ?He has to be more and more alone, if he is going to get on?the boy has to cut himself off,? (47). This is exactly what Rodriguez does; he chooses his education and the classroom over his

​“Real Work” by Richard Rodriguez is about a young man struggling with self-confidence. He seeks to build his self-esteem by participating in real manual labor over a summer job. When Rodriguez is offered a job working on a construction site he doesn’t hesitate to say yes. His father had always told him he could never understand the hardships of “Real work’, and Rodriguez felt that completing this summer job would make his father proud of him, and in many ways consider him to be a “Real man”. Richard Rodriguez was raised in America, unlike his family. He never really knew anything different. This made it very easy for his father to tell him that “he didn’t really know