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Summary Of Bilingual Childhood By Richard Rodriguez

Decent Essays

Approximately 37 million people speak both English and Spanish in the United States and have experienced a feeling of discrimination or rejection. Richard Rodriguez’s memoir called “Aria: A Memoir Of A Bilingual Childhood” demonstrates this with a personal experience. This memoir was taken from the book “Hunger Of Memory” which was originally published in “1982”. The events in this memoir occur specifically in the 1900s, when the author was a young boy, entering an American school for the first time. One of the main issues displayed in his memoir is when Rodriguez recalls being labeled as a “problem student” being a Hispanic-American student in an all-white school. Another issue displayed in this memoir is the difficulties he had had to learn English meantime he felt more comfortable with Spanish. Being discriminated and not being able to adapt to two different languages is a struggle more than half of the world deals with. This is truly a serious issue because this could potentially be the origin of socially feeling uncomfortable. The purpose of this memoir was to tell the reader that individuality can come from both one's private and public communities, but that does not mean that one loses himself. The audience attracted to this memoir are foreigners in America. This memoir is directed to immigrants and other foreign people who have experienced the same difficulty of learning a new public language in America. Rodriguez wrote in his memoir about the struggles he

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