Response to Richard Rodriguez's "Aria: Memoir of a Bilingual Childhood"

Richard Rodriguez’s “Aria: Memoir of a Bilingual Childhood” follows a young Rodriguez as he transitions from Spanish to English as his primary language and learns that intimacy doesn’t depend on a language. Rodriguez controversially argues against bilingual education in this essay and against affirmative action elsewhere in the book that this essay was taken from, Hunger of Memory. He writes that bilingual voters’ ballots are “foolish and certainly doomed” because they “implie that a person can exercise the most public of rights-the right to vote-while still keeping apart…from public life.” Rodriguez points out many of these paradoxes about private and public life, but I disagree with his analysis. While he is certainly credible since he experienced everything himself, he has fallacies in his argument: teaching children in their family languages would keep them alienated from the public life. He writes that those who support bilingual education are idealistic in that they can’t better both the sense of self apart from the crowd and the sense of self within the crowd at the same time. What Rodriguez fails to mention are those who are truly bilingual and very fluent in both languages rather than heavily favoring one, like my parents. Because they are bilingual they can have thriving public lives while still maintaining their intimate private lives.

Bilingual Joke - Brainless Tales by Marcus

In addition, the first 30 or so paragraphs could be halved and still have the same effect or even a better effect since there would be less repetition. I enjoyed the essay much more when Rodriguez began to write about the transition in his life and how it affected him, especially when he was called “pocho” for forgetting his Spanish. Being bilingual and bad at my family language, this resonated with me. Rodriguez writes about how he and his grandmother were still intimate despite the lack of Spanish sounds that used to define intimacy for him, and I mostly agree since my relationship with my grandmother is similar to his. While the relationship is intimate, it could be even more so if I spoke better Chinese so that I could better communicate with her.