Compare And Contrast Richard Rodriguez And Anzaldúa

Confident Relationships Built on Language Wouldn’t it be exciting to grow up learning more than one language? Imagine being in Japan for a week on vacation with a group of friends, and one day decided to go to the oldest zoo in Japan, Ueno Zoo. To get to Ueno Zoo, riding the bullet train was a necessity, except knowing which line was the correct line, when to get off the bullet train, or even which ticket to buy was a daunting task. Nobody in your group has the confidence to ask the workers for help since they don’t have the knowledge of Japanese to help them. So everybody agrees to head back to the hotel to plan something else considering nobody knew how to speak a bit of Japanese, and that inability to communicate hurt your group’s confidence

Richard Rodriguez and Gloria Anzaldúa are two authors who both immigrated to America in the 1950s and received first hand experience of the assimilation process into American society. During this time, Rodriguez and Anzaldúa had struggled adjusting to the school system. Since understanding English was difficult, it made adjusting to the American school system increasingly difficult for Rodriguez. Whereas Anzaldúa, on the other hand, had trouble adjusting to America’s school system due to the fact that she didn’t wish to stop speaking Spanish even though she could speak English. Both Rodriguez and Anzaldúa had points in their growing educational lives where they had to remain silent since the people around them weren’t interested in hearing them speaking any other language than English. The silence that immigrants experience when assimilating into a new culture is not always a sign of social control. That silence is their confidence with the new language, and

The silence is a transition period, where the immigrants find their new voice that they can use confidently in their new society. During this time, immigrants would stop using their native language and just do their best to use the new one. As a result from them doing that, their use and understanding of the language increases, and their confidence to use what they know grows. Rodriguez went through a phase similar to what was just mentioned. When Rodriguez was young, he would speak in English in school or in stores near his house, and when Rodriguez would get home from school he would speak Spanish (72). Rodriguez’s English was not the best, and because of that he would either be silent or quietly mumble when asked to participate by one of the nuns (73). Since his lack of participation was noticeable and showed little progress, some of his teachers visited Rodriguez’s home to ask his parents to “encourage your children to practice their English when they are home?” (73). Rodriguez one day walks in on his parents speaking Spanish, but when they see him they switch to English, which offends and over the days that follows angers him enough to decide to seriously learn English. Rodriguez even willingly decides to participate in class (74). Rodriguez would speak English in school because to him it was a “public language”, while Spanish was a “private language” (72). Rodriguez