Comparing Aira By Richard Rodriguez And Mother Tongue By Amy Tan

Richard Rodriguez’s “Aira: A Memoir of Bilingual Childhood” and Amy Tan’s “Mother Tongue” both exercise the three common rhetoric devices – pathos, ethos, and logos – to appeal to the audience and to make their arguments within the text more valid and comprehensive. Both authors write about their experiences and struggles with immigration and the assimilation into the public identity and society, but their reactions to these situations are similar and different in several forms and aspects, including how they were presented to the public identity, how they reacted to the public identity and assimilation into the society by facing their challenges, what their family connection was, and what credibility they have.

While both authors did resist

When Rodriguez was a young boy, he enjoyed listening to his family speak, but when he listened, he wasn’t wholly listening to the actual language itself, but to the sounds that the people made when speaking (Rodriguez, 250). Spanish wasn’t simply a language to him; Spanish was the glue and the strong bond that kept the family so close, and this language meant something significant to Rodriguez, and this becomes prominent when he says, “Walking toward our house, climbing the steps from the sidewalk, in summer when the front door was open. I’d hear voices beyond the screen door talking in Spanish. For a second or two I’d stay, linger there listening. Smiling, I’d hear my mother call out, saying in Spanish, ‘Is that you, Richard?’ Those were her words, but all the while her sounds wound assure me” (252). Rodriguez continued to solidify the argument that Spanish was what made him feel comfortable by expressing his thoughts about assimilation into society, saying, “Like others who feel the pain of public alienation, we transformed the knowledge of our public separateness into a consoling reminder of our intimacy” (252). Rodriguez Rodriguez exercises the rhetorical devices of pathos and logos in this example, as he effectively conveys his emotions and his connection to the language and the bond it has created for the

Tan was raised in the English society and was already assimilated into society as she grew up. The language Tan was familiar with like Rodriguez was familiar to Spanish was her mother’s language, which she refers to as her “mother tongue” (Tan, 313). Tan writes about her experiences of her mother’s language as a child, and says, “…when I was growing up, my mother’s ‘limited’ English limited my perception of her. I was ashamed of her English” (314). Throughout the first few pages of the text, it becomes quite obvious that Tan was ashamed of the way her mother spoke, describing it as “broken” (313) and “fractured” (313). But as you proceed through the text, it is apparent that, not only does Tan become accepting of her mother’s English, but she associates it with a familiar and loving feeling. Tan later realizes that simple linguistic tests couldn’t portray her mother’s actual language, and says, “I wanted to capture what language ability tests can never reveal: her intent, her passion, her imagery, the rhythms of her speech and the nature of her thoughts” (316). Tan primarily used the rhetorical device pathos to express her thoughts in this aspect. The emotions came not only from Tan’s writing, but were pulled from the audience in… an emotional equilibrium of understanding. In addition to this, Tan exercised logos, as the