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Con Respeto I Am Not Richard Rodriguez Summary

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Where is my family from? I want to go home!” a young student thought with tears in her eyes. She stayed quiet because she could not translate her thoughts into English. In retrospect, Norma Mota-Altman believes being part of an English-only classroom in America when she was a child hurt her, and she now realizes the importance of bilingual education (4). Altman reveals this perspective in her editorial, “Con Respeto, I Am Not Richard Rodriguez.” In the debate over whether to include students’ private lives and cultures in the U.S. education system, Altman’s outlook contrasts with Richard Rodriguez’, an essayist and opponent of multilingual classrooms. Victor Villanueva, Jr., a bilingual academic, also has a perspective differing from Rodriguez’ …show more content…

Altman could succeed in school by accommodating public expectations while preserving her heritage (4). By learning to navigate public and private spaces, one may achieve socially or academically by fulfilling public expectations. Simultaneously, one may lose communication abilities essential to connecting with those in one’s private life. Villanueva acknowledges that Rodriguez lost intimacy with his family to participate in public settings, although Villanueva felt connected to his private life by maintaining an accent while learning English (19). Altman and others exhibit that experiences with navigating public and private domains can vary, as can their consequences. Altman believes English-only policies are unneeded. People’s cultural backgrounds can provide them with an advantage in learning and communicating with others, even in the public sphere. Conversely, Rodriguez explains assimilation is vital as it enables people to achieve public …show more content…

Altman reveals that one should be free to use one’s language in public and nonpublic domains. Her experience highlights that education systems have broad control over expectations for language and whether some languages belong in public environments. It also demonstrates that people have varying ways of negotiating between language and culture, such as by speaking separate public and private languages while deciding whether to conform to a language or culture. Assimilation may affect how one associates languages with public and private spheres. A variety of experiences and consequences can occur when one finds success with presence in public and closed spaces, such as becoming better equipped to attain educational success or losing connection with one’s private life. Altman underlines that assimilation is unnecessary as heritage can provide funds of knowledge for the benefit of one’s education, and systems promoting assimilation can alienate and inflict harm upon

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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

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In Aria: A Memoir of a Bilingual Childhood, Richard Rodriguez makes the claim that “[i]t is not possible for a child—any child—ever to use his family’s language in school. Not to understand this is to misunderstand the public uses of schooling and to trivialize the nature of intimate life – a family’s ‘language.’” Rodriguez enforces this idea through extensive use of vignettes as well as the structure of his essay, recalling his childhood and his reluctance to learn public language. Going into depth, he explains how his fear of the public society—rather his belief that he could not be a part of it—caused the young author to be weary of leaving his intimate family setting.

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Sara and her family are going through this assimilation process because they believe they will be welcomed by society and adopt American identities. For immigrants’ transitions, and Sara in particular, a reality of independence is strongly desired. She seeks to become independent of her family and her cultural background because she believes that independence is a sign of authenticity and originality. This process is a combination of self-creation and Americanization. English language skills and a method of education are also critical components of cultural assimilation.

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I have seen people get offended when you assume they can speak the language of their people, because they grew up in America, “their people” speak English. Others get hurt when you do not make an effort to understand their culture. We have to be mindful of this. The author mentions Jewish and Chinese private schools in the US (p. 155). It is possible that rather than having a nation where everyone eventually integrates, that we instead will have a nation where everyone wants to hold on to their heritage.

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Essentially, the gain of public individuality will result in fitting in. Rodriguez states, “In public, by contrast, full individuality is achieved, paradoxically, by those who are able to consider themselves members of the crowd” (457). In order to thrive and be considered ‘normal’ in today’s society a person must have developed a strong public individuality. Bilingual education can deter the development of a public identity in child whose native language is not

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Being bilingual can be both useful or irritating, having the ability to communicate and understand several languages or being raised to be an interpreter for your parents. As you become more exposed to a variety of languages you can often observe how society treats certain languages. Martin Espada is a lawyer and poet who defends Spanish speakers in America, makes it clear about the role of language in his essay, “The New Bathroom Policy at English High School.” He asserts that the importance of language is created from cultural identity. When Espada shared what he learned about maintaining and defending Spanish he proceeded to say, “Defending the right of all Latinos to use the tongue of their history and identity creates in me passion for Spanish itself.”

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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.

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Instead of supporting why the teachers should have spoken Spanish to him, he then presents a statement that goes against the wishes of his non-bilingual self, saying “I would have trusted them and responded with ease. But I would have evaded- and for how long could I afford to delay?-learning the great lesson of school, that I had a public identity.” Although the process of learning English had caused discomfort, it was the pressure to learn a language that ultimately lead him to learn the public language English and become a member of

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But even when they didn’t learn English themselves, their children grew up speaking it. Thousands of first-generation Americans still strive to learn English, but others face reduced educational and career opportunities because they have not mastered this basic skill they need to get ahead. According to the 1990 census, 40 percent of the Hispanics born in the United States do not graduate from high school, and the Department of Education says that a lack of proficiency in English is an important factor in the drop-out rate. People and agencies that favor providing services only in foreign languages want to help people who do not speak English, but they may be doing these people a disservice by condemning them to a linguistic ghetto from which they cannot easily escape.

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The parent’s perspective towards bilingual education was like the student’s opinions because both individuals felt immersion classrooms benefit the students and the parents. The father of Jason was proud his son was the first in his family to read, write, and speak in English. Jason’s father knew his son would have many career opportunities by learning English at school. Learning the English academic language was not the only proud language Jason’s father encouraged for Jason to learn but also the Spanish language as well. Jason’s father only speaks Spanish so if his son was to lose his home language, a language barrier would form between father and son.

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For many new immigrants coming to America, it is difficult to adjust into the new society. Many come to America without the basic knowledge of English, the new immigrants do not have the ability assimilate to American society because of the lack of possible communication between the immigrant and an native. Non-English speaking immigrants that come to America face harsh challenges when trying to assimilate to U.S. society because immigrants are often segregated into ethnic communities away from natives, Americans do not know basics of words of other well known languages, and the lack of government funding education programs. Assimilation into a new society is difficult enough, but when the society pushes any new immigrants to separate part

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Carrice Cummins, a Professor in Education in the College of Education at Louisiana Tech University, wrote an article entitled, “Celebrating Teachers: Teachers of Dual Language Learners Making a Difference.” In her article she discusses the ways in which teachers should create a comfortable home-like environment for their students and the importance of understanding their student’s cultural backgrounds.

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Imagine, you have a dream of a better, new life. You pursue that dream; but the only way of accomplishing that is going to a different country. When you get to that country, you decide to continue to speak only English in, perhaps, in a country that only speaks Portuguese. You have strong beliefs that your life is so much better now; but it is now a nuisance that you cannot speak the country’s native language. It is clear to see in the United States, especially Colorado, that this is an actual issue that almost everyone has to deal with on a daily basis.

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Even though we live in a melting pot of culture, the United States proves to be a country whose views tend to lean towards being monolinguistic or English-only. Through my survey I hope to observe whether or not more people of newer generations are more open to a multilinguistic society than earlier generations were where English-only was a much larger part of their identity. The idea behind English-only is of one “official” language, a superior language, to be used as a commonality. The expected positive outcome for that being a more efficient way to communicate. However, the ideology and active pursuit for English assimilation comes from Xenophobia.(Xenophobia, 2017)

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