In his widely admired piece, Aria, author Richard Rodriguez carefully illustrates the concept of individuality being influenced by the people and community surrounding oneself, through his personal experiences as a bilingual student in America. Rodriguez shares his story in order to inform the general public and to simply raise awareness of the struggles and hardship that bilingual people endure while forced to learn a secondary language to survive in a judgemental environment. Richard Rodriguez, also known as Ricardo, states that he first started to associate Spanish with being his “home language” or “family language” even before he started to learn language itself. He writes about his happy home life, and the strong connection he has with his family when they speak Spanish. He also writes about the strange sounds of English, the language of ‘los gringos’. “Crowds at Safeway or at bus stops were noisy with the birdlike sounds of los gringos. I’d move away from them all- the chirping chatter above me,”. He notes the difficulty that he and his family have making those same sounds, that their English was poor. Rodriguez uses warm, loving mood words when talking about …show more content…
His teachers link his silence and substandard effort in school to his limited ability to speak English well, and persuade his parents to practice speaking English exclusively in their home. “In an instant they agreed to give up the language (the sounds) which had revealed and accentuated our family’s closeness,”. Richard begins to assimilate into the society that once considered him a ‘foreigner’ all because of language. In turn, Richard begins to lose the closeness, the connection that he felt with his family, losing a piece of himself in the process. Rodriguez expertly uses writing technique pathos to pull at the emotions of the reader to make them feel a connection to