Bilingual Education Richard Rodriguez Analysis

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Constant controversy exists on the topic of educating immigrants and the strategies in which to do so. This is a topic that writer Richard Rodriguez tackles using various rhetorical strategies to showcase both the positives and negatives of two opposing educational viewpoints. Overall, with these strategies Rodriguez is able to convey his purpose of opposing bilingual education.
Rodriguez begins with an anecdote, setting the scene thirty years ago to show the struggle he endured as a Mexican-American when he began school due to the language barrier between his family’s “private” language and his classmates’ “public” language. He repeatedly returns to this strategy of using anecdotes to showcase his home life and how the public language began to separate his family. His native language served as a bond between him and his family, a secret means of communication. Language was “the reminder of …show more content…
For a large beginning portion of the memoir, he references the caucasian people in his neighborhood as “gringos”, even saying, “We lived among gringos and only a block from the biggest, whitest houses” (308). He also associates his neighbors with the English language (309). His tone when he uses the word more negative than positive, and it can be implied that he thinks the Spanish language may hinder communication in an area where English is the dominant language. As Rodriguez nears the end of the memoir, he uses less and less Spanish words. He does this to show how as he grew up, he became more proficient in English and even became unfamiliar with the Spanish language. He was forced to sacrifice a part of himself in order to gain another part in the world of Americans. Rodriguez ends the memoir with very positive statements about how speaking the same language increases the intimacy between people and makes communication much easier and more
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