Hunger of Memory The Education of Richard Rodriguez

Talking Points #2
"WHAT A HEFTY PRICE TO PAY TO BE AMERICANIZED"
1.  "Do your children speak only Spanish at home, Mrs Rodriguez?"  While another voice added, "That Richard especially seems so timid and shy." The nun emphasizing,  "That Rich-heard!"

Not only did Ricardo have to lose his Spanish spoken name, but he had to lose his Spanish language. Before his parents started to speak only English to him, he would feel embraced by the sounds of their words.  "Those sounds said:  I am speaking with ease in Spanish, I am addressing you in words I never use with los gringos.  I recognize you as someone special, close, like no one outside.  You belong with us.  In the family." He couldn't wait to get home home from school where he could be in Spanish world, where he felt safe and where he felt he belonged.  He didn't feel this way anymore. After the nuns visited his home, his parents would only speak to Richard in English. Richard arrives home one day to hear his parents speaking in Spanish and when they see him their voices change to English and he was completely startled.  He says, "...I felt my throat twisted by unsounded grief.  I turned and left the room." That was the day Richard was determined to learn classroom English.  I felt he had lost so much of himself as a child.  Later on, though, he states, "Only when I was able to think of myself as an Amercian,  no longer an alien in gringo society,  could I seek the rights and opportunities necessary for full public individuality."  As is "An Indian Father's Plea", Wind-Wolf was being labeled a "slow learner" because he was quiet and shy in the classroom.  He, like Richard, had to lose a big part of himself to become Americanized.

2.  This makes me think of a quote that Delpit uses in "The Silenced Diaries".  On page 37 she uses this final comment for examination, "Children have the right to their own language, their own culture.   We must fight cultural hegemony and fight the system by insisting that children be allowed to express themselves in their own language style.  It is not they, the children, who must change, but the schools.  To push children to do anything else is repressive and reactionary." She was referring to a Native Amercan student, who submitted a paper and, due to her cultural difference, her ideas were lost and some faculty thought she shouldn't be in the teacher education program.  What happens to the Richards and the Wind-Wolfs in our society?  Where do their thoughts and ideas go to?  We are stripping them of everything they know and they may have great things to share with us but we have taken away their ability to do so.

3.  Not only was Ricardo stripped of his name and his language, but he also had to endure being ridiculed by his relatives.  Richard tells us that as he became fluent in English he lost the ability to speak in Spanish.  When relatives came over, he was unable to repond to them.   "Pocho then they called me. Sometimes playfully, teasingly, using the tender diminutive--mi pochito.  Sometimes not so playfully, mockingly, Pocho.  (A Spanish dictionary defines that word as an adjective meaning "colorless" or "bland."  But I heard it as a noun, naming the Mexican-American who, in becoming an American, forgets his native society.)" Not only did his relatives do this, but also the lady in the Mexican food store.  Richard goes on to say that any of the people who called him Pocho could have spoke English to him if they had wanted to.  He says he also felt that by learning English he betrayed