Journal #8: Rodriguez - Reflection

 Immediately when I read this excerpt from Richard Rodriguez's Aria, I thought of my boyfriend and his family. His family immigrated to the United States from Guatemala and he's the only one from his family that was born here in the U.S. A lot of what Rodriguez said makes me think of his situation. His parents only speak Spanish and very little, broken English. Anthony, my boyfriend, however, speaks English as his first language and gets frustrated because of the language barrier between him and his parents. 

With this being stated and seeing it firsthand, it puts into perspective for me everything that Rodriguez was saying about no longer being able to communicate with his parents. "The family's quiet was partly due to the fact that, as we children learned more and more English, we shared fewer and fewer words with our parents" (Rodriguez, 37). The language barrier between yourself and your parents has got to be so difficult to live with and sad to see. Not having that clear communication between your family is incredibly hard to deal with everyday. Anthony gets frustrated when he will try to explain something and his parents don't understand, but he'll try to say it in Spanish and flub the words because he primarily learned English as a young child despite having Spanish speaking parents. 

I think it's incredibly important to integrate kids into society no matter what language they speak, but to embrace their other languages while also giving them English as a resource. The strategy that the nuns and his parents used with Rodriguez did help him learn English, but it also stripped away his Hispanic identity and brought him further away from his culture. Programs like ESL are incredibly helpful to this, but there's always more we can do! Here is an article with strategies and resources to use when needing to teach English, yet embrace their native language: 10 Ways to Teach English to Your Spanish Speaking Students