I was particularly intrigued reading Richard Rodriguez' "Aria: A Memoir of a Bilingual Childhood". Though while reading my mind expressed a fair amount of internal skepticism as to the ability of a child of that age to have formed such clear memories and interpretations of the private and the public, I still think he's onto something profound within the pages of the text that may be going on without our really knowing about it, that is ignoring the differences between public and private in our traditional bilingual classrooms. Rodriguez expresses a genuine fear of and struggle with alienation from his family as a result of language, and having to learn English as the language of public expression. The stereotype of the immigrant who refuses to learn or speak English in their household is deployed with a certain amount of familial pride and affection in the text, even as Rodriquez points out the obvious, that it was difficult for those members of the family to speak from a position of strength and confidence among the "gringos".
One of the things that surprised me the most was his awareness, as a child, of a world that was public and a world that was private, and of the immense sense of loss he felt when his parents ceased speaking to him in Spanish all together. Or perhaps what surprised me was his reaction to that loss as he reflects back in the memoir. He says that as painful as it was, he did need to learn to communicate in a public manner. There's still that anxiety and hurt that comes from interactions with other family members, and their near scornful reaction when they find he's lost his Spanish fluency, but he also has more confidence and comes to see himself as belonging more and more to something like an American public identity.
I must confess I am a white, Anglo-Saxon protestant male in a family with a college educated mother and father and two siblings, so we are in many respects the portrait of the nuclear family, but I do from time to time see some conflict between my private, family life and my public one. For instance my family is very close, and particularly my siblings and I are very openly affectionate and supportive of one another, in ways that have often led people to comment. Generally speaking I've found that those who comment admire the bonds we share, but there have been those who see that bond as unnatural and believe our public image should be one of rivalry.
One of the things that surprised me the most was his awareness, as a child, of a world that was public and a world that was private, and of the immense sense of loss he felt when his parents ceased speaking to him in Spanish all together. Or perhaps what surprised me was his reaction to that loss as he reflects back in the memoir. He says that as painful as it was, he did need to learn to communicate in a public manner. There's still that anxiety and hurt that comes from interactions with other family members, and their near scornful reaction when they find he's lost his Spanish fluency, but he also has more confidence and comes to see himself as belonging more and more to something like an American public identity.
I must confess I am a white, Anglo-Saxon protestant male in a family with a college educated mother and father and two siblings, so we are in many respects the portrait of the nuclear family, but I do from time to time see some conflict between my private, family life and my public one. For instance my family is very close, and particularly my siblings and I are very openly affectionate and supportive of one another, in ways that have often led people to comment. Generally speaking I've found that those who comment admire the bonds we share, but there have been those who see that bond as unnatural and believe our public image should be one of rivalry.
