As a son of Mexican American immigrants, Richard Rodriguez recounts the story of his childhood and his struggle to assimilate into American culture. In Aria: A memoir of a Bilingual Childhood, Rodriguez always felt like an outcast whenever he set foot outside of his house. As a young child, he exclusively spoke Spanish to members of his household and tried his best to learn and speak English in the real world. He “regarded Spanish as a private language. It was a ghetto language that deepened and strengthened [his] feeling of public separateness” (Rodriguez 505) because it identified him as a member of his family and it served as a link to his own Mexican heritage.
By speaking Spanish, he communicates a certain level of intimacy with all of his relatives. However, as his narrative progresses, he finds himself slowly breaking away from that intimacy as he begins to speak more English, both by force and social pressure. Teachers scolded him if he spoke anything but English and his peers Americanized his name into Richard (rather than calling him Ricardo.) He began to feel like a traitor by mastering this “public language” when his relatives began treating him differently. His bilingual childhood was an enormous adversity that Rodriguez had to overcome.
Language and toys both serve a similar role in Aria: A memoir of a Bilingual Childhood and Toys respectively. I believe that they both act as a kind of catalyst that helps children mature and see the real world faster. In Barthes’ essay Toys, he argues that current French toys may stifle a child’s creativity by subtly infiltrating their minds with premade ideas of what society is like and it discourages creativity. In his essay, he also uses an interesting technique and depicts the timeline of a human life. His introductory paragraph heavily conveys a picture of infantry and his conclusive paragraph heavily conveys a picture of death (as argued in Deepening Exercise 3.) Toys have been the cause of this progression and the main topic of Barthes’ essay. Furthermore, Barthes makes multiple points to the fact that French toys cause the child to think a preset certain way as they grow up. He argues that “French toys always mean something, and this something is always entirely socialized, constituted by the myths or the techniques of modern adult life” (Barthes 689.) Whether this is interpreted as a good or bad thing, the child learns, perhaps unwittingly, about the adult world and toys incontrovertibly influence the maturity of the child.
The Homework on Considerations for Child Development – Middle Childhood
Physical development is concerned with the biological changes of the body and the brain. It includes genetics, a foetus’s growth in the mother’s womb, the birth process, brain development and the acquisition of fine motor skills; it also encompasses behaviours that promote and impede health and environmental factors that influence physical growth. (McDevitt & Ormrod, 2010, p. 5). I have chosen ...
In Rodriguez’s narrative, language helps him understand the conditions of the real world. Although not explicitly mentioned in his piece, his experience with a bilingual childhood has helped him mature as he learned and understood the concept of intimacy and sacrifice. He has first handedly experienced the loss of connection when he spoke the “public language” English at home. He now fully understands the value of his family and sacrifices cultural values with the “los gringos” (his term for Americans.) Moreover, he understood himself more as the narrative reached its conclusion.
