Hunger Of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez

1. "What I needed to learn in school was that I had the right-and the obligation-to speak the public language of los gringos."
Rodriguez is explaining that it is necessary to learn English when living in America. This is becoming less necessary each day with more and more immigrants moving to the United States from Mexico and other Spanish-speaking countries. These immigrants are able to move to an area in the US that is predominantly Spanish-speaking, so they never have the need to learn English, but it is their children who suffer as we see in Rodriguez's case. His parents spoke very little English, so he felt that he was betraying them by speaking in English.
2. "Supporters of bilingual education today imply that students like me miss a great deal by not being taught in their family's language."
This quote made me think of the article by Terry Meier on storybook reading in multilingual and multicultural classrooms. Meier cites the work of S.B. Heath who found that children from different background "learned to tell very different kinds of stories based on their community's cultural beliefs about what constituted an effective story." If this is true, then who's to say that teaching a child in their native language isn't beneficial to the child? Students who are taught in their native language might feel more comfortable participating in class and will probably understand the material better than if they were being taught in English.
3.. "That day, I moved very far from the disadvantaged child I had been only days earlier. The belief, the calming assurance that I belonged in public, had at last taken hold."
Although he was opposed to it in the beginning, Rodriguez did eventually learn English, and once he did, he felt as though he belonged. It's hard to succeed in a nation where English is the predominant language if you only speak Spanish or any other foreign language.

I found this article very interesting. I suppose I would consider myself a bilingualist. I believe that students should have the opportunity to be taught in their native language and that a teacher should be provided for them. Even though the major language of the United States is English, I don't think that children or their families should be forced to learn English and it is not necessary to succeed here. Today there are many opportunities for Spanish-speaking job hunters. I believe that if Rodriguez had been a child now, he and his family would have been able to do fine with just speaking Spanish.