Assimilation Richard Rodriguez and Gloria

¶ … Assimilation

Richard Rodriguez and Gloria Anzladua both pursue the same end in their writings: the question of Mexican-American integration into American culture. However, their paths could not be more different. Anzladua chooses the more conventional path of explicating the difficulties of assimilation, while Rodriguez goes further and even blames some of the difficulties on the Mexican immigrants themselves. However, when the two texts are examined side by side, it becomes evident that they are drawn together by one observation: that assimilation is a purely personal choice and path, one that cannot be dictated by family.

Rodriquez announces to his parents, early in his childhood years, that a teacher had declared that he was losing all traces of a Spanish accent. He was proud of this fact, he took it home with him as one would an 'A' on a science quiz.

This is not the start that we, as readers, anticipate. We look for the more prototypical immigrant success story, at least the one from cinema and narrative: one in which the child holds onto every fiber of his foreignness while beating and converting the unforgiving natives at his own game and pace.

Such was not at all the case for Rodriguez. He himself admits that when he reached third grade he had to "outgrow" such behavior, that a sense of abandonment of his Mexican heritage was actually the natural path of least resistance for him, a path that he had to purposely abandon, presumably to bring about the ending this story entails.

In fact, this separation existed long after Rodriguez's formative years: What I am about to say to you has taken me more than twenty years to admit: "A primary reason for my success in the classroom was that I couldn't forget that schooling was changing me and separating me from the life I enjoyed before becoming a student. That simple realization! For years I never spoke to anyone about it. Never mentioned a thing to my family or my teachers or classmates. From a very early age, I understood enough, just enough about my classroom experiences to keep what I knew repressed, hidden beneath layers of embarrassment. Not until my last months as a graduate student, nearly thirty years old, was it possible for me to think much about the reasons for my academic success. Only then. At the end of my schooling, I needed to determine how far I had moved from my past."

Note the language Rodriguez uses: he "moved" far from his past, he was "changed" and "separated" and had to "repress" notions of who he was.

This is not the typical verbiage associated with a coming of age immigrant tale. And that is partly why Rodriguez narrative is so effective. His is the more common tale, the more practical one. His is the tale that people actually experience. In reality, immigrant success stories are not at all cut-and-dried. Rather, they are amalgamations of doubt, repression and regret. True, the positive factors of perseverance and courage pervade, but they are not unaccompanied by mitigating narrative factors.

That is Rodriguez's image of "scholarship boy" in a nutshell: "For although I was a very good student, I was also a very bad student. I was a "scholarship boy," a certain kind of scholarship boy. Always successful, I was always unconfident. Exhilarated by my progress. Sad. I became the prized student - anxious and eager to learn. Too eager, too anxious - an imitative and unoriginal pupil. My brother and two sisters enjoyed the advantages I did, and they grew to be as successful as I, but none of them ever seemed so anxious about their schooling. A second-grade student, I was the one who came home and corrected the "simple" grammatical mistakes of our parents. ("Two negatives make a positive.")"

Here we see a first generation child violently overthrowing the shackles of his immigrant upbringing, succumbing to what Anzladua would call the white rationality, or a brain split into two functions.

The Mexican heritage in Rodriguez was strongly repressed, while he cultivated and nurtured the American side. That is the only way in which he rose to the top, academically. And it is also the reason he chucked the academic lifestyle and moved back with his family. It took him a circuitous route to realize what Anzladua realized all along in her works.

Anzaldua is a lot more in tune with her roots from her early development. She did not share Rodriguez's longing to separate from her family, to separate from her ethnicity and to separate from her background.

Rather, she embraced her Mexicanness more, as evidenced by the following passage: "I remember being caught speaking Spanish at recess-that was good for three licks on the knuckles with a sharp ruler. I remember being sent to the corner of the classroom for "talking back" to the Anglo teacher when all I was trying to do was tell her how to pronounce my name. If you want to be American, speak

American.' If you don't like it, go back to Mexico where you belong." "I want you to speak English. Pa' hallar buen trabajo tienes que saber hablar el ingles bien. Que vale toda to educaci n si todavia hablas ingles con un 'accent,'" my mother would say, mortified that I spoke English like a Mexican. At Pan American University, I, and all Chicano students were required to take two speech classes. Their purpose: to get rid of our accents. Attacks on one's form of expression with the intent to censor are a violation of the First Amendment. ElAnglo con cara de inocente nos arranc6 la lengua. Wild tongues can't be tamed, they can only be cut out."

Here, Anzladua bemoans the process of cutting out her wild tongue, bemoans the attack of white rationality and the forced splitting of her two brains. Anzladua uses much more violent language to describe the eviction of her heritage from her upbringing, indicating that she was much more opposed to the process than was Rodriguez.

Rodriguez speaks of his teachers as though they showed him the way to the promised land of pure assimilation, while Anzladua stands up to those teachers and continues to assert her background and upbringing.

Anzladua is correct: Wild tongues cannot be tamed, they can only be cut out. However, Rodriguez may have proven her wrong, at least for a while. For so long, Rodriguez's tongue was tamed. However, there too, he did the taming himself. His teachers, in his narrative, do not force him to abandon his roots. Rather, he is ever so ready to do so himself.

Note the marked difference: Rodriguez comes home from school proud of the fact that a teacher has complimented him on his lack of accent, and Anzladua almost gets into a fight with a teacher who tries to Americanize her.

These are two entirely different paths to the same end: academic and life success. But in Rodriguez's case, as he made a pact with white rationality, much like Dr. Faustus in Marlow, he had to pay the price eventually. The academic lifestyle simply became untenable for him, as its support structure was patently false.

Rodriguez knew better than anyone that he had ignored one side of his brain to propel the other to success. That is why he had to back down from academia. Anzladua, on the other hand, made no such ill bargains.

Anzladua tackled her heritage head on: For a people who are neither Spanish nor live in a country in which Spanish is the first language; for a people who live in a country in which English is the reigning tongue but who are not Anglo; for a people who cannot entirely identify with either standard (formal, Castillian) Spanish nor standard English, what recourse is left to them but to create their own language? A language which they can connect their identity to, one capable of communicating the realities and values true to themselves -- a language with terms that are neither espanol ni ingles, but both. We speak a patois, a forked tongue, a variation of two languages.