Richard Rodriguez’s half-memoir, half essay “Aria,” published in 1982 as part of the book Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez, was met upon publication with wildly divided response. It was lauded for its heartfelt, intellectual vantage point on the issues of Mexican-American youth and bilingual education by many critics, while it simultaneously generated backlash from the Chicano/a community, who saw his opposition to bilingual education, and indictment of those “middle-class ethnics” who supported it, as traitorous. It is this latter response, and the opinions that incited it, that the piece is, today, most remembered for: in part due to the considerable growth of minority populations in relation to the nation as a whole, Rodriguez’s opposition to bilingual education as present in “Aria” is increasingly aligned with conservative political thought that at the time it might well not have been intended to share voice with. Considering all of this, it would seem (on the surface, at least) unlikely that the piece would share much in common with …y no se lo tragó la tierra/…And the Earth Did Not Devour Him, which was immediately embraced as an emblem for social action by the Chicano/a movement during el movimiento. While both written by Chicano authors, and both at least partially autobiographical – Rivera expressed his desire for …And the Earth Did Not Devour Him was to paint the “people he knew” from his time growing up as a migrant in Texas – the social and political lights they are remembered in association with are so vastly different that it would be easy, in fact, to see them on opposite ends of a spectrum, as opposed as the work of Langston Hughes and George Schuyler. But this view is belied, somewhat, by the stories Rodriguez tells of his childhood – stories of loss, due to the world that is America. “America isn’t a country of family values;” he says. “Mexico is a country of family values. This is a country of people who leave home.”
Though the “individuality through assimilation” that Rodriguez espouses would likely fall poorly on Tomás Rivera’s ears, his depictions of a child born and raised el otro lado to Mexican parents, still caught in the traditions of the home country, echo some of those endured by the nameless boy in Rivera’s novella. Where Young Richard Rodriguez was “unsettled” by hearing his father struggle with English (15), the nameless boy is frustrated by his parent’s continued ascription to a religion that does them no favors (“And the Earth Did Not Devour Him”); where Rodriguez’s sense of security at home is undermined by his parents agreement to “give up the language (the sounds) that had revealed and accentuated our family’s closeness” (21), the nameless boy’s sense of domestic security is stricken because his parents’ wishes for a better life for their child can’t surmount the reality of his otherness (“It’s That It Hurts”). Rather than far ends of a spectrum, the experiences here are two sides of a coin – that of the American child born to Mexican parents – but they are separated, and shaped, by the social environments they occur in. Rodriguez admits that there was very little bigotry directed towards his family where he grew up in Sacramento (12), and his family always felt as though both a financial and social future were open to them, and especially to their children, and as such providing the most advantageous path to achieving those was appropriate. This is in contrast to Rivera’s nameless boy, who, when faced with racism that excludes him wholly from equal interaction with his birth country, has nowhere to turn but to go “home to get his father” (103), sending him back to the isolation of his racially, culturally and linguistically segregated family.
Question: To what extent do we feel that Rodriguez’s viewpoint is dictated by his background?
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