A prevalent theme throughout Richard Rodriguez's short memoir “Aria” is education. He talks about language in the private and public spheres, his main public location (when he was a child) being school. Education is also given consideration in Tomas Rivera's novella ...And The Earth Did Not Devour Him, and I feel that the two of them have a similar attitude about approaching American education from a Chicano background. Both writers treat school as being an important part of becoming a successful person, but show the hardships of coming into the American school system from a different culture. However, despite the difficulties both writers end up emphasizing the importance of schooling.
The first time Rivera talks about school is in the chapter “It's That It Hurts” wherein the boy has been expelled from school for fighting with a white classmate that attacked him. The boy's anxiety about telling his parents that he got kicked out of school indicates the importance they put on him going to school and being successful. Over and over he asks himself “What do I do?” and “What do I tell them?” He even worries they'll send him to a reformatory school. Clearly, this subject is important to him and his family. So too we see in “Aria” that school is seen as important by Richard and his family. When the nuns come to speak to his parents about him having trouble with English they are completely receptive to the idea of speaking English at home for the sake of his education. School is presented as a place of anxiety for both children- the boy in Rivera's novella is often picked on and discriminated against, Richard having trouble using English as he is expected to- but at the same time school isn't something that they can just give up on.
There is also the idea of what can be achieved if you are successful in school. Rodriguez talks about learning English as something that was pivotal to his ability to gain confidence and a public identity. He asserts that though he might have been scorned by his Chicano family for becoming an English-speaker, he embraced the idea that public success wouldn't have been possible for him in America without speaking the American public language. In “It's That It Hurts,” the boy thinks about how badly his father wanted him to grow up to be a telephone operator, a profession for which, in America, it would be necessary to be a confident English-speaker. For the father this profession is a high goal, something that the boy would have to study hard and do well in school to be able to achieve. The voice of the father in the boy's head says, “He's smarter than anything. I just pray God helps him finish school so he can become an operator.” There is also the short anecdote after the chapter which appears to be a conversation between two children. The first child asks “ Why do y'all go to school so much?” to which the other replies, “My Dad says it's to prepare us. He says that if someday there's an opportunity, maybe they'll give it to us.” This seems to imply that going to school could give someone a chance at success that they wouldn't have otherwise.
DISCUSSION QUESTION: Is it easier now for non-English speakers to achieve success of some kind in the United States, or is language always a barrier regardless of what cultural attitudes may have shifted?
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