Richard Rodriguez was a speaker at the Festival as well. He's an interesting man. He is an essayist. I was going to write, he's got lots of opinions. But that's kind of a dumb thing to say.
Anyway, this is a memoir. He and his family were immigrants from Mexico, and he grew up in the Sacramento area. He talks quite a bit about the experience of learning English after only speaking and knowing Spanish in his home. He writes about the intimacy of the language they use at home vs. the public language of English in school. The experience was very significant, maybe even traumatic for him. He talks about the guilt of hearing his parents' halting English, about losing his ability to speak easily in Spanish although he continued to understand it fine. He also talks about being a "scholarship boy," someone who doesn't fit in with the people around him.
Although the process of getting his education in a different language than he'd learned as a child was traumatic, Rodriguez is definitely not a proponent of bilingual education. He sees it as part of a "decade when middle-class ethnics began to resist the process of assimilation -- the American melting pot." This reminded me of Ayaan Hirsi Ali. She talks about assimilating, too, and the need for Americans (and other countries) to have some beliefs and standards that people must agree to when they live in the country. It makes a lot of sense and I can see where speaking the language would need to be a part of that. I'm not so positive, though, that having some bilingual education would necessarily prevent the learning of English. I'd hope that it would be a gentler way to learn English. But it's true that the pendulum often swings too far.
I like the book. I haven't finished it yet but I plan to.
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I have this one on the Kindle, and it translates well. Footnotes, TOC work fine. But most of all, it's the text and the mechanics. This is a classic in the San Francisco community college arena, where English 101 instructors push the text, through anthologies that have included it, or the book itself. He was a bit more frequent on NPR 5 or so years ago, but not as much. As soon as affirmative action comes into play again, they'll call him back. Some say he's too flowery, something characteristic of minority English students. There are two other books that come to mind when I think of pulling this one up: Reality Hunger: A Manifesto and Ilustrado: A Novel. I'll be rereading Hunger of Memory shortly.
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