TOW #7- “Aria: A Memoir of a Bilingual Childhood”

          In the “Memoir of a Bilingual Childhood”, Richard Rodriguez shares the conflicts he had to withstand growing up as a bilingual Hispanic living in America. He expresses his complicated encounter with the American culture and continues to reveal the positive and negative affects it had on him. Attending a private school with Caucasians, Rodriguez felt that he had to abandon his Hispanic culture and speaking Spanish because it yielded him from learning English. He soon began to feel a disconnection between him and his parents and “no longer kn[ew] what words to use in addressing them” (para, 18). Although he felt that it was important that he assimilate to the American culture, he felt “guilty” and felt a “sad confusion” (para, 41) at home. Through Rodriguez’s use of anecdote, he is able to appeal to ethos and pathos in order to emphasize the struggles he faced growing up as a bilingual child.

            When establishing ethos, Rodriguez shares his experiences of having Spanish as his primary language by gradually revealing the conflicts he faced when learning to speak English. Humiliation, terror, and sadness, he describes, sums up his childhood. This reveals his credibility as the experiences and feelings that are describes, were what motivated him to write the memoir. Pathos is revealed when he explains his poor relationship with his parents. He describes how he “shared fewer and fewer words with them” (para, 35), as he tried to neglect the culture that used to be important. He also claims himself as a “victim of a disconcerting confusion”(para, 46), emphasizing the emotional impact the new culture and language had on him.

            Overall, Rodriguez’s use of anecdote that helped to appeal to ethos and pathos is a successful method of emphasizing the distraught he felt growing up as a bilingual child. As a bilingual child myself, I was able to connect to his experiences and reflect back to the South Korean Culture that I came from.