Response to "Achievement of Desire" by Richard Rodriguez

            When Richard Rodriguez started his education, he was looked at as an outcast not only by his peers in school, but by his family members as well. Coming from a Hispanic background Richard Rodriguez could barely speak any English when he started in school. Throughout this article I really felt for Rodriguez. He took his education, reading, writing, etc. very seriously and kept to himself when he was working on them. His brothers and sisters were also dedicated to their education but they found it odd that Richard worked at it so often and was always isolated or alone. He described his experiences around reading as mainly negative. Richard quoted his brother once saying, “Hey, Four Eyes!” and laughing when he saw him struggling home with a stack of books from the library.

            Richard felt out of place when it came to his time at home. He felt that his parents could not help him in his school work because they hadn’t received the education he was receiving. His mother who was new to America had received her high school diploma but, “by teachers too careless or busy to notice that she hardly spoke English.” Richard’s mother practiced literacy when she learned how to type on her own. She even became employed in jobs where she needed to type. One quote I really liked that Richard told of his mother once saying was, “Get all the education you can; with an education you can do anything.” This was instantly where I saw Richard and his mother similarly in their appreciation for education and learning. Richard described his father saying he “never verbally encouraged his children’s academic success. Nor did he even praise us.” His literacy background consisted of going to school until he stopped when he was eight years old to “apprentice” for an uncle of his. Later on in his life when he came to America he went to night school with Richard’s mother for about two years and then stopped going to school again. Once when he asked his father for help with math homework, Richard watched his father struggle with what the homework was asking. He ended up taking the book out of his father’s hands and saying, “I’ll try to figure it out some more by myself.” It took him a really long time to realize that becoming a student changed him and separated him from the life he previously knew and enjoyed.

            Richard used vocabulary that almost jumped off the page to me. He had vocabulary that exceeded that of his parents all of his life. The way he wrote this piece expressed how he felt and how he was affected in these situations. “It is myself (as a boy) I see as she faces me now (a man in my thirties). Another quote that came up a lot that stood out to me was, “Your parents must be very proud…” However Richard felt that his parents might have been proud but also a little humiliated to have their children get older and “come home to challenge ideas both of them had…” Coming home from college Richard still felt that he couldn’t tell them about the term paper he had just finished on “Shakespeare’s appeal.” He would go on to only mention little things going on in his life. “We tried to make our conversation seem like more than an interview.”