Richard Rodriguez Quotes About Language

Quotes about: Language

• Mexico was most powerfully my father's smile and not, as you might otherwise imagine, not language, not pigment.

  Richard Rodriguez

  Father, Justice, Diversity

  Richard Rodriguez (1993). “Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father”, Penguin Group USA

• Intimacy is not trapped within words. It passes through words. It passes. The truth is that intimates leave the room. Doors close. Faces move away from the window. Time passes. Voices recede into the dark. Death finally quiets the voice. And there is no way to deny it. No way to stand in the crowd, uttering one's family language.

  Richard Rodriguez

  Moving, Dark, Doors

  Richard Rodriguez (2004). “Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez”, p.40, Bantam

• Now we have this idea that, not only do you go to first grade to learn your family's language, but you go to a university to learn about the person you were before you left home.

  Richard Rodriguez

  Home, Ideas, Firsts

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

• So, rather than becoming multicultural, rather than becoming a person of several languages, rather than becoming confident in your knowledge of the world, you become just the opposite. You end up in college having to apologize for the fact that you no longer speak your native language.

  Richard Rodriguez

  College, Opposites, Native Language

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

• I worry these days that Latinos in California speak neither Spanish nor English very well. They are in a kind of linguistic limbo between the two. They don't really have a language, and are, in some deep sense, homeless.

  Richard Rodriguez

  Two, California, Worry

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

• I had all this anxiety about what it meant to be a minority. My professors - the same men who taught me the intricacies of language - just shied away from the issue. They didn't want to talk about it, other than to suggest I could be a "role model" to other Hispanics - when I went back to my barrio, I suppose.

  Richard Rodriguez

  Men, Issues, Role Models

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

• Language is a social event.

  Richard Rodriguez

  Events, Language, Social

• For them [LGBT group], language has to say exactly what it means. "Why aren't you proud of being gay?" they wanted to know. "Why are you so dark? Why are you so morbid? Why are you so sad? Don't you realize, we're all okay? Let's celebrate that fact." But that is not what writers do. We don't celebrate being "okay." If you want to be okay, take an aspirin.

  Richard Rodriguez

  Mean, Dark, Gay

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

• In some countries, of course, Spanish is the language spoken in public. But for many American children whose families speak Spanish at home, it becomes a private language. They use it to keep the English-speaking world at bay.

  Richard Rodriguez

  Country, Children, Home

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

• But lots of emerging racial tensions in California have nothing to do with whites: Filipinos and Samoans are fighting it out in San Francisco high schools. Merced is becoming majority Mexican and Cambodian. They may be fighting in gangs right now, but I bet they are also learning each other's language.

  Richard Rodriguez

  School, Fighting, California

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

• Bilingual-education advocates say it's important to teach a child in his or her family's language. I say you can't use family language in the classroom - the very nature of the classroom requires that you use language publicly.

  Richard Rodriguez

  Children, Important, Use

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

• 'm constantly depressed by the Mexican gang members I meet in East L.A. who essentially live their lives inside five or six blocks. They are caught in some tiny ghetto of the mind that limits them to these five blocks because, they say, "I'm Mexican. I live here." And I say, "What do you mean you live here - five blocks? Your granny, your abualita, walked two thousand miles to get here. She violated borders, moved from one language to another, moved from a sixteenth-century village to a twenty-first-century city, and you live within five blocks?"

  Richard Rodriguez

  Block, Mean, Ghetto

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

• When the Irish nun said to me, "Speak your name loud and clear so that all the boys and girls can hear you," she was asking me to use language publicly, with strangers. That's the appropriate instruction for a teacher to give. If she were to say to me, "We are going to speak now in Spanish, just like you do at home. You can whisper anything you want to me, and I am going to call you by a nickname, just like your mother does," that would be inappropriate. Intimacy is not what classrooms are about.

  Richard Rodriguez

  Girl, Mother, Teacher

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

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