"Aria" and "...And the Earth Did Not Devour Him".

            As I was reading Rodriguez’s “Aria”, I was instantly reminded of Rivera’s work in “…And the Earth Did Not Devour Him.” The themes of childhood innocence and hardship were prevalent throughout, as well as close family relationships.

            In Rivera’s novel, there is an anecdote titled “First Communion” that tells a story about a child who is told that he must confess every sin he has made to the church. He is nervous about forgetting all the sins he’s made, and goes to church with an over—estimated amount of sins so that if he did forget any it would be counted. As I was reading “Aria”, this story kept popping back into my head.

            In Aria, the child is told that he needs to speak English better by the nuns at the school he goes to. The nuns come to his house and talk to his parents about speaking more English in the household, and he’s taken-aback that they’re in his house, because school and home has always been separate to him. Both of the children in these stories have been exposed to new things and they don’t quite know how to deal with it. Both also express either fear or uncertainty about the matter at hand.

            Another vignette from Rivera’s Novel describes how a little boy took the button off his only shirt to give to his teacher so that a class project could be completed. I viewed this action as a deep and powerful desire to belong and to be accepted socially.

            In Aria, Rodriguez wants nothing more than to have a social identity in America. He learns English, and is embarrassed of his parents when they falter in public conversation with an Anglo-American. He, like the little boy in Rivera’s novel, has a deep desire to belong and to be accepted.

            In “When We Arrive” from Rivera’s “… And the Earth Did Not Devour Him”, the characters all have a bit of a desperate need to move forward, not physically, but socially. Most of them feel as if they aren’t going anywhere, and they’re just moving from place to place to do the same work over and over again. This is what Rodriguez was afraid of when he was young. He didn’t want to be stuck because he didn’t know the language of the “gringos”. Although the Spanish language comforted him, and reminded him of home, he also knew that he must learn English to move up in the world and to be socially accepted at the time (1950’s). Once he started learning English, and was using it in the house more often than Spanish, he became more aware of the differences in the languages and found out that certain meanings would be lost in the translation from Spanish to English. He came to the conclusion that assimilation of language would be the best way to learn a language (at the time) if teachers wanted native Spanish speaking students to succeed in America.

            After reading Rivera’s novel and “Aria”, what do you think about bilingualism and language assimilation? Do you think that schools should choose bilingualism over assimilation, or vice versa?