2.1 Diglossia, assimilation, and bilingualism among the hispanics  (Page 3/17)

After this declaration of principles, Richard Rodriguez attacked the bilingual education because it turns something into an ethnic subject, when it is but an entrance test to a social class; that is to say, the transit from a working-class family to a middle-class classroom. He himself recognized this baptism by immersion to English to the point of suffocating with the devilish phonemes that choked him. He soon reached the conclusion, by the gentle hand of his teachers, that English was the language of his public identity. For a Hispanic boy from Sacramento, the acquisition of English as a second language entails a traumatic experience. More than just a linguistic difficulty, a Latin boy, said Rodriguez, must overcome a psychological difficulty, since having to acquire the language of the bus driver and the pattern of a father, and imposes the inevitable loss of the most intimate symbols of childhood. Rodriguez himself confirmed the irreparable loss:

As my brothers and I learned more and more English, conversations with my parents diminished....  the meals became an ocean of silence where you could only hear the noises made by the cutlery pressed against the plate. My mother accompanied her brief comments with a smile, while my father, on the other end of the table, chewed in silence while staring into the ceiling. (1982 p. 23)

As one sees, the diglostic situation that is stable by nature tends to break its normal balance in the distribution of functions: the public sector for English, the private one for Spanish. We see that in the second generation, when an accelerated linguistic assimilation takes place, the balance is broken in favor of the dominant language, English. Richard remembered that, from his early Americanization, he could never naturally pronounce the words in Spanish and was never able to call his parents by the name of mama and papa, something that would have been a constant reminder of the drastic change experimented. On the other hand, the English expressions mom and dad did not seem suitable for his parents. But before arriving at this situation of intergenerational silence, the diglostic balance always ends up breaking when on a fatiguing day, the school principal inquisitively asks the Latin parents summoned to the school to discuss the school problems of their son: “Why aren’t you speaking in Spanish to your son?” Mr. Rodriguez related the scene:

One Saturday morning, three nuns show up to the house. They sit on the blue sofa in the room, stiff as three solemn candles. From the door of the other room, you could observe the clash of two worlds, the faces and the voices of the school invading the familiar atmosphere of the house. When suddenly, something like this was heard:

“Mr. Rodriguez, their children aren’t only speaking Spanish in the house?” After that, they direct their attention to my mother.

“Would it be possible that you and your husband encourage the boys to speak English when they are at home?” Of course, my parents said yes. (1982, p.20)