Analyzing: Rivera vs. Rodriguez; A conversation.

Tomás Rivera’s …and the Earth Did Not Devour Him shares obvious similarities with Richard Rodriguez’s short “Aria.” They both generally involve a memory of being a young Chicano boy struggling with growing up as a Mexican in American society. Although Rivera’s piece is technically a work of fiction, the chapter “It’s that it hurts” describes a situation so real, that I can’t help but take the liberty of attributing it as a memoire from Rivera’s own past. Both works particularly put emphasis on schooling and the difficulties of going to a school taught entirely in English with a very weak English-speaking background. Almost word-for-word these pieces mirror each other in the way they invoke the self-conscious terror of having to speak a language that the narrator is unfamiliar with, in front of a crowd of his peers who are undoubtedly better at it than they are.

            That is, however, where the similarities end between these two pieces. Rivera’s piece continues to take sympathy on the migrant worker, and the Chicano children, portraying the white gringo, and American society as a whole in progressively harsher, more scornful lighting. He continuously alludes to the famed American dream, portraying it with a sense of yin and yang, light and darkness. On one hand, the American dream was something of a spark of hope for the migrant peoples in Rivera’s tale, but on another hand, it was a false hope, an ideal which is adamantly strived for, but was rarely achieved.

            Rodriguez, though placed in something of the same situation as Rivera, came out of it with an entirely different outlook. He regards his assimilation, although painful at the time, to have been overall better for him in the long run as to becoming a strong, happy American citizen. He overtly criticizes “bilingualists,” claiming that they are attempting to coddle children, and that American children are better off when exposed to American language in schooling. In one memorable instance in his piece, he even recalls a confrontation with a fellow Hispanic, a family friend, with scorn. This particular instance seems to show this big breaking point for Rodriguez, between his crossing from identifying as a Mexican in America, towards identifying completely as an American.

            I have found myself at a bit of a predicament in this analysis, as I feel I have set myself up to attempt to draw connections between two pieces that are entirely opposed to  each other in almost every way. At the same time, I have pondered to myself whether that is as impossible as I might think it is.

            For this prompt, I am instructed to put these two texts in a conversation with each other, but is it not possible that this conversation could lead to a debate. What is present here, are two texts that both take a situation that is near entirely identical to each other, and yet both take radically opposing opinions based on the experiences had.

            My question, then, is considering the fact that Rivera and Rodriguez have both told a story (or shared a recollection, to be more precise) with identical situations, but which draw opposing arguments and beliefs based on those experiments, what subtle differences between Rivera’s experience and Rodriguez’ experience could there be for them to experience the same situation so differently?

(551 words)

Analyzing: Never Marry a Mexican

For this post, I am going to be focusing on a passage from Never Marry a Mexican. The passage takes place in three small paragraphs beginning from the bottom of page 82. The plot of the piece revolves a woman named Clemencia, and reflections of Drew, a married man who she once had an affair with when she was a teenager. In the passage, Clemencia reflects on the scenario prior, where she had courted Drew’s now-teenaged son and killed him. We soon realize in this passage, that the prior scenario was merely  something she had dreamt up inside her head, and she reflects on her ability to kill someone.

                The passage takes place during the falling action of the work as a whole, directly preceding the climax, where she had dreamt that she had killed Drew’s son. It is mainly significant as a clarifying point in the story, as it shows that Clemencia did not, in fact, kill Drew’s son, but was merely thinking of a way to enact something of vengeance on Drew.  The passage is something of a sigh of relief. A solemn revelation that “Oh, that F’d up thing that happened in the two paragraphs before this didn’t actually happen outside of her own imagination, and she just calls the guy at 2 A.M. instead. Well thank God for that.”  From Clemencia’s point of view, however, the entire feeling of the passage is actually quite pathetic. She realizes that she doesn’t have the capability, in one way or another, to actually pull it off. So when she has these feelings, “when it wants out from my eyes” she calls him on the phone, the line “dangerous as a terrorist” coming off as a sarcastic admittance that she isn’t even capable of killing the boy.

                Moreso, however, she speaks almost as a person who is unraveling. Throughout this passage she uses incredibly abstract language to convey simple ideas, throwing metaphors seemingly anywhere that they may be applicable.  Her thought process is conveyed in the passage with a very clear, understandable sentence structure, but her actual words, the diction, is something a bit off. It should be of note that she doesn’t seem to convey any remorse for her thoughts of killing Drew’s son. It is merely conveyed that she can not actually go through with it for whatever means, or in an even darker interpretation, she just merely hasn’t yet.

                This passage, to me, is one of the most interesting passages throughout a story that I found interesting enough as a whole. It’s appearance after a moment that was so intense that my eyeballs felt like they were going to dry up from lack of moisture is just this huge contrast. One minute she’s luring a boy to his death, another she’s calmly questioning her ability to kill, and her sanity. It’s truly boggling, and I am a bit frightened to admit that I ate it all up.

Oh, and a discussion question: What does everybody think about the comparison that the situation with her mother and her father has with the situation with Drew? Does anybody else see a pattern here?