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)
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