And Then I Went To School Analysis

Language and power have a strong relationship, when one is speaking one is introducing two things at once. Language and power hold on to each other like a priest and his God. They take each other in, sometimes helping others understand it. In “Aria” by Richard Rodriguez and in “And Then I Went to School” by Joe Suina describes how language and power can create and destroy your past and present. Initially, your past and present affect one in many ways, just like it did for Joseph Suina. In “ And Then I Went to School” by Joe Suina. When he was young he loved his language, his way of living. But after he started going to school, reading cliche books about kids with nice lives, he started to doubt his lifestyle. He used to love his house, and his Native language but now he does not speak it as much. After he is already older in a boarding school, he realizes how much he misses home

So that was the case for Richard Rodriguez in “Aria”, he expands on his life as a kid learning to speak English. And his parents not knowing how to speak English fluently. He would not like going to school because when he would try to speak English he would get made fun of. English was never comfortable to him. But that all changed when the nuns from his school came to his house to tell his parents to speak more English at home. He felt broken, there was no talking in Spanish in the house just English. From there he started to learn more English at school and became fluent in it. He even forgot how to pronounce things in Spanish after that. Richard Rodriguez said, “I would speak, or try to speak, Spanish, and I would manage to utter halting, hiccupping sounds that betrayed my unease” (Richard 319). He felt disappointed in himself for not being able to speak Spanish. This is a showing of how language has power. Just because he stopped speaking a language, he forgot it and became more fluent in another