Commentary On The Essay 'Workers' By Richard Rodriguez

In his autobiographical essay, “Workers”, Richard Rodriguez tells about a summer in which he gets a job at a construction site in order to show that not all construction workers are poor and uneducated. Toward the conclusion of his essay, he explains that your skin color does not give people the right to judge others based on their skin color or their occupation selection. The speaker makes an obvious case people should not judge a book by its cover while also implying that skin tone should mean nothing.
At the beginning of his essay, Rodriguez remembers a conversation he had with a friend when they were at Stanford. He uses quoted dialogue to explain how his friend and he would talk about the new job opening at a construction site. Rodriguez

begins to show his personal thoughts in the third paragraph of his essay. The speaker states his personal thoughts by putting parentheses around a sentence, for example, “(A Princeton graduate, it turned out)”. He uses this thought to show the reader what he found out about a contractor he met on the first day on the job.
In paragraphs four through seven the speaker uses a sufficient amount of details to describe his working environment. He states that, “(when the air was still damp but the scent of weeds and dry earth anticipated the heat of the sun), I would feel my body resist the first thrusts of the shovel…” Rodriguez wants the reader to imagine what he went through every day on the job, not for the reader to pity him, but to show that he enjoyed his working conditions. Rodriguez soon discovers that not all construction workers are the standard los pobres, meaning that they were not all poor and uneducated. He shows his shock and amazement when he states, “Nor did I expect to meet so many workers with college diplomas. (They were the ones who were not surprised that I intended to enter graduate school in the fall.)” The speaker uses his exclusive reflection to invite the reader into his world so that they may see the shock and the irony in his discovery.
From paragraphs ten to sixteen, the speaker describes an important event that happened in his job where he met a new set of workers who so happened to be a group of Mexicans. He uses illuminating words to describe how they appeared to him. The author states that the Mexicans were “anonymous men” who were run by a “fatalistic sense”, meaning that what they were doing was inevitable to happen. The purpose of this specific section of the essay was for him to make a bold statement to persuade the reader and himself that he was morally and physically distinctive from the Mexicans. The speaker even states that, “I would not shorten the distance I felt from los pobres with a few weeks of physical labor. I would not become like them. They were different from me.” In paragraph eleven, Rodriguez used the word “quiet” to describe how the Mexicans lived their day to day lives. Quiet was a symbolic word which showed that the Mexicans were silenced by their work and that they were the epitome of what happens when one experiences “real work”.
In the next few paragraphs, the author talks about what kind of person he became after his summer job.

Rodriguez believed that although he experienced a drastic physical changed, his mental state stayed the same. He states that, “After that summer, a great deal-and not very much really-changed in my life. The curse of physical shame was broken by the sun; I was no longer ashamed of my body. No longer would I deny myself the pleasing sensations of my maleness.” Richard Rodriguez has finally accepted himself as who he is after his hard work at his summer job. In his essay, he uses imagery to show who he became when he wrote, “The torso, the soccer player’s calves and thighs, the arms of the twenty-year-old I never was, I possess now in my thirties.” He urges the reader to indulge in their body work and to change their body for their personal likings and not for others. Rodriguez depicts a moment in life when he visited a school in the ghetto. He says that, “Ghetto girls mimic high-fashion models. Their dresses are of bold, forceful color; their figures elegant, long; the stance theatrical. Boys wear shirts that grip at their overdeveloped muscular bodies… Bad nutrition does not yet tell.” He states this to show how the youth are taking advantage of what they were born with and have yet to accept themselves without being flashy or trying to mimic others that they believe look better than

them.
Richard Rodriguez believed that his color does not make him impoverished. He believed, in his words that, “What made me different from them was an attitude of mind, my imagination of myself.” Rodriguez liked to think that he showed confidence better than the other workers at his site which made him distinguishable. Rodriguez admits that he will never know what real work was or what it felt like.
In the conclusion of Richard Rodriguez’s essay, he reminds the reader of the los pobres he used to know. He yet again uses descriptive words to describe what he thought when he saw los pobres. “Only: the quite. Something uncanny about it. Its compliance. Vulnerability. Pathos.” In this quote, the author describes how unusual the Mexicans were because they would rarely communicate with others unless it involved work. The purpose of his conclusion was to show the reader that in Rodriguez’s eyes the Mexicans he had encountered will always stay a disadvantaged group. He tells the reader that they “lacked a public identity”.
The purpose of Richard Rodriguez’s essay was to persuade the reader to accept themselves and others the way they are. He uses his personal life to show the reader that he struggled to accept himself, and it may not be easy for others. He also implies that anyone can distinguish themselves from a certain ethnic group like he did. He was able to make is points he uses his personal thoughts to invite you onto his world. He would repeat “real work” to tell the reader he will never experience it. He also used descriptive words to give the readers a vivid scene.