So little is said about the scholarship boy in pages and pages of educational literature. Nothing is said of the silence that comes to separate the b… - Richard Rodriguez

But middle-class Americans, friends of mine, composites of friends of mine, of a liberal bent, nice people, OK people, see nothing wrong with bilingual education. In fact, they wish their own children to be bilingual. In fact, they send their kids to French schools. In fact, they ask if I know of a housekeeper who might inadvertently teach their children Spanish while she dusts under the piano. Nope.

Several days later, I tell a neighbor, a man I know well, that my mother died and that the floor lamp in my bedroom came on during the night. My neighbor is sincerely sorry to hear of my mother’s death; he supposes there must have been some kind of surge in the electrical grid. Our lives are so similar, my friends’ and mine. The difference between us briefly flares—like the lamp in my bedroom—only when I publish a religious opinion.

When I was a boy and refused to speak Spanish (because I spoke English), then could not speak Spanish from awkwardness, then guilt, Mexican relatives criticized my parents for letting me “lose it”—my culture, they said.