Rodriguez:I get letters especially from older readers who are working class, and who know what that is like. That's why I take it that the energies o… - Richard Rodriguez

Roles of pathos were available to boys at my high school, but I eschewed them in favor of a role more akin to Prosecutor, Ironist. I advanced by questions. In some more perfect world, like American Bandstand, I suppose I would have been happier in a sexually integrated high school. I knew how to talk to girls. I had two sisters. And I loved to talk. But early nonsexual female companionship would have come at a price. “Sissy” is the chrysalis of “darling.”

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 boy from his parents.

I was the student at Stanford who remembered to notice the Mexican-American janitors and gardeners working on campus.