"But not in my family. My mother and father (with immigrant pragmatism) assumed the American tongue would reinvent their children. Just so did several immigrant Hispanic mothers in Southern California recently remark their childrenâs reluctance to join America. These mothers feared their children were not swimming in the American currentânot in the swifts and not in the depths; not even in the pop. They blamed âbilingual education,â a leaky boat theorem ostensibly designed to sink into the American current. (In fact, the theorem became a bureacracy preoccupied with prolonging itself.) These few mothers organized an opposition to bilingual education and eventually they sank the Armada in California. Theirs was an American impulse: to engage the American flow directly and to let their children be taken by it."
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Academics from the United StatesJournalists from the United StatesMemoirists from the United StatesPeople from San FranciscoHispanic Americans
Original Language: English
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Richard Rodriguez
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