New Ways of Speaking and Caring About my Cultural Separation

My early education was steeped in “the banking concept of education” (Friere 212). Most of the classes I attended in the first eight years of my education required massive amounts of memorization especially when dealing with subjects like math, science, English, and religion. I had strongly identified with Friere’s essay. My response was passionate. His thoughts stirred my thoughts to consider the very foundation of learning itself. Now Richard Rodriguez’s essay The Achievement of Desire challenges me to take a deeper look at what I have learned.

I was born into a clash of cultures. My father was an immigrant from Ecuador, and my mother was an Iowa farm girl. When they met some forty years ago working at the Los Angeles International Airport, they had no common language with which to communicate. Dad spoke very few words of English, and Mom didn’t know any words in Spanish. Yet, they fell in love and conceived a child. My having to learn two different languages and cultures simultaneously in order to communicate with them both is amazing to me! Although my situation was somewhat different than that of Rodriguez, I find many parallels in my personal experience.

Unlike Rodriguez, both my parents had gone to college. They worked long hours and made many sacrifices to pay for their own schooling as well as the tuition to send my two sisters and me to Catholic school. They valued a good education above everything else. I felt a tremendous pressure to excel because they wanted me to have better opportunities than they did. And yet, I wanted to learn. Rodriguez speaks about a metaphor, called the “scholarship boy,” that describes a student who is overly concerned with his academic performance (Rodriguez 568). In his case, Rodriguez uses the metaphor to describe both the positive and negative aspects of his desire to succeed.

Rodriguez, throughout his essay, attempts to persuade us that his experience is a common experience among students as they advance through the academic ladder. He is sad because he was compelled to suspend his cultural identity in order to integrate with fellow students and the academia at large. Just like Rodriguez, I had a compelling desire to achieve. However, Rodriguez grew up in a time when life was less complicated. I grew up in Hollywood during the peak of the sexual revolution. By the time I had reached the eighth grade, no one would have ever suspected that I was of Latin American descent. I had fully integrated into mainstream society.

I had been exposed to lifestyles that were uncommon in his time. I faced numerous pressures by my peers to participate in sex, drugs, and petty crime. Many of my basic concepts of life were drawn from personal indulgence in such things. So, I cannot just simply say that I am a victim of cultural differences or educational concepts. I must take responsibility for the choices I made rather than waste my time attempting to find someone or some thing on which to lay blame.

Rodriguez tells us that “if, because of my schooling, I had grown culturally separated from my parents, my education finally had given me ways of speaking and caring about that fact” (Rodriguez 585). I pondered the meaning of this statement. My first reading was hasty. Because of the distractions of the busy academic life I now lead, I couldn’t find a reason to care about his experience. However, upon deeper consideration, memories of my own schooling began to come back to me. I realized I could identify with him on so many levels because I had many things in common with his experience.

I also became upset because I was reminded of the humiliation I had suffered at the hands of classmates because of being an over achiever. I was bullied and called names like “fatso” and “fag boy.” I quietly endured their torment and often escaped into a book or some music. At certain times, I would win awards or be selected for some position of responsibility; then the insults and pranks by classmates would escalate while praise rang out from the mouths of nuns and parents. Eventually, I preferred the company of adults to my childhood peers. Rodriguez’s essay made me aware that I still had some unresolved issues concerning my schooling that I had yet to put into perspective.

My parents gave me many values to care about, but my learning had reached a climax. Many things I wanted to learn weren’t taught in school, so I took a test to get my diploma early in the eleventh grade and got a job. My family life had developed into a painful façade. My parents had never been able to bridge the communication gap that existed between them. Making money became our escape. Gradually all my family members drifted away from each other as we each pursued separate lives. My education moved from the classroom to the streets. I quit school and left home when I was seventeen.

In his essay, Rodriguez talks about reaching the end of his education. I interpret the end of his education as his finally becoming whole. Rodriguez was, through his own admission, guilty of being a self-indulgent student. He regretted the fact that his education was creating a "Grand Canyon" between his family and himself. I believe that deep inside he desired both, but power, attained through the accumulation of knowledge, won out for so many years. However, Rodriguez tells us that he couldn't express his internal conflict, his pain, until he had acquired the language skills he felt he needed.

Rodriguez's education in literature now becomes the vehicle for him to reach the minds of those who are prisoners of the intellect, just like he was - for a long time. He always cared. He had to have noticed the cultural differences and even suffered prejudice and humiliation. All of the struggles he endured seemed to strengthen his resolve to accomplish his goal, and that goal seems to have been to create a bridge between the two. Unfortunately, it took him a long time before he was able to communicate what he was feeling.

In my case, the school of hard knocks took just as long as it takes to get a PHD. I spent years trying out different jobs, and living with different roommates or lovers, while, at the same time, pursuing many different hobbies and interests: accounting, sales, food service, music, theater, photo processing, micro film, telecommunications, satellite TV, computers, real estate, construction, landscaping, painting, cooking, and more. Each time I moved on to something new, I would exaggerate about what I had learned from the previous experience so I could earn better pay. I always credited myself with knowing more than I actually did, relying on quick assimilation of new information while pretending to know the job. I learned how to be a good actor. I learned the buzzwords that opened doors of opportunity. I read scores of books, magazines, newspapers, technical manuals, and encyclopedias. This was my life of crime.

I was also in pursuit of the almighty orgasm and the ultimate high. My desire for both took me to the darkest places: private clubs, bars, and bathhouses, journeys to other parts of the world. I went through several wedding engagements as well as homosexual relationships. In all of those years I probably had more than a thousand sexual partners, both male and female. I experienced the gamut of sexual possibilities. I also experimented with every type of drug, as long as it didn’t involve needles. All of these experiences in my life caused me intense pleasure, and an equal amount of pain. I learned many hard lessons about love and loss. I witnessed the systematic destruction of my health.

I reached the end of my education when I went through a fearless and searching inventory of my life. I called this process declaring bankruptcy in the ‘banking’ style of education in an essay I composed after considering Paulo Friere’s essay earlier in the term. This inventory process did not occur until shortly after turning thirty years old. By then I lived what felt like several lifetimes before being able to consolidate the vast diversity of knowledge and personal experience I had accumulated.

All of the pain and personal experience I had accumulated up to that point, I poured into a collection of songs that I wrote with my dear friend, Penny Shipp, over the next several years. My songs became my first way of “speaking and caring” (Rodriguez 585). I believe that the music and the words are filled with the emotion and spirit of the lessons I learned during my entire education and subsequent personal reflection. Completing the inventory, and expressing my emotions through music made me realize how much love my parents had for me. I also became able to acknowledge the love I had for them after having blamed them for all my problems for so many years. Fortunately for me my parents had attempted their own personal inventories at the same time, making it easier for us to understand one another. The healing that took place as a result of this reconciliation process was so powerful that my parents decided to get remarried to each other after having been divorced for several years and vowing never to speak again. Our family became reacquainted. It was as though we had met each other for the first time, yet known each other forever.

The most important lesson I learned from this shared experience was that only by removing the labels I had become comfortable with, could I understand the underlying principles at work. For example, I came to see my parents as the biological instruments of my existence, calling them by their first names instead of Mom and Dad. They loved and cared for me until I began to parent myself. Then my choices led me in an entirely different direction than the one I was originally offered by them. I learned to be a chameleon, a universal translator. I was given the gift of being able to read between the lines and still know what lines I was reading. I found that all my suffering had given me a tremendous capacity for compassion. I learned patience. I became whole because I stopped running away from my fear and isolation and embraced the light of understanding.

Today, my life has taken a quantum leap forward. My health is stable now thanks to the numerous medications I must ingest on a daily basis. I have returned to school, where I am discovering new ways of speaking and caring through writing, film, and the Internet. Multimedia has become my new language, my new way of speaking and caring. I am hopeful that I, too, can help others to find ways of speaking and caring about themselves, and help them to bridge the “Grand Canyons” they have created in their own lives. I am truly blessed!