Journal Post #3 - Public Separateness

     Tomas Rivera’s novella, “…And the Earth Did Not Devour Him” deals with a boy’s desire to find his place in a society that he often feels alienated from. At school he is met with discrimination, embarrassment, and separateness from the other students that his white peers will most likely never experience. One day he decides not to go to class after recalling “how the teacher would spank him for sure because he didn’t know the words.” On another occasion he is sent to the nurse’s office to be examined for lice, because he is Mexican. The boy in Rivera’s story is becoming ever more conscious of what Richard Rodriguez, in his memoir “Aria”, “public separateness.”

     Rodriguez attributes this separateness to students not being forced to learn English, and allowing them, because of bilingual education to continue to speak Spanish in the midst of their English speaking peers. Though this form of bilingualism accommodates speakers of other languages in schools, students will not find the same accommodations after leaving school and entering a society that remains foreign to them. According to Rodriguez, the “great lesson of school” is to teach students that they have a “public identity” and bilingual education delays this because it allows disadvantaged youth to continue speaking their “private language.” This private language is what the student speaks at home. If the private language remains the student’s first language and the public language (English) is not learned, upward mobility in public life will be difficult to come by. Rodriguez states: “The fact is that only in private – with intimates – is separateness from the crowd a perquisite for individuality.” Public separateness does bring people together in private, united by disadvantages in public life.

     That said, the protagonist in Rivera’s story has not fallen prey to bilingual education, as it has yet to be instituted. “…And the Earth Did Not Devour Him,” takes place in the fifties and bilingual education, according to Rodriguez, “was popularized in the seventies.” But he does feel alienated from his peers because of language – he has yet to learn English well enough to function in public life. Teachers try to get him to participate in class by reading but he found it nearly impossible. “When it was my turn to read, I couldn’t. I could hear myself. And I could hear that no words were coming out.” Rodriguez also found himself in this situation: “I continued to mumble… I remained dazed, diffident, afraid.” Both face a silence in public life that sets them apart from the crowd. Silence is a main theme for both writers. The two individuals, Rodriguez, and Rivera’s protagonist gain their individuality from this silence, but this kind of individuality is really just the “public separateness” that Rodriguez eloquently describes.

     Both of these authors write of the trials and tribulations of growing up in a public life that is vastly different from private life.

     In a society that values individuality and diversity, is individuality gained from feeling alienated important to preserve?

Woman Hollering Creek

     Before Cliofilas is bonded with her husband in holy matrimony she is in essence a giddy schoolgirl with a distorted view of the realities of marriage, in love with the idea of pasión. Sandra Cisneros’s internal omniscient narrator gives the reader a window into Cliofilas’s mind (on p.45) with very short and sometimes fragmented sentences to depict Cliofilas’s pre-marital thoughts. “Far away and lovely. Not like Monclova. Coahuia. Ugly.” This indirectly characterizes Cliofilas as an overly excited, and slightly caffeinated, teenager who has lost all ability to think rationally.

      

     Cliofilas also naively sees the town she will move to as a married woman, Seguin, Texas, as an almost magical safety haven of happily ever afters and wealth, compared to her Mexican hometown where she lives with her father and six brothers. She longs for the day that she can move with her perfect husband to Seguin, which she finds to have “a nice sterling ring to it.” Sterling ring has a double meaning here. Not only does Cliofilas think it sounds pretty, but she associates the town with marriage, with a pun on the word ring, and with wealth, in that the ring in question happens to be “sterling.” The following  sentence, “The tinkle of Money,” furthers Cliofilas’s obsession with the idea of wealth and the endless amounts of it that she thinks her Romeo-esque husband will provide her with. It should also be noted that there is yet another pun on the word “tinkle” referencing the motif of the creek that will become embedded in Cliofilas’s harsh marital reality in the near future.

     Cliofilas again gives the reader a glimpse of her disconnect with reality when she muses upon the outfits she will wear once she is married which will be just “like the women on the tele.” The telenovellas provide Cliofilas with a camp and bombastically over exaggerated depiction of love, marriage, and life. Her dependence on the telenovella to form her opinions and ideas of reality again depict Cliofilas as an immature child, set up for disappointment in married life because of her expectations that her reality will somehow intersect with the reality of a fictitious character from a soap opera. Later in the story, when things start to sour for her, Cliofilas still uses the telenovella as a lens. She says that her husband “doesn’t look like the men on the telenovellas,” and later that her life is become like a telenovella “only now the episodes got sadder and sadder.”

      

     Cliofilas even concludes this passage hoping that she will make her childhood friend (and later, bridesmaid) Chela jealous. It is almost as if Cliofilas is caught up in the romanticism of the idea of marriage, designing a scrapbook with plans for her future engagement, sitting on the floor of her bedroom of her parent’s house, dreaming of the day her prince will leap off of the pages of her favorite fairy tale. She obviously has a few innocent, yet immature, delusions.   

      

     Which brings me to my question: Are all delusions about marriage bad? Can escaping into alternate realities, (such as the telenovellas) temporarily, be beneficial to a person?