Robert Rodriguez's Essay the Achievement of Desire

Journal 8: The Ambitious Mexican

Before congregating with our groups on Tuesday, my views of Robert Rodriguez's essay "The Achievement of Desire" consisted mostly of annoyance and boredom. However, rather than a twenty page complaint, a second reading enlightened me into the life and hardships that Rodriguez endured to achieve his academic success. At first I felt that Rodriguez disregarded his family, and cared about nothing but his school work. Although this is somewhat true, I see now that he did it for all the right reasons, and his intentions were not malicious. Coming from a house that spoke little English, Rodriguez felt that in order to progress substantially in the class room, he had to absorb and partake in as much English language as possible. Rodriguez loved his family and his parents, but he knew that any significant advancement of his English skills would have to be done on his own with the help of his teachers, whom he self-adopted as his role models and as his influences.

"What do you see in your books?" ( Rodriguez, 564) , a statement too common in Rodriguez's household growing up. It is no wonder to me that he turned to his teachers for guidance and aid during his times of trouble. It is obvious that Robert Rodriguez's passion in life was and is reading, and taking what he read and learning from it. I look at the gradual separation from his parents as a way of keeping his ambitions alive, quite possibly he felt that talking and engaging in conversations with them would cause him to regress in his learning. Also, I feel Rodriguez used his parents as both an example and a model of what not to do. His mother attained a typing job when she was young, however she was fired when she misspelled the word " guerilla" and instead used " gorilla". A very common mistake actually, however it cost his mother her job, and possibly a gateway to advanced reading and writing. Rodriguez did not want to end up like his parents,