Rhetorical Strategies

• Fragments: “A factory job. Then a cannery job. Then a job at a ware house…Nowhere a union” (Rodriguez 129).
• Metaphor: “Tongues explored the edges of words, especially the fat vowels. And we happily sounded that military drum roll, the twirling roar of the Spanish r” (Rodriguez 17).
• Repetition: “What solely concerned them was that affirmative action limited their chances, their plans” (Rodriguez 178).
The fragments are from a section where the author describes his father’s hard life and how his dreams were shattered. The fragments create a tone of sadness and desperation, one thing moving to another with no hope. Besides just commenting on the situation of his father, Rodriguez also shows the disparity of the illegal immigrant workers using fragments to further the tone of anguish. The purpose of the metaphor is to show how the Spanish language heightens the intimacy and warmth for Richard Rodriguez. The repetition in combination with the italics on the word “their” emphasizes Rodriguez’s point that middle-class white students were complaining about affirmative action selfishly, they should also keep in mind the lower-class whites who are more severely damaged by affirmative action. Rodriguez uses many rhetorical strategies in this book, and all contribute to making his writing sophisticated, mature, and persuasive.