"Los Pobres" by Richard Rodriguez

I do not really relate at all to Richard Rodriguez in his essay, "Los Pobres" so I have decided to answer some of the questions at the end of the selection. Rodriguez hopes to learn what it really feels like to do manuel labor like his ancestors from his summer of hard labor. He wants to sweat and hurt and feel like they did and really experience a hard life, even if it for just one summer. He wants some connection to his people, his heritage. I understand why he would want to do this. He goes to Stanford which is mostly populated by wealthy class white Americans and he probably got sucked into that lifestyle and lost most of his traditions and beliefs in doing so. He wanted to do as his people does. What he does in fact learn is that he is far from feeling how his people have felt. He does learn that he likes the labor, maybe just becasue he only has to do it for a summer and actually can see the end in sight. He also learns that he is working with a bunch of men who are middle-class average men and not the poor, or pobre, that he was expecting to work with. And he found that he related with them and when a Mexican group of workers come, he finds that he is uncomfortable with them and does not relate to them at all.At the end of paragraph 17, Rodriguez senses the distance he felt from los pobres : "I would not become like them. They were different from me." He can't become like them because he just never grew up like them or had to deal with the issues they had to deal with. He grew up and American and they grew up Mexican. And it has nothing to do with a geographical distance for they could have grown up in houses right next to each other on the same street and still not become like them. It is the hardship and suffering that they endured and he didn't that separates Rodriguez from los pobres. They are different because they grew up fully in Mexican culture and took part in Mexican traditions, whereas Rodriguez grew up in a mixed, Mexican and American culture. They will never understand each other completely but I think that Rodriguez can still appreciate what his ancestors had gone through and in some slight way have a sense of the hard labor and work they had to endure through his summer at the construction site. He just has to face the fact that he has a great history but that just isn't how he or his family lives now and that things have changed.