By Sybrina

I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Rodriguez who is an amazing, humble person. He spoke of how he came to America to pursue his dreams and attended college. He spoke of the racial tensions he felt and still feels today in the way Americans view Latin American people. He felt embarrassed of his skin color and his ethnic background in his earlier years. In his book, Brown, he likens the Rio Grande to a stool sample stain on the American border. This profound metaphor speaks loudly of his experiences as a Latino in America. He made me squirm in my seat and humbled me. He spoke of how we are all the color brown and that America is not made up of Black and White people. There are brown people that have contributed to building this country, farming this country, and made it what it is today, yet they are exploited and treated as if they are stains upon our society. You could hear a pin drop when he spoke from his heart. He believes that modern technology is ruining our ability to communicate in language and how a letter, written by the hand, is so much more personal than a letter sent through cyberspace. We are all in a hurry and we don't take time to embrace what we have. He used Facebook as an example. If you are constantly updating your status on a social network, what else is there to talk about when you see your family and friends. It has all been said to the world. Writing properly, such as using correct grammar and punctuation is fading because of informal text messaging and words are now shortened to LOL or IDK. Our future rests on the generation we are raising now and it is scary. People don't even capitalize their names on forms anymore. Everything is informal. What will happen in the future if our language is lost? Are we so busy that we must lose that as well?