Analysis Of How To Tame A Wild Tongue By Taloria Anzaldúa

Anzaldúa wrote about the conflicting views that Chicanos face involving their own self-identity growing up in societies that tell them they do not belong. Chicanos are people that were born in the United States but have parents that were born in Mexico. They face constant criticism for the way they speak, by both American and Mexican people. Often times Chicanos are told that they’re cultural traitors and that they’re speaking the oppressors’ language and ruining the Spanish language when they are heard speaking English by Latinos (Anzaldúa, 17). They are made to feel as if they need to choose a sole identity to represent and anything other than that is going to be looked down on. Chicanos have felt as if they didn’t belong anywhere, so they created an identity to fit in and belong to “Chicano Spanish sprang out of the Chicanos’ need to identify ourselves as a distinct people” (Anzaldúa, 17). A feeling of

When I was brought into the world, I was not aware of the hand that I was dealt with. I was completely oblivious to human constructs that inevitably left our world divided. I did not know about race, religion, sexuality or gender roles. If it had not been for the media, I would not have tried to put so much emphasis on the label that was given to me, Latina. When reading Issa Rae’s essay “The Struggle”, I felt a sense of comfort knowing that someone else had gone through similar experiences.

In “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” by Gloria Anzaldua, she speaks from personal experiences she grows up with while living as a Chicana in the United States. Throughout her life she was subjected to being oppressed because of her native language. From a very young age she felt as if she was not allowed to express and acknowledge herself while speaking Spanish. Anzaldua believes that “If you want to really hurt me, talk bad about my language. Ethnic identity is twin skin to linguistic identity – I am my language”. What I get from this quote is if a person is really looking forward to tearing me down, speak poorly of my roots or culture since that is a part of my identity. Since both are all I know, it would be extremely offensive. In “How to

Women themselves perpetuate their inferiority; the author recounts a moment in her life when her emotional connection with her mother was interrupted abruptly by a telephone call from her brother. In this instance, the mother chose to speak with her son, the Chicano, over her daughter, the Chicana.

In “How To (lower case to) Tame Your Wild Tongue”, Anzaldua’s project is to explain how one's language can be negatively associated by others with your value as a person. Her goal is to not only show the harsh judgment that can come with language differences (comma) but to explain the emotional effects of that judgement as well. “How To Tame Your Wild Tongue” is an argument being presented from a narrative stand point. In this writing Anzaldua defends her argument by discussing different means of linguistic terrorism that she has personally experienced throughout her life as a Chicana. Anzaluda was born in Texas into a family of immigrants from Mexico. The Spanish she spoke was a combination of both English and Spanish as they were not Spanish

Standard and working class English from school, media and job situations (Anzaldúa 472). Anzaldúa compares and contrasts the languages that her culture speaks and where they originate and how she learned them. Pachuco is a rebellion language; it consists of slang words from both English and Spanish. It becomes hard for Anzaldúa to fully take pride in her, not until she takes pride of her language. She has to fully accept her identity of Chicano Texas Spanish, and all the other languages she speaks. The Chicana language she associates herself in combines all the languages others speak; the Chicano language is really a mutilation of Spanish.

In the United States early history, Native Americans, Africans and Europeans were marginalized by White People, and categorized as the minorities because they were seen as the inferior race. For nearly three centuries, the criteria for membership in these groups were similar, comprising a person's appearance, their social circle (how they lived), and their known non-White ancestry. History played a major part, as persons with known slave ancestors were assumed to be African (or, in later usage, black), regardless of whether they also had European ancestry. Most often these minorities face significant discrimination in various forms whether through voting, law policy, unequal pay, or even implicit racism, minorities of all kinds have been and still are being put down today. The book Between the World and Me is a letter to Ta-Nehisi Coates’s fifteen-year-old son, Samori. He weaves his personal, historical, and intellectual development into his ruminations on how to live in a black body in America. Not only does Coates give his personal experience in how he experience in first hand discrimination, racism, marginalization but he also gives vivid images on how he lived multiple worlds and how those experiences changed him. In “How to Tame a Wild Tongue”, Gloria Anzaldua exposes her feelings about social and cultural difficulties that Mexican immigrants face when being raised in the United States. She establishes comparisons among English, Spanish and their variations on how

Gloria Anzaldua, an American writer, passionately displays her mixed feelings of the Spanish and American differences of culture and language through the pages of How to Tame a Wild Tongue. She consistently proves her identity through the use of Spanish language in the text, albeit the text is primarily in English. However, Anazaldua is not a Mexican citizen, she still feels so deeply connected to its’ culture. Even so she can speak English and has struggled with the barriers that arise, she continues to claim that her culture and language make up who she and the other Chicanos are and it is highly valued to them.

For being the Chicanos means you are the “other.” You are inferior to the dominant discourse by speaking a different language.In the essay,” How to Tame a Wild Tongue,” Anzaldua explains how the Chicanos are referred as a marginalized groups because their cultural language is found different and also inferior to the English dominant discourse. As a result, the Chicanos people then felt uncomfortable of speaking their language to other people, as they thought they were making low expectations of them by speaking an unfamiliar language; therefore, they start speaking the English discourse as a neutral language to communicate without feeling embarrassed. However, Anzaldua is against the idea of the Chicanos people by speaking the English

Language is an essential part of a person; through language, you will find a person’s culture and nationality. In “How to Tame a Wild Tongue”, Gloria Anzaldua, demonstrates her stance of language and how she proudly admits that language, to her, is an identity that makes her feel whole . She also expresses hardship growing up because some people are not willing to accept her for who she is and forcefully attempts to make her change.

Gloria Anzaldua uses extended definition in her essay How to Tame a Wild Tongue in order to express her experience with language. Starting off with a possible fictitious anecdote of a dentist’s office experience, Anzaldua uses function to demonstrate the type situations that her language—in the anecdote, her tongue— has lead her to experience and later defines how these situations have affected her and her dialect. For example, Anzaldua uses exemplifications of actual anecdotes, such as a scolding for speaking spanish during recess or being pushed to speak more ‘American.’ These fictitious and genuine anecdotes express the oppression that Anzaldua felt growing up and even further, the way other Chicanos feel being shamed for their language

In her essay’s, “How To Tame A Wild Tounge”, Gloria Anzaldua discusses her experience in finding her identity as a Hispanic. At the beginning of her essay’s she open it with her unpleasant experience with a dentist that almost lost his temper, it is because Anzaldua obstinate. So, aggressive and attacking tone seen on her essay. Besides that, she tells us that “she is being pressured and oppressed by the

The concept of identity exists as an ever-changing and crucial component of one’s life. Within “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” Gloria Anzaldúa retells the struggle of coming to terms with all the individual pieces of her intertwined Chicano identity. Every individual’s identity resembles a montage, much like Anzaldúa’s writing style, created by life experiences unique to diverse cultures, relationships, and ways of life. While Anzaldúa stressed the importance of language to her identity, she also touches on the influence of other personal factors such as her gender and sexuality. In my experience, the shaping of an identity, like Anzaldúa’s, occurs over time as people change, grow, and form new relationships to connect within their communities.

In the article How to Tame a Wild Tongue, author Gloria Anzaldua writes about her feelings and experiences about speaking the Spanish language. While she was born in the U.S, like many other people who live in this country, she felt most comfortable speaking spanish and because many people didn’t approve of this she would speak English. In this article Anzaldua writes about the topic of linguistic terrorism and how people tend to oppress each other by the language they speak and how they speak it. She completely disagrees with this because she wants the toleration of all languages and she wants everyone to take pride in their language and culture so they “will no longer feel ashamed of existing.” One of her points is that people should freely

Anzaldua takes great pride in her language, “So if you want to really hurt me, talk badly about my language. Ethnic diversity is twin skin to linguistic identity – I am my language” (p89). She states that her language is a part of herself so when you insult Chicano it’s like a strike to the heart of Anzaldua. Anzaldua goes on to explains that although Chicanos all over the US speak different dialects of Chicano Spanish, they are still all Chicanos. Just because the language varies a little does not diminish its authenticity. People who speak a variation on a language should not be ashamed because they speak a little differently. “There is the quiet of the Indian about us. We know how to survive. When other races have given up their tongue we’ve kept ours. We know what it is to live under the hammer blow of the dominant norteamericano culture. but more we count the blows, we count the days the weeks the years the centuries the aeons until the white laws and commerce and customs will rot in the deserts they’ve created” (p93). She strongly urges Los Chicanos to not give up their culture and endure. She believes that the will of their culture will outlast any obstacle they encounter and demands that they not give in to the temptation to conform.