Gloria Anzaldua's How To Tame A Wild Tongue

In her essay “My Two Lives,” Jhumpa Lahiri, an Indian American, explains the balance between the identities of the two countries inside her heart, as well as her psychological struggle between her bicultural identities. She describes herself as an Indian-American because she moved with her family from India to the United States when she was very young. However, confused with her identity through her growth, she feels that she doesn’t belong to either of the two countries because of its completely different cultures. When she is at home, she deals with her parents in an Indian way, which is strange compared to the American way that she come across outside. She says that she has a distinctive identity in spite of her Indian appearance

Gloria Anzaldúa was a Texas-born, lesbian, Latina, feminist, that wrote about many of her personal experiences and views of the diverse background she grew up in. Growing up a certain culture at home and being in a country with a different culture, brings along a lot of self-identifying issues. Gloria Anzaldúa uses various strategies and languages to write this powerful piece by code-switching, quoting others, diction, and rhetorical questions. Anzaldúa’s “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” speaks about the social issues that Latinos face involving identity, language, and sexism.

Our actions are what define us as humans. Words are part of our actions. Therefore, our voice defines who we are, so when we change our voice we change the fabric of who we are. Zadie Smith, the author of “Speaking in Tongues”, knows this first hand when she moved from a working class district of London to Cambridge. She felt that she was able to have both, the Cambridge voice and the Willesden voice, and use them to expand her base of knowledge; like learning a new language. However, as she became more engrossed in her studies the core of her personality that kept her at her roots disappeared and she was consumed by the Cambridge life style. She lost herself in Cambridge because she was imitating the Cambridge life style and according to Susan Blackmore’s essay “Strange Creatures” humans imitate naturally to learn. As humans imitate they change and because they change, their voices change as well; building an idea within us that our voices need to be unified, or singular. When we change voices we change mindsets making it incredibly difficult to switch between two mindsets on a whim. Our voices must be singular in order for us to correctly display our identity to the world.

“How to Tame a Wild Tongue” is published in Borderlands/La Frontera, by Gloria Anzaldua and “the book talks about how she is concerned with many kinds of borders--between nations, cultures, classes, genders, and languages.” Anzaldua gives many examples of how she felt when being classified as a Chicana. Her thesis in this is that she is “arguing for the ways in which identity is intertwined with the way we speak

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

After reading “How to Tame a wild Tongue” by Gloria Anzaldua, I can definitely feel the social and cultural difficulties immigrants experienced while being raised in the United State in a profound way. So it brings up a question I have as an immigrant for a long time: Would we get treated differently if we act the same way they act, speak the same kind of language they speak, eat the same type of food they eat? If we accomplish all of those things, would they consider us like them? Or would they still see us as outsiders and always keep a distance away from us? Will we have better interactions with them? Or will we still have to hang out with those people who are same races as us? By reading “Do We Really Want Immigrants to Assimilate?”, Nathan Glazer posed the question: “Is Assimilation Dead?” three years ago and his answer was yes to this concern. Though he stressed the fact that assimilation still making the progress toward society, on the one side I agree with his notion that assimilation insists a social reality but on the other side, I strongly disagree with the idea that assimilation is dead as nation ideal. So should immigrant assimilate? There are many benefits of being multicultural and one should try their best to accommodate majority’s needs.

Identity is something that some people have a really hard time with, deciding who you are or who you want to be seems like a simple task but for some the choice to choose who they want to be isn’t always their choice. James Paul Gee author of “Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistic: Introduction” talks about identity and how people have different Discourses depending on what social situation a person is in. Gee created and described Discourse as “ ways of being in the world; they are forms of life which integrate words, acts, values, beliefs, attitudes, and social identities as well as gestures, body positions, and clothes”(Gee). Gee talks about how discourses are pretty much an “identity kit”, which means a person is able to take on different

What is the meaning of language? How big the role of language in your life? Have you ever realize the impact of language in your life? In my opinion, language is not as simple as people seen in general. Usually the way people see language just as a tool for communicating with others. For me, behind the general usage of language, it also has a big role in our life because a language has the power to stand and show each person’s identity. Inside the Gloria Anzaldua’s essay “How To Tame A Wild Tongue” and Amy Tan’s essay “Mother Tongue” claim that language is an identity. Because they show that language which they commonly use to communicate since the day they were born, showing who are they really are. Language as identity is very arguing phrases, it can be approach from a different perspective. This thing is exactly what are both of these essays are trying to do by approaching differently and using a different tone. Their life and experience give an impact to the way they interpret that language is an identity, and it also seen in each of their essays.

In Gloria Anzaldua’s essay “How to Tame a Wild Tongue,” Anzaldua expresses her experience of growing up in the United States with a strong Mexican background. She is quick to point out the prominent social and cultural differences within the dual cultural society such as language and culture. Anzaldua uses definition essay to demonstrate that language and culture is not always concrete. Throughout her essay, Anzaldua switches back and fourth between English and Spanish. It is clear that Anzaldua is proud of not only her Spanish language, but also her ability to speak both English and Spanish.

The passage How to Tame a Wild Tongue by Gloria Anzaldua exposes the difficulties that many ethnicities of immigrants are exposed to, when they recently migrate to the United States. Gloria Anzaldua stands up for the minorities who are underrepresented, as well as talks of her own personal experiences. Anzaldua does not let linguistic terrorism be a negative influence, resulting in her own language being robbed from her, and pridefully speaks the language, regardless of the situation that she is presented with.

An American writer of Chicana cultural theory, Gloria Anzaldúa, in “How to Tame a Wild Tongue,” asserts that language is intertwined with identity. She supports her claim by first using an allegory with imagery of a dentist visit in order to showcase the struggle of having a “unconventional” accent, then uses emotional appeal to reveal the Chicanx community’s insecurities about their language in order for the audience to have a personal understanding of their struggles, and finally utilizes a simile as a call to action for the Chicanx community to unite and take pride in their culture. Anzaldúa’s purpose is to emphasize how people should not be ashamed of their native tongue in order to encourage people to take pride in their cultural identity.

Language and identity are two things that are very closely related. In the excerpt of “How to Tame a wild Tongue” by Gloria Anzaldua, the author does an excellent job of explaining how identity and language blend right together. By hearing someone speak their language one could determine a person’s cultural values and their identity. In the excerpt Anzaldua says, “For a people who cannot entirely identify with either standard Spanish or English, what recourse is left to them but to create their own language?” By this quote, author is trying to show that it is very important for a person to connect with their language because the way someone speaks a language will reflect their identity and their value in a society.

Identity is at the core of Piri Thomas’s Down These Mean Streets, Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones, and Rhina Espiallat’s Where Horizons Go. All of these Diasporic literary works deals with the manner in which the characters negotiate their relationships between their current locations and their ancestral homelands. In each work the protagonists struggle to unionize there two parts of his/her identity, to bring together the ‘here’ (where they are now) and ‘there’ (their ancestral homeland).

Jhumpa Lahiri as an immigrant writer concerned with sociological, psychological and spiritual maladies, and she tries to an interpreter the experiences of second generation. The Namesake brings about the experience of immigrants who suffer from dual culture identities.

Introduction: In her novels, Jhumpa Lahiri presented Indian women in multiple and conflict position. She shows a great degree of cross-cultural feeling and also a kind of ironic modernity by which she serves to take apart the traditionalism from the westernized characters in her fiction. Her female characters of first generation are particularly caught in migrant situations where she has depicted some of the troubles engendered by the experience of migration and diasporas such as; displacement, disintegration, intolerance, marginalization and predicament of identity.